(Photo: Julian Roeder) What exactly is an opera? Karlheinz Stockhausen spent much of the last quarter of the 20th century providing increasingly improbable answers to that question. “Mittwoch aus Licht,” composed between 1995 and 1997, contains a world parliament debating esoteric love, an audition for an orchestra whose musicians are scattered through space, a string quartet performing in four helicopters {…}

(Photo: Monika Rittershaus) There are operas that survive their period, and others that somehow seem to grow into it. Aribert Reimann’s “Lear,” which received its world premiere at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1978—a performance I attended—belongs emphatically to the latter category. Nearly half a century later, its music has lost none of its capacity to disturb. If {…}

Ultimately, however, the evening belonged to Gershwin. Nearly a century after its 1935 premiere, "Porgy and Bess" remains an extraordinary amalgam of musical worlds that ought not necessarily to fit together but somehow do. Cape Town Opera, Chineke! Orchestra and, above all, Mazzola trusted those contrasts rather than smoothing them away. In the Philharmonie, with no and nowhere for either performers or music to hide, that proved more than enough.

In keeping with this year’s theme, “The Sea,” the week-long Birgit Nilsson Festival concluded with a semi-staged open-air performance of Wagner’s “Der fliegende Holländer” at Båstad Tennis Stadium in south Sweden.

More than a display of versatility, it presented an artist moving confidently among traditions while retaining a recognizable musical identity of his own.

Józef Beer’s "Polish Wedding" is one of those works in which history seems almost as dramatic as its plot.

Richard Wagner’s "Die Walküre" unfolds in a world governed by contracts, power structures, and inherited systems of control. Yet beneath its mythological surface lies a drama about the moment when those systems begin to fail.

With "Orlando," Olga Neuwirth has not simply written an opera based on a Virginia Woolf novel, but a sprawling epic that seeks to be everything at once: a parable on gender, a cultural-historical chronicle, a political warning, a queer manifesto, a critique of the media, and a musical panorama of Western modernity.

Nicola Campogrande’s "Olympia" world premiere at the Teatro Comunale Nouveau di Bologna joins a small category of operas that attempt to absorb the psychic weather of the digital age without collapsing into either technophilia or dystopian cliché.

Ewelina Marciniaks Inszenierung reagiert auf die Materialfülle von Olga Neuwirths «Orlando» mit einer Ästhetik der Überlagerung

Ein KI-Roboter entdeckt die eigene Menschlichkeit: Uraufführung von Nicola Campograndes «Olympia»

What is reality, what is dream? In "Juliette," Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů constructs an aural dreamscape in which memory dissolves almost as soon as it forms, and identity flickers with unstable voltage.

There are evenings when a thematic program feels like an academic conceit, and others when it becomes a kinetic organism.

«Julietta» von Bohuslav Martinů: Eine Welt, deren Bewohner nach wenigen Minuten alles vergessen, produziert ihre Wirklichkeit fortwährend neu. Mit Sinn für Transparent und Farbe dirigiert Mirian Khukhunaishvili

(Photo: Juan Diego Castillo / Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo) When Richard Wagner completed “Der fliegende Holländer” almost two centuries ago, he stood at a threshold in his artistic life. Within its turbulent orchestral sea there is already the sense of the psychological obsessions that would later culminate in “Tristan” and “The Ring.” The work’s themes —eternal wandering, obsessive {…}

Das Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo in Bogotá hat sich in kurzer Zeit zu einem der wichtigsten Musik- und Theaterzentren Lateinamerikas entwickelt

Sebastian Fagerlund's new opera, based on Karl Ove Knausgård's novel "Morgenstjernen" in Swedish or "The Morning Star" in English, inhabits that rare territory where literature, music, and visual spectacle converge to create something genuinely original — unsettling and beautiful at the same time.

Sebastian Fagerlunds «Der Morgenstern» ist eine Meditation über Sterblichkeit und Transzendenz in einer Zeit der kollektiven Desorientierung – ein Bericht von einer bewegenden Uraufführung

Die Uraufführung von «Das kalte Herz» des Komponisten Matthias Pintscher offenbarte eine Oper der Zustände in einem Zwischenreich aus Realität, Traum und Mythos. Am stärksten waren die Sängerinnen und Sänger

Zarzuela in der Schweiz ist ein seltenes Vergnügen, das Christof Loy derzeit mit Ansejo Barbieris «El barberillo de Lavapiés» und einem spanischsprachigen Ensemble ermöglicht