Do you have a practice facility booked? Where can you go to freely practice?

My neighbours are kinda getting pissed, cause I live in a very quiet neighbourhood.

Nowadays I doubt Timon of Athens will be anyone's favourite Shakespeare. The text is a bit of a mess, and the main character is intentionally unlikeable. There's a feel of a fable about it, with its plot of generosity wasted on false friends souring to misanthropy. Famously Purcell wrote music for a masque for the 1695 revival of Thomas Shadwell's production. That seems to be where things lay in terms of musical adaptations until the 20th century, when Stephen Oliver composed a Timon of Athens opera (1990). He also wrote the libretto, as did Luca Francesconi for his 2020 opera, Timon of Athens, which was premiered by the Bayerische Staatsoper. Do you know of any other adaptations, or have you seen the Oliver or Francesconi productions?

A movie of the Béla Bartók one-act opera. The visuals and the sound match wonderfully. Wild stuff! Sung in the original Hungarian, with English subtitles.

Here's the link — https://youtu.be/JmhHx21UmQ8

“Teatro alla Scala’s streaming platform is dropping its paywall. From Tuesday 1 September, every title in the LaScalaTV catalogue will be available to watch for free, following simple registration – a shift made possible by continued support from the platform’s Principal Sponsor, Intesa Sanpaolo.”

“The move to free access is part of a wider strategy at the Fondazione Teatro alla Scala to broaden the ways audiences can discover and engage with its work. “ - gramilano

Years ago, I started watching a video of Rusalka on YouTube. It was a modern staging, a very plain scene. There was a rectangular pool in the centre. Vodnik was wearing a suit. So visually not very appealing. But the acting was insanely good. The woodsprites were jumping in that pool and splashing water while singing, really having fun.

Did that description ring a bell to anyone? I'd like to watch the rest of it as well. No idea why I didn't do that back then.

Thank you in advance.

That’s it it’s a rlly good opera

I just got super curious: anyone have any cool opera-based or opera-inspired tattoo ideas?

…or better yet, any tattoos you want to show off?

Super simple, but I’ve wanted violets for a long time. Violets have a lot of different meanings for me, but one of those meanings would have to be for Violetta, my favorite opera character. She means so much to me!

I'd like to know what these lyrics about. This is an aria from Charles Gounod's opera Faust.

Mephistopheles (a demon) is asked to sing a song by a drunk student, it goes like this ↓

One equals three, nine will prevail since it is the unyielding number.

And everything will become clear.

Four remains in the shadows.

Eight is even darker still. Seven conjures fate.

The fifth and tenth complete the system.

These numbers of death shall rule the earth.

If nine is all, thirteen is at the end.

The clip on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em5u7fJVjwg&list=RDEm5u7fJVjwg&start_radio=1&pp=ygUYY2hhbnNvbiBkdSBub21icmUgdHJlaXploAcB

I don't know the precise name of this song (It says [The Song of No. 13] on the clip ).

Does anyone could tell what this song specifically means ?

Or do you think this is just a song about the number 13 ?

La Scala will stream free of charge

Hello everyone! I’m a mezzo who just got out of grad school and I qualified for the Laffont competition for the first time! Which is exciting! I was just wondering if anyone here has participated in the competition or knows someone who has?
I just have a lot of questions that the website doesn’t answer. Thanks guys!

Don’t know where to ask so I’ll try here.
I was first introduced to La Barcarolle watching Life Is Beautiful directed* by Roberto Benigni but then I noticed this aria in at least one other movie about WWII and fascism, so it strikes me as curious. Is it just a coincidence? Was there any link between *Les Contes d’Hoffmann and nazi-fascism? Or was it maybe just a popular opera at the time? Does anyone know?

You know how Austria, Germany, and Italy are famous for opera. Broadly speaking, the opera world is often divided into Austria/Germany on one side and Italy on the other. Is there much exchange between the opera scenes of Austria/Germany and Italy? (I mean among various entities like theaters, conductors, orchestras, singers, music universities, conservatories, etc.)

​For example, do Italian theaters sign contracts with German singers? Do Italians study at German music universities? Do Austrian/German singers and Italian singers actually interact and work together?

​Since I'm Korean, I'm not very familiar with the local situations in Austria, Germany, and Italy. I get the impression that there might not be much active exchange, and that it's mostly just works by Italian composers being performed in Austrian/German theaters. What do you think?

​If anyone is knowledgeable about this, please let me know. It would be even better if you are actually from Austria, Germany, or Italy!

Any REPUTABLE teachers heavily influenced by the old school bel canto style of teaching in London. Will settle for England more generally.

So the subtitles got stripped out of my copy of the 2010-2013 Metropolitan Opera's production of Wagner's Ring Cycle at some point, and I was wondering if anyone has a copy of the subtitle files for the four operas that they'd be willing to share. Or perhaps, if someone knows a source where I could look for them.

I no longer have the BluRay, or at least I can't find it anymore, and unfortunately I can't speak German. They have official subtitles on the digital/disc release, so I know they exist.

Thanks!

(Also willing to take suggestions for other Ring Cycle productions that are worth watching :)

Might as well try my luck here too

This post is the third in my series on Miyazaki and Wagner. Here are the links to the previous ones:

1. Porco Rosso

2. Howl's Moving Castle

The problem I am facing with this one is that first I need to explain what's really going on in the movie Princess Mononoke. It is not just "humans are bad because they destroy nature" as people tend to think. So this post is going to be a long one.

Here I am actually not coming up with my own interpretation of the movie. I am basing my theory on what is actually a well known interpretation on the Japanese side of the Internet. It goes like this:

So all throughout the movie, there is this idea that the essence of life is suffering (which is the idea at the heart of buddhism, so it's really nothing new though it might seem weird to a Western audience). Here is the line where it is the most apparent (from one of the lepers):

生きることは誠に苦しくつらい。世を呪い、人を呪い、それでも生きたい。
Living is truly painful. Cursing the world, cursing people, still I want to live.

The really important part is understanding that the forest spirit has everything to do with this. He carries the weight of all of the suffering in the world. His power is to either give or take life, and since life = suffering he is at the heart of the cycle of suffering in the world.

This is reflected in the cyclic nature of his transformation from deer during the day to giant during the night. In his giant form, he has marks all over his body that the storyboard specifies are actually the same marks as the ones on Ashitaka's arm. They are marks of "suffering and hatred", as suggested by the last words of Nago the boar at the beginning of the movie:

汚らわしい人間どもめ。わが苦しみと憎しみを知るがいい…
You impure humans. You shall know my suffering and my hatred.

Basically through the act of killing Nago, Ashitaka inherited his suffering and hatred (originally caused by the gunshot wound he received from humans). He is doomed to become a demon like Nago, which is why his community casts him away immediately.

Eventually, the forest spirit becomes unable to carry out his role as the incarnation of the cycle of suffering in the world when he gets shot by lady Eboshi. He starts taking the life out of everything around him, spreading death indiscriminately. It is Ashitaka's act of compassion of giving him back his head that finally appeases him, releasing him from his duty.

I think the parallel with Parsifal is quite striking.

The question of the relationship of man with nature is central to Parsifal. The new take on the story of Christ that Wagner introduces is that the Christ's sacrifice is what allows man to reconcile with nature. Or rather, what allows nature to reconcile with itself, since man is just the part of nature that became alienated from itself. This is the idea at the heart of the Good Friday's spell scene of act 3 (Karfreitagszauber).

The fisher king is at the center of all of this. As custodian of the Grail he acts as a living testimony of the sacrifice of Christ on this earth. His wound is a reminder of the nature of man as a sinner.

In Princess Mononoke you have the same thing but without the christian references. Instead of the nature of man as a sinner, it is the suffering of the world that the forest spirit is carrying.

Basically:

Ashitaka = Parsifal

An innocent hero who grew up sheltered from the brutality of the world. In Ashitaka's case his innocence is represented by him being part of a small remnant community of Emishi people (populations from the northeast of the main island who resisted unification with the rest of Japan).

Nago = the swan

A slain animal acting as the starting point of the main character's journey, revealing to him his sinful/impure nature.

The forest spirit = the Grail+Amfortas

In Japanese, the forest spirit is called シシ神 (shishigami). It appears that "shishi" is an old word that means the meat of hunted animals, and kami/gami is god or spirit. So the forest spirit's sacrifice to humans is already contained in his name. It echoes the eucharist of christianity, but changes it to a hunter/prey dynamic, which is a really interesting new idea.

The forest = the Grail's domain

In the movie, it is implied that the lake where the forest spirit dwells can normally not be found by humans. This is why Eboshi is so set on following the old boar Okkoto inside the forest after the battle: it is a rare opportunity to find the forest spirit. This is similar to how the Grail decides who finds the way to his domain in Parsifal.

Moro = Gurnemanz

The wolves and the boars are warrior spirits whose role is to protect the Shishigami, similarly to the knights of the Grail with, well, the Grail. Among them Moro stands out as the wise one, deeply aware of what's going on, a bit like Gurnemanz.

Nature coming back to life at the end = the Good Friday's spell scene

This one is pretty self-explanatory, I don't think I need to go into much detail. Interestingly, Ashitaka and San wake up in the middle of a prairie specifically.

San = Kundry (sort of, there are some major divergences here)

This might have gone unnoticed to a lot of people who watched the movie, but it is implied that San is a cursed being. Her curse is described by Moro in the following terms: she can never be fully human nor fully wolf. She is a little bit of both worlds but does not fully belong to either one, and she hates humans even though she is originally a human herself. San's character is an important element to the movie because she represents compassion: the compassion that Moro felt for her when she decided to spare and adopt her, which meets a similar feeling in Ashitaka (leading Moro to entrust San to him before her death). But also the compassion that San herself felt for Ashitaka when she decided to spare his life. By emphasizing compassion as the central element in the sacrifice of Christ in Parsifal, Wagner gave the story of Christ a bit of a buddhist undertone, and this of course was not lost on Miyazaki.

The big divergence from Wagner with San's character is that Miyazaki did not turn her into a penitent at the end of the movie like Wagner did with Kundry. She even raises the head of the forest spirit together with Ashitaka in the same gesture as Parsifal presenting the Grail. I think this is Miyazaki's way of showing his appreciation for women, distantiating himself from Wagner on that specific point.

Another big divergence is that the second act of Parsifal is completely absent from Princess Mononoke. The Irontown is definitely NOT the equivalent of Klingsor's garden. You can sort of see a parallel with the flower maidens in the way that the women of Irontown swarm around Ashitaka, but that's the extent of it. Miyazaki did not make sexual desire a central element of his movie.

Okay, I think we've covered everything. I'll end this post by adding that the last line of the movie (バカには勝てん "you can't win against fools") can be seen as Miyazaki's cheeky little way of admitting that his movie is a response to Parsifal.

I ran across this amusing article this morning and thought the community might enjoy it. Apparently, Tito Schipa was gifted a rare albino marmoset by the Friends of the Esperanto Lodge of Masons following his concert tour of South America in the summer of 1927. He became rather attached to the primate, and when authorities in England insisted it be placed in quarantine when Schipa arrived in March 1928 to sing at Albert Hall, the tenor refused to perform unless he was provided with a fill-in monkey!

This question was raised for me by someone’s comment that Anna Netrebko is well past her prime. I’m no expert, just an opera lover, and I know there are people in this group who are more knowledgeable about the subject than I am.

These are different productions with different casts. (Though I don’t know enough to even guess whether some chorus or behind the scenes folks might be the same). I don’t just mean staples like The Marriage of Figaro either. Though there were at least two different productions of that in the first half of 2026.

e.g. RBO are doing Alcina in autumn 2026, and Scottish Opera in early 2027. Others I have noticed include Elektra, Un Ballo in Maschera and Bluebeard’s Castle, as well as the more likely Don Giovanni

I recently listened to Led Zeppelin IV from beginning to end with opera singer and classically trained soprano Elizaveta Kozlova, and I thought some people here might enjoy the conversation.

What I found most interesting was how differently she heard certain parts of the record. She picked up on the a cappella sections in “Black Dog,” Plant’s range and vocal control, the harmonies throughout the album, and even described the beginning of “Stairway to Heaven” from a classical perspective. We ended up talking a lot about why Plant’s singing feels so expressive without losing the actual meaning of the words.

I’ve loved this album for a long time, but listening to it next to someone with her musical background genuinely made me notice things I hadn’t really thought about before.

**One quick audio note before watching**: after uploading, I realized something went wrong with the album playback in the final export and part of the stereo mix got collapsed, so there are some instruments/details that don’t come through properly. I’m aware of it and making sure it doesn’t happen again, but I wanted to mention it here so nobody thinks it’s their setup.

Would be really interested to hear what longtime Zeppelin fans think of her perspective.

I am learning to mix my voice ( male baritone ). My teacher tells me to send the sound back and up but not back and down. I feel my tongue tugging down a bit which is why I think I am dealing with tension. Is this a nromal aspect of learning head voice?