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Opera

  • Curtain Call: Joan Sutherland
    Peter Conrad | The Monthly Essays | Music | October 2009 | Opera

    With the connivance of an airline official, her husband Richard Bonynge had caught the first flight out to London; the diva was left behind with their impedimenta, the tiles and rugs they had bought as souvenirs, and also – as she told me on a later occasion – with the fees...

  • La Travesty: Opera Australia’s Troubles
    Gideon Haigh | The Monthly Essays | October 2008 | Opera | Society & Culture

    When Martin retired in January, after a 45-year career, it was with all passion spent. The voice of Wagner's Hans Sachs and Wotan was as rich as ever, but so tinged with bitterness that he declined a formal farewell. He would not be speaking now, save for the public airing of...

  • Sing Out Loud, Sing Out Strong: Opera in Australia
    Peter Craven | June 2008 | Opera
    It's an odd business, a night at the opera. You know, if you like the diversion, that you are basking in the glow of an artistic institution that we're lucky to have and yet sometimes the effect can be bemusing and the ho-hums can assail you, as if the maintenance of an...
  • 'Flight and Here Lies Love' at the Adelaide Festival of Arts
    Dennis Altman | Opera | April 2006

    The program of almost any major opera company reveals a repertoire largely unchanged for over a century: there are more likely to be productions of works by Mozart, Verdi and Puccini than even such mid-twentieth-century works as...