Life as Opera - Two Miles High (Page 2)

Two Miles High

Life as Opera

A collection of 31 posts

Sappho

This is Sappho by French painter Charles Mengin (1877) in Manchester Art Gallery. It pretty much captures her racy reputation throughout the 19th century. Although it was said that Sappho wrote love poems to her female students, this painting chooses to illustrate a story that said she threw herself into

The Birth of Cabaret

The Birth of Cabaret

Cabarets developed on two tracks: clubs and music halls and they were different. But, first they had to move inside. Les Hydropathes, founded in 1878 in the Latin Quarter, was short-lived but it was so named because its hosts professed to hate water and so had to drink wine or

The Real Lola Montez

The speculation about Lola turned out to be right -- she was born Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, probably in 1821 in Limerick, Ireland, with her mother’s side providing the Spanish names and dark Spanish eyes that bewitched her fans. Lola Montez was just the stage name for this

The Rise of the 'Femme Fatale'

The Rise of the 'Femme Fatale'

There was a sense of theatricality about bohemian life in Europe's cities in the late 19th century. At a time when imperialism was revolutionizing the arts, it seemed that writing and composing were not enough—one had to be larger than life to get attention. Lola Montez’s

'Turandot' Goes to China

'Turandot' Goes to China

After being banned in China, director Zhang Yimou staged the opera at the Teatro Comunale in Florence in 1997 (with Zubin Mehta) and subsequently outdoors at the Forbidden City in Beijing in 1998. This set up the wonderfully curious situation of a Western fantasy set in imperial China being staged

Viareggio

Viareggio is a beach town in Tuscany famous for its carnivals. Puccini was born in the nearby city of Lucca. He particularly loved the area around the village of Torre del Lago, and Lake Massaciuccoli, a wetlands area between Viareggio and Lucca. He moved there in 1921, composed there (and