Just in time for the High Holy Days, the Metropolitan Opera is bringing back its production of one of the few works of music that helped change history. “Nabucco” (Nebuchadnezzar), a wildly eccentric story inspired by the biblical Lamentations of Jeremiah, was Giuseppe Verdi’s first professional breakthrough, and it helped inspire the Risorgiomento, which ended…
It seems evil people can live a really long time. Now 107(!) years old and still singing, Hitler’s favorite singer Johannes Heesters recently discovered his native Netherlands still regards him as a traitor. German chancellor Angela Merkel was recently hosting a formal state dinner for the visiting Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and invited Heesters,…
A Monument to Hatuey in Baracoa, Cuba. Photo by Michal Zalewski. A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. In 1931, Yiddish poet, journalist and editor Ascher Penn published “Hatuey,” a 126-page epic poem about a Taíno chieftain who fought against the Spanish invasion of Cuba at the beginning of the 16th century, and who…
It’s not every day that one gets to see an opera illustrated in comics and sung by rock musicians, but happily, May 7 was one of those days. That night “Memorial City,” the latest musical theater piece by comics great (and former Forward cartoonist) Ben Katchor and composer Mark Mulcahy, had its Manhattan premiere as…
Crossposted from Haaretz The Israeli Chamber Orchestra’s participation in the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany has been canceled after news of the would-be historic visit was leaked. The cancellation is unlikely to be overturned. The visit was to be announced by Katrina Wagner, great-granddaughter of composer Richard Wagner, during a visit to Israel next week….
“That was simply amazing!” a normally jaded music executive exclaimed to me after the second act of Franz Schreker’s provocative “Der Ferne Klang” (“The Distant Sound”). Hounded to death as a “degenerate” composer by the rising Nazis, Schreker’s defiantly louche, wildly successful 1909 opera disappeared and had to wait a century for its first American…
Franz Schreker, an Austrian composer of Jewish descent who was hounded to an untimely death by the Nazis, has long been considered an unjustly forgotten genius. In recent years, however, Schreker’s works have received some long-overdue attention. In 2005 American music director Kent Nagano conducted a darkly impressive revival of Schreker’s 1918 opera “The Marked…
Yesterday’s announcement that 43 years after playing a quintessentially confused Jewish college graduate, Dustin Hoffman plans to make his directorial debut, may raise some eyebrows. Hoffman has chosen to adapt “Quartet,” a 1999 play by Cape Town-born Jewish playwright Ronald Harwood (né Horwitz). In the bittersweet “Quartet,” ancient opera singers in a retirement home lip…
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