Opera Warhorses

Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte” had never been performed in San Francisco Opera history until October 2, 1956. I saw my first performance of the work in the San Francisco Opera tour at San Diego’s Fox Theatre, three weeks later. George Jenkins’ new production of the Mozart “dark comedy” marked a new approach to presenting opera [...]

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In my essays “Expanding 1955’s Standard Repertory” and “‘Robert Wilson’s Parsifal’ in L.A. — Whose Spell is it Anyway?” I noted that opera companies in the late 20th and early 21st century increasingly perform the music in operas as written (no cuts, no transpositions) and present them in their original languages, yet perform them in [...]

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November, 2005
Hi Bill: I love your new opera “Warhorses” site!! Excellent idea, and you, a true scholar on the idiom, are more than qualified to do it!! We’ll talk more at dinner before Parsifal which I will see this weekend!! Meanwhile, I’ll see L A Opera’s Tosca with Samuel Ramey as my hero Baron Scarpia [...]

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