Macbeth and Lady Macbeth

01/09/20 • 45 min

What happens when two lifelong Shakespeareans attend Verdi's "Macbeth" at the Met? Marc Eliot Stein examines Giuseppe Verdi's earliest Shakespeare opera with Meg Wise-Lawrence, who teaches English at Hunter College and City College in New York City. We talk about witches, prophecies, banquets, mad scenes, Ian McKellen, Italian nationalism, the Scottish people, Verdi's "Nabucco", Verdi's "Otello" and Tchaikovsky's "Queen of Spades".

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Fidelio and Napoleon

Beethoven's politically charged "Fidelio" is an opera for today, with messages of resistance, defiance, #MeToo and prisoner awareness. It premiered during the Napoleonic Wars that brought revolutionary tumult all over Europe, and Ludwig van Beethoven was deeply involved in progressive revolutionary politics. We talk about the French Revolution, Tolstoy's "War and Peace", David Lang's "Prisoner of the State", Schroeder's toy piano and much more. The final episode of Season 1 of "Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera"!

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Figaro and Rosina

Figaro and Rosina are beloved characters in two masterpieces by two different composers: "Le Nozze di Figaro" by Mozart and "Il Barbieri di Siviglia" by Rossini. This episode is about Rossini's comic opera, and we also talk about commedia dell'arte, Pierre-Augustin Caron Pierre de Beaumarchais, Freddie Mercury, Groucho Marx, Bugs Bunny, Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza, Harley Quinn, the Joker, beautiful melodies and crescendoes and whether or not comic opera is funny (it's not).