My personal preference, in choosing opera films, is, whenever possible, to go with performances from the country of origin of the opera. The reason is quite simple. Nobody understands the cultural context

The title means approximately "A Woman Gone Astray." The version reviewed here is the one that I'm including in my cycle of the twelve best cinematic adaptations. In fact, I rank it as the most

I decided to generate twelve opera films reviews representing my twelve favorite operas (without any claim of these also being the twelve greatest). Don't hold your breath waiting for Wagner to make an

La Bohème, dating from 1965, is widely considered among the best opera films ever made. The great Franco Zeffirelli provided the production design and the equally renowned Herbert Von Karajan conducted

Recently, my wife and I have decided to watch a classic movie every week of my choosing. We generally disagree on most movies and have very different tastes, but my hope is that by starting her off with

Growing up, one of my favorite genres of film was the musical. Still, even though I loved the genre as a whole, it wasn’t until the past few years that I really started seeing some of the best musicals

In May of 1767, the 11 years old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his first opera, Apollo et Hyacinthus, to the Latin text modified by Father Rufinus Widl from the Greek myth. If you have read Ovid’s

This is a review of the English composer Rachel Portman’s opera, The Little Prince, based on Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s much beloved novel. The libretto by Nicholas Wright is adapted from Richard Howard's

Composed very shortly before Mozart's death in 1791, this German Singspiel is one of the most popular opera ever written. Being a Singspiel means that its musical numbers are connected by spoken German

The story of this opera is an expansion from a side story in Homer’s epic, The Iliad, into the play Idomenee by Antoine Danchet. Idomeneo, the Greek King of Crete, left his kingdom in the care of his young

Christoph Willibald Gluck's 4 Acts masterpiece still sounds much younger than its age 222 years after it was composed in 1779. This was the opera that completed Gluck's 'reform' of the Baroque ways of

Based on libretto by Eugene Scribe, Jacques Fromenthal-Halevy's La Juive (composed in 1835) is a heavy opera that deals with a timelessly heavy issue - what happens when people puts their religion before

Most people (at least those who are familiar with Spanish literature) are well familiar with Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding) (1932) as the first of the trilogy plays by Frederico Garcia Lorca (the others

Ha! Didn't know that Franz Schubert wrote any opera, did you? Well, neither did I! This 1823 three-act opera is set to a libretto by Josef Kupelwieser after 'Buch der Liebe' by Büsching, von der Hagen,

The libretto of the opera by Gaetano Rossi is based on Voltaire’s play Tancrede. The story progresses slowly and the plot is quite holey, which is typical of opera seria. These are dramatic pieces with

This opera is chronologically the prequel to Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), though it was written after that work (Mozart was inspired to write his as a sequel to Giovanni Paisiello’s

This gorgeous opera of the mature Gioachino Rossini on the libretto of Cesare della Valle is extremely rarely performed. There are many versions of it, including the more popular French resetting under

Written in 1775 on the libretto by Giuseppe Petrosellini, this work is very rarely performed nowadays. It is a cross between opera seria (dramatically serious opera with scene-stopping arias) and opera