Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera

In Gilbert and Sullivan’s fairy opera “Iolanthe” empowered magical women crash into toxic privileged masculinity in 19th century London. Marc Eliot Stein interviews New York City singer and actress Casey Keeler about her role as the powerful Fairy Queen in a recent Village Light Opera Group "Iolanthe". We also talk about “Utopia, Limited”, community theater, and how New York City's post-COVID opera subculture is stayi...

Jacques Offenbach’s masterpiece “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” is an existential psychological comic opera, a morality tale about an aesthete who destroys himself over a fanciful love of three women. In the last episode of Season 3, Marc Eliot Stein talks about Jewish composers in Paris, “Faust”, drinking songs, Mozart, Gilbert and Sullivan, Zarzuela, sex dolls, synaesthesia and the opera novels of late New York City writer ...

What should we do with Mozart’s problematic masterpiece “Don Giovanni” in the 21st century? Vicki Zunitch joins Marc Eliot Stein to talk about the moral situations portrayed in the famous story of a sociopathic charmer and rapist brought to justice by a stone statue, with a focus on all the characters caught in his web: Anna, Elvira, Zerlina, Masetto, Ottavio, the Commendatore and the eternal wingman, Leporello. We al...

Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana kicked off the verismo craze in Italian opera in 1890. Ruggero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci followed two years later. We talk about the ripple effects of the verismo movement in this wide-ranging episode, covering everything from Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese to Anton Chekhov, Konstantin Stanislavski, Stella Adler and Marlon Brando, along with more Marx Brothers, the Ride of the Valkyrie...

Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” is one of the most popular operas of all time, and also one of the hardest to follow. What is going on with this crazy plot? There’s a lot under the surface, and it's all spelled out in this explainer by Marc Eliot Stein, who shows how a thrilling but nakedly horrible storyline became an entertainment fit for 19th century operagoers. This fascinating episode ends with a look at the Marx Brothers...

Season 3 kicks off with a visit from poet and professor Daniel Nester, librettist for "The Summer King" by Daniel Sonenberg and author of "God Save My Queen". We talk about slam poetry, karaoke and New York City's Bowery Poetry Club, and then attempt a deep dive into the operatic context of the classic rock song "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen, and why it may have been inspired by the verismo opera "Cavalleria Rusticana" by Pietro Mas...

Jules Massenet is best known for "Manon" and "Werther", and his "Don Quichotte" hasn't played at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City for nearly a hundred years. Why not, and was it actually killed in 1926 by a single bad review? Marc Eliot Stein rediscovers this forgotten classic and finds a beautiful surprise. We also talk about "Man of La Mancha", "Sturm und Drung", Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Wagner's "Der Fliegende Ho...

We continue our look at the two great Figaro operas with a deep dive into Mozart's dark sexual comedy "Le Nozze di Figaro". We talk about Soren Kierkegaard, "Either/Or", trouser roles, gender ambiguity, castratos, Peter Pan, Harpo Marx, Prince's "Purple Rain", Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, Rossini, Strauss, "Der Rosenkavalier", "La Mere Coupable", "Porkys", and Marc Eliot Stein's theory that a Stephen Foster folk song and ...

We zoom into today’s literary scene with composer and librettist Rachel J. Peters, who turns short stories from authors like Sheila Heti and Arthur Phillips into contemporary operas. Her work spans from absurdist postmodernism back to the American tradition of Carl Sandburg, and her influences include Nina Simone, Stephen Sondheim and Meredith Monk. A fascinating look at opera as a living form!

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 ...

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".

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 a...

Marc Eliot Stein and Bud Parr, two software developers and literary bloggers from New York City, sat through all 18.5 hours of Richard Wagner's "Ring des Nibuleng" cycle at the Metropolitan Opera this year, and lived to tell the tale. Actually, we were both very impressed. In our latest exploration of opera's often misunderstood literary side, we focus on the dramatic and mythical aspects of Wagner's masterpiece, and also talk abou...

Opera was born during the Renaissance as an attempt to recreate the experience of an ancient Greek play as it would have been performed in the Theater of Dionysus in Athens. In this episode, Marc Eliot Stein and Lisa Geraghty talk about the greatest of several operas about one particular Greek myth: "Orfeo ed Euridice" by Christoph Willibald Gluck, which tells the story of the musician Orpheus's descent into the Underworld to retri...

After a lifetime of not understanding opera, I attempted to transform myself into an aficionado by pledging to listening to the same 100 arias repeatedly for months, hoping that musical "osmosis" would eventually take effect and that I would start enjoying myself. The experiment succeeded beyond my wildest expectations, including a peak opera experience with Mozart's "Cosi Fan Tutte" at the Met. The story of my opera journey is con...

An exciting new podcast by Marc Eliot Stein of Literary Kicks. Why is opera relevant in 2019? This sometimes-lost art form hides a fascinating, vibrant world. In our first episode, we discuss whether Verdi's Otello is better than Shakespeare's Othello, whether Othello had PTSD, and what it means that Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro is an Italian opera by a German Austrian and a Venetian Jew based on a French play that takes place in Sp...