What do we want from historical romance? Should it reflect its time or offer escape from it? Fact and fantasy coexist frequently in opera, but balancing these impulses proves both fascinating and difficult in Charles Edwards’s new production of I Puritani, the first at the Metropolitan Opera in over four decades. The star-crossed pair—the Puritan Elvira and staunch Royalist Arturo—are separated first by Arturo’s divided loyalties and then, more disturbingly, by Elvira’s increasing madness. And while the 17th Century is the historical backdrop, I Puritani is more a reflection of 19th-century Italian opera tropes than of the English Civil War: mad scenes and cries of “la patria!”

Edwards’s production amps up both the historical context and adds in some psychoanalytic touches to its general peril; maps of Plymouth under siege are projected, and chyrons appear to deliver snippets of the English Civil War timeline. There is more than one green-tinged mad sequence in which ghostly doubles of our characters float through the scene. Elvira paints numerous hideous self-portraits that recall more AP Art portfolio than Robert Walker, and in a climactic scene, she hurls them across the room and punches an arm through one of them. There’s a lot going on here, in other words.

For an opera with a tighter grip on its own historical setting, this approach could be both informative and compelling, but in I Puritani the English Civil War is used primarily to provide obstacles to the lovers. The additional history, instead of amping up the drama, only knocks it off-kilter. Everyone seems all the sillier for caring this much about the star-crossed pair when the audience is constantly reminded that Scots are besieging the town. I Puritani, even more than similar works, insists romantic difficulties take precedence over horrifying contemporary events. Edwards’s impulse to beef up the dark setting merely exposes the myopia of Bellini’s opera.

Unsurprisingly for a director who is primarily a set designer, what does work beautifully are the sets. The first act places the audience in a Puritan meeting house that is at once austere and dramatic, without sacrificing visual interest or flattening his setting. The tiered seats and towering pulpit gave Edwards multiple levels on which to place his singers, lending the whole production—especially the first act—welcome variety. Met newcomer Tim Mitchell’s lighting is exceptional, with a painterly sensibility that sees great shafts of light angled downward into the faces of the actors from high back windows or emerging from firelit darkness, half-shadowed but still visible as in a Caravaggio painting. Later on, the Puritan meeting house splinters apart, with dashes of light crisscrossing the stage as if showing us Elvira’s fragmentation on the very walls. Edwards and Mitchell’s collaboration makes this production one of the most visually striking in the past few years.

Edwards’s ability to create arresting tableaux is a great strength, as is his commitment to having singers move; a frequent critique of mine is that directors do not always know how to leverage the Metropolitan Opera’s massive stage to sufficient dramatic effect, leaving singers snoozily parked downstage center or moving aimlessly across the floor with nothing to engage with. But frequently, the production’s dynamism gives way to busyness or even adds confusion to the already convoluted plot. Background characters pull focus from the principals during arias, difficult-to-make-out paintings trip up the space, and the use of child doubles for Arturo and Elvira in the mad scenes and dream sequences was neither dramatically clarifying nor emotionally compelling. Claus Guth’s Salome may have succeeded with this tactic earlier this year, but let’s not overdo it. There are a few other missteps that mar this production. Gabrielle Dalton’s costumes are by turns austere and splendid, and she manages to make even the Puritan characters look sleek and expensive, but her choice to style Elvira in Act III as a pixie-cut-sporting waif recalled Anne Hathaway as Fantine in Les Miserables too closely for my taste.

Lisette Oropesa, a soprano whom I frequently admire, was by turns brilliant and bumpy as the pathetic Elvira, who sings what feels like a record number of mad scenes. The slower cavatinas displayed Oropesa at her best—rich rivers of nuanced, lively sound—but the vocal fireworks expected in the cabalettas had not enough sparkle, with moments of effortful coloratura and a few breathy, pinched high notes. Laurence Brownlee, recently adorable as Tonio in La Fille du Régiment, was an exceptionally strong Arturo, with an even, forward sound that perfectly balanced brightness with depth. He is well-suited to this role; even though it does not take advantage of Brownlee’s effervescent charm, his Arturo was near-unimpeachable vocally and only gained momentum as the opera drew to its close.

As the lovers’ principal antagonist Riccardo, Artur Ruciński was the other standout. He has a dimensional, delicious baritone that leans toward bass in its richness; his Act I aria “Ah, per sempre” was a surprising emotional high point, as was his duet with Christian Van Horn’s Giorgio. Van Horn, who has a crisp metallic bass, was persuasive and heartfelt as Elvira’s beloved uncle and advocate. Eve Gigliotti has only a little to do as the secret-queen Enrichetta, but delivered a massive sound in her short time on stage.

All the singers were supported by veteran guest conductor Marco Armiliato, who is a generous and sensitive interpreter of Bellini, able to bring out both the elegance and the occasional bouts of military bombast with grace.

While Edwards’s production veers into the dangerously overstuffed by the third act—his choice to stage the final moments of the opera with Arturo embracing the ghost of his father was strange and nonsensical—there is still much to commend in his bold visual style, even if his ideas strain at the seams of his material. Arturo and Elvira’s romance ends with a surprising reprieve; Cromwell’s forces save the day and, madness forgotten, the lovers can reunite. I Puritani is tragedy with a happy ending, one that always feels forced and unrealistic regardless of the production. At its best, it reflects that shred of hopefulness romances always offer—that love might, for a moment, overcome the forces of history.

On another note, you won’t be seeing as much of me on Observer’s pages moving forward, and to all those reading this, I want to thank you. As a scholar and a singer, writing these reviews has meant so much to me, as has the work of the team of editors at Observer who have polished and published my writing. It has been a deep honor and extraordinary pleasure to write on this platform, though this isn’t necessarily goodbye. If you’d like to continue reading my articles and reviews, including a 2026 season preview with all of the things I’m most looking forward to hearing this year, use this link to sign up for my email list. Happy New Year to all—may yours be full of opera. With that, exit Madame Ferrari. On to the next stage!

If I were allowed to be a chorus member in any Met opera production, my first choice very well might be Laurent Pelly’s La Fille du Regiment. Who wouldn’t want to be a saucepan-helmeted townsperson, a bumbling drunken soldier, or a pearl-clutching little old lady in this unabashedly adorable comedy about a foul-mouthed military brat and the men who love her?

Pelly’s production, which debuted in 2008 and has retained its looks, is directed with precision to produce maximum whimsy and delight, from the rigorously choreographed chorus scenes to the numerous visual gags to every stomp, swear and harrumph that comes out of Marie’s potty mouth. Rendered as a mountain landscape made of maps, Chantal Thomas’s sets lean into the fantasy; it may be set during World War One, but this is the lightest of comedies. It is marvelously entertaining from first to last, even including the overture, which was exceptionally lively under Giacomo Sagripanti’s baton. A notary pops out of a fireplace when his services are required, Tonio rides in on a teeny-tiny tank to get his girl, while Sandra Oh—yes, that Sandra Oh—kitted out in a padded posterior and enormous fan as the Duchess du Krakenthorp, aims little kicks at the maids. No comedic opportunity is lost and one gets the sense that everyone onstage is enjoying themselves just as much as the audience is.

Erin Morley’s Marie, whom we meet as she karate-chops laundry into neat squares, is a unique character in the operatic canon: a good girl but not a feminine one. She prefers regimental songs to the pretty airs women are expected to sing and trousers to dresses, but she can still sing fabulous bouts of coloratura. In other words, she’s an absolute breath of fresh air, blowing strong from 1840. The men of the regiment are right to be enamored.

Morley, a soprano who has been at the top of her game for so long that it’s easy to forget her genius, delivered a perfect vocal performance here. Every note was vividly in tune, highly polished and sung with deceptive ease, even as she soared to the upper limits above the ledger line. Oh and she’s also funny, wrenching every bit of physical comedy out of her character, from her boyish walk to her occasional butt scratches. One particularly delightful moment: in a fight with father figure Sulpice, Morley shut herself behind an invisible door with a cry of “Slam!”

Tenor Lawrence Brownlee was not quite as perfect vocally, but his Tonio was no less lovable than Morley’s Marie. Tonio’s famous “Ah mes amis,” with its nine high C’s, was sufficiently thrilling—the C’s were excellent but not effortless—but his second aria, the calmer “Pour me rapprocher de Marie,” was a more underrated showpiece, allowing for a more relaxed sound to emerge. Brownlee is a natural-born charmer; his dazzling white smile and fine comedic instincts make his Tonio positively effervescent. His final charge to rescue Marie was met with both laughter and cheers.

Peter Kálman, as Marie’s beloved “papa” Sulpice, had a warm, generous bass-baritone to match his loving, if bumbling, character. He also contributed another running comic bit by never quite remembering the Marquise de Berkenfield’s name: Birkenstock, is it? Or Birkin Bag? The second-act trio, when Marie, Tonio and Sulpice are finally reunited, was a high point, with all three moving in choreographed glee.

It’s hard to say who is having the most fun in Pelly’s production, but a case could be made for a tie between Susan Graham and Sandra Oh—the Marquise de Berkenfield and the Duchess du Krakenthorp. Each of these dueling dames has her weapons; Graham’s Marquise whaps her servant (Paul Corona, amusing as the lone straight man in this comedy) in the face with an impossibly long fox-fur stole and wields her towering height. Oh’s Krakenthorp has her fan, her padded rear and what seems to be a vaguely erotic fascination with the Marquise’s maids. Each is visibly reveling in her role, as only first-class artists in hammy bit parts can. I could have watched them face off for at least another hour.

Giacomo Sagripanti conducts Donizetti with boundless verve, bringing out its crispness and wit and, with it, the orchestra’s full colors. The three hours simply fly by with Sagripanti at the helm. The Met Opera chorus, always good, is exceptional here. They stomp and dance with vigor and especially for the men of the regiment, each chorus member feels alive and individual. They all love their Marie, but it’s a testament both to their skill and to the care with which this production is directed that we get the sense they all love her in slightly different ways. The scene where they bid her goodbye with hugs and little trinkets was truly touching.

The singing is wonderful, the production is darling and the French accents are of variable quality. What more can a guy’s girl want? So, break out the drums—there’s only one thing left to sing: Rataplan!

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In 1609, Galileo Galilei flipped around a lens and the telescope became a microscope. This turn connected the massive to the minuscule, far-away made close to the too-close made visible. The same technology that would allow us to see massive bodies in space would also allow us to see minuscule bodies: the cells that make up much of life on this earth. Eventually, we’d find out that the same elements out there in space were in us too.

Georg Friedrich Haas’s piece at the Park Avenue Armory, entitled 11,000 Strings for the wires that sound in the fifty pianos—yes, fifty—the composer calls for, contains dual actions of telescoping and magnifying, only sound, not light, is his material and his mode. The result is a work of enormous scope and forcefulness that reaches, by some pivot of a lens, an intimacy that surprises.

The piece, making its North American premiere after its first performance in Bolzano two years ago, has a technical underpinning to it that I will fail to explain succinctly, so I shall defer to the composer’s notes:

When a violin tunes its strings in perfectly intoned fifths, this interval is a tiny fraction (almost exactly one-fiftieth of a semitone) higher than the piano’s fifth. If each of the 50 pianos is tuned higher by this very small interval, then an absolutely perfect fifth is created, for example, between the C of the first piano and the G of the second piano. The same applies between the C of the second and the G of the third piano (one-fiftieth of a semitone higher), between the C of the third and the G of the fourth piano, and so on. After 50 pianos, the circle closes, and the fifth has risen by a semitone.

No need to fret, though. One does not need an acoustical physics course or a perfectly pitched ear, however, to feel the power of 11,000 Strings; one only needs ears and a certain openness—openness to be enveloped, openness to sounds as they are given, openness to making them mean something all one’s own.

This is a piece of great precision that provokes diffuse and imprecise feeling. It requires a thoroughly modern approach—dozens of synchronized iPads, all timed down to the millisecond to allow for the configuration of the pianos, which, with the instruments, surround the audience on all sides. The fifty pianists and twenty-five instrumentalists, here, members of the Austrian ensemble Klangforum Wien are not conducted; they play, both alone and together, against their stopwatches. The Armory is perhaps the only venue in the city that could and would put on this piece, and here it is mostly unadorned: only washes of lavender, pink, and midnight blue light and the instruments.

11,000 Strings unfolds through almost tectonic shifts, starting from a place of ultimate simplicity—a cadence that lands on a C Major triad, first sounded not in the piano but in its direct ancestor, the harpsichord. It proceeds from there not forward, but outward, redoubling and expanding into massive plates of sound that shift and collide. Roiling timpani, a wheezing, breathing accordion, piercing flutes, a roaring bass trombone and many many other instruments, often more felt than heard, all vie for the listeners attention.

An octave, a chord, a scale—these are the building blocks of our musical worlds, but we’re so used to seeing the musical forest, so to speak, that we don’t consider the wonder of the trees. The sonic materials may be simple enough, but such “simple” things are the result of thousands of years of history and countless decisions by people, remembered and unremembered. The piano, so ubiquitous now, is a miracle of engineering; its expressive capacities were epoch-shaping. The major scale may be derived from the mathematical calculations of the overtone series, but it also reflects agreement, one undertaken by people with one another: about what they value, about how they build a shared musical language, about how they endeavor to play together.

11,000 Strings unearths the beauty and contingency of such human agreements by insisting on the elemental force of even “simple” things. A tremolo, a glissando: what wonders, not just for what they are, but for how quick we are to make them mean, to hear in them thunder, or waves, or rain. By hearing such things both in micro- and telescopic scale, indeed, to be placed within them and be buffeted by them, we hear them anew. When, late in the piece, a series of chords returned surrounded us, I felt overcome, close to tears. I recall thinking, “How beautiful to live in a world with chords and pianos and people to hear them.” And then I started to laugh out of sheer delight.

Perceptible or not, the effect of Haas’s microtones is a matter of relation. Fifty pianos, it suggests, can only agree in the same way that people can, by never entirely eliminating difference. Complete identity, that’s the stuff of sine wave generators, not of flesh and wood and metal. These tiny overlaps in alignment—present always, and made concrete here—give sound its timbre, make it an undulating mesh instead of a single crisp line on a graph. Best are the moments when, by some confluence of clashing overtones, any individual instrument’s timbre seemed to blur or hybridize with that of another. Sound is how we know our world, but we are reminded that that knowledge is a conditional and intimate negotiation between ourselves and that world.

At times, it is fascinating to listen with eyes open, if only to see how thoroughly you can be tricked by your ears. In other moments, Haas’s textures are so rich and all-encompassing that it’s best just to give over to them with eyes closed. There is no sonic equivalent in our oculocentric language for the twin moves of telescoping and microscoping, but one can hear what can’t be said.

Haas denies this piece as an “experiment”—“you don’t experiment with people,” he writes in the program notes—but it results in a monumental discovery, nonetheless.

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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay opens with a magic trick; a young man leaps into the Moldau in a straitjacket with only eighty seconds to escape. But, in a bit of dramatic sleight of hand, the real nail-biter is happening back on the riverbank, where a band of SS thugs come upon his sister, demanding her papers. She, too, narrowly slips away. These various forms of escape, from the stylized to the real, encapsulate Mason Bates’s new opera, an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s 2001 novel, which took home a Pulitzer Prize. (Bates’s first opera, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs with librettist Mark Campbell, looks at the rise of the tech giant in a circular fictionalized narrative that eats itself like an ouroboros.) For Kavalier and Clay, Bates turns to a pair of fictional boy geniuses, two teenage cousins who invent an anti-fascist superhero called The Escapist. Unlike the increasingly power-mad Steve Jobs of his first opera, the two young men at the center of this opera are very clearly the good guys. Josef “Joe” Kavalier, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague with a love for Houdini, and his cousin Sam Clay, a Brooklynite whose early battle with polio has left him in a leg brace, find an instant bond and a lucrative creative partnership after Joe comes to live in the Clays’ apartment. Together, they create their answer to Superman: The Escapist. He doesn’t fly, or shoot lasers; instead, he liberates the oppressed with his golden key and punches Nazis—literally. As their creation launches the cousins to stardom, both Kavalier and Clay fall in love: the former with an artist and activist named Rosa, who is fundraising for the Ark of Miriam, the latter with the actor who voices The Escapist. By the end, each man must choose to stop running from themselves and to live authentically.

Gene Scheer condenses Michael Chabon’s novel with great economy. While this leads to some clichés in the writing, the final product is balanced and dramatically compelling. What emotional stakes Scheer establishes in the first act, he pays off methodically in the second. It is as satisfying as any Marvel movie. Bates’s music is similarly consumable, filled with variety and energy. The score combines orchestra with synthesizer and electronics, resulting in an animated—and sometimes overloud—swirl of sounds with a driving rhythmic pulse. A plucky mandolin accompanies the Prague scenes, and rubbery synth adds an edgy heartbeat to the rising action of the first act. In other scenes, Bates turns the Met Opera Orchestra into a swing band, a move that was less successful at first but grew on me. Bates also has a welcome grasp for vocal writing; more than one scene soars with lush melodies, and he shows his singers off to advantage.

Kavalier and Clay isn’t groundbreaking, either in its dramatic structure or its score, but it is eminently competent and entertaining. Like the superhero comics that inspired its source text, there are plot points you can see coming at you faster than a speeding bullet and some schlocky lines. But the execution is so lively, the emotions so clearly drawn, and the characters so lovable that what could be eye-roll-inducing is heartwarming instead. It takes advantage of the grand opera format and puts the more filmic qualities of Bates’s writing to perfect use. Operas are shot through with tropes and highly stylized actions; comic books are a better fit than one might expect.

As with big-budget films, the effects are everything here. Bartlett Sher’s production is a delicious marvel of technical theater. One gets the sense that all the stops have been pulled out, from the dynamic projections that show us Kavalier’s drawings to the scrims that narrow in and out to capture our characters within comic panels of their own to the impressively seamless transitions between settings both real and imagined. All of this stage magic comes from Studio 59, a company that does both theatrical productions and large-scale “activation”-type events for corporations. The first act alone moves from the Charles Bridge to a Brooklyn bedroom to a downtown factory to the Prague streets to a recording studio to an art gallery to Pier 39 and, finally, to the top of the Empire State Building, all rendered through a combination of practical sets and projected settings—while also showing us the comics themselves. The first act is relentlessly dynamic, moving swiftly and stylishly through the cousins’ collaboration and their stratospheric rise to fame, interspersed with the horrifying scenes back in Prague. The New York scenes are in color, while Prague is rendered almost entirely in black and white. The second act is slower by comparison—only moving from New York settings to the Western Front to Long Island—but retains much of the momentum.

The cast has both the energy and polish to meet the production. Met newcomer Andrzej Filończyk made a strong impression as Joe Kavalier, delivering an emotive, rich baritone and an absorbing dramatic performance. Miles Mykkanen, adorable and compelling as the excitable wise-ass Sam, had a rigorous, nasal tenor that mellowed significantly as his character matured. They are well-matched as an odd couple. As Rosa Saks, Joe’s eventual lover, Sun-Ly Pierce had a rich, somewhat chilly mezzo-soprano that gave her character a welcome seriousness, even as she charmed as a plucky activist and artist in her own right. Soprano Lauren Snouffer, as Joe’s little sister Sarah, brought a knife-sharp sound and energy to her young character. She took a moment to settle vocally, but as she did, we were treated to some more warmth. Suave baritone Edward Nelson lent both a supple sound and dancer’s grace to Tracy Bacon, the voice of The Escapist in radio plays and Sam’s lover. A gay party scene in Act II saw him singing a saucy chorus of “we love Dick”—Dick Johnson, that is, a politician whose arrest becomes Sam’s downfall as well. Patrick Carfizzi, opera’s greatest ‘hey, it’s that guy,’ gets a nice feature here as Sam’s boss, Sheldon Anapol. Carfizzi is so effortless in these character roles that it’s easy to forget what a fine singer he is, but it is a treat to watch him ham it up with an entourage of secretaries.

In the background of this stylized opera is a fairly serious question: what power does art have in the face of fascism? For Joe, art is a way to think through his experiences, to draw himself out of corners, but he’s also tormented by his own imaginative powers; some of the most heart-wrenching scenes show Joe envisioning the fates of his parents and sister in terrible technicolor. Sam Clay, the writer of the duo, theorizes art as a way to see “the world as it could be.” (Here, librettist Gene Scheer recalls an idea from Man of La Mancha; in that show, another dreamer proclaims that it might be “maddest of all to see life as it is, and not as it ought to be.”) As the name of Kavalier and Clay’s creation underlines, art can also be an escape. Not just from horrifying world events and trauma and, for some lucky artists, an escape from poverty, but also from the people who need us. Escapism cuts both ways. It’s not very subtle, either in Chabon’s novel or in Scheer’s libretto, but it is a worthy question and one the opera takes seriously. In the end, the opera leans hardest into the broad optimistic possibilities of art, even as the worst happens to our characters and their loved ones. Joe’s parents don’t escape, nor does his sister. Sam is sexually assaulted, and his lover is killed on the Western Front. Despite all this, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is full of comedy, sometimes zinging between laughter and weeping with astonishing speed, and it ends on notes of hope and connection. If only the Met sold huge buckets of popcorn! This has blockbuster appeal.

And if only I could end my review there. Is this opera worth seeing? Certainly. It is a tidy, colorful production with a strong cast and engaging characters. But this opera, for all its interest in art versus fascism, can have only a superhero movie’s kind of political critique—right-minded but vague, its tropes easily co-opted by the very enemies it seeks to vanquish. Kavalier and Clay is also an escape back into a distinctly American mindset, that of the superhero-artist-capitalist, the individual who can save themselves. It might be too tidy, too slick, too candy-colorful. I find myself thinking about a moment before the opera started. Senator Chuck Schumer appeared amidst a flurry of booing to introduce the opera, reminding us that the “arts are under attack.” As Schumer spoke, more than one audience member shouted, “Do something!” Well? Fascism is knocking on our doors, and there’s no golden key to be found.

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Maria Callas’s problem was being too much of everything: too much of a serious actress, too much of a prima donna and too much of a scandal machine. How we long for another singer of such delicious excess! Anthony Roth Costanzo, who showed his own taste for excess last year when he played all the roles in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, seems a fitting choice to take on the diva of all divas. The problem with Galas is that it isn’t quite enough of anything, be it comedy, melodrama or opera. Its most obvious contemporary comparison is Oh Mary, but unlike Cole Escola’s Broadway smash, Galas doesn’t turn the comedy dial up high enough on its central figure, instead descending into a series of self-serious monologues about art that would be more in place in a straightforward biopic.

Charles Ludlam’s Galas was written in 1983, six years after Callas’s death and four years before the writer’s own, from complications due to AIDS. Like many older comedies, it suffers from a certain trapped-in-amber quality. What once was innovative is now stale; popular culture has absorbed the avant-garde so thoroughly that the latter looks quaint by comparison. Unlike Oh Mary, Eric Ting’s production doesn’t dial up the ridiculousness far enough to give Galas a true comedic edge for a modern audience. After years of living in the Drag Race extended universe that is queer pop culture, a full-length drag homage to Callas isn’t all that innovative.

Galas sees its diva through her meeting and marriage with her husband-manager Meneghini, through her eventual success (and then failure) at La Scala, her affair with Aristotle Onassis and ends with her lonely death after she’s replaced by Jackie Kennedy. The first half had energy and charm, even if its comedy never rises above the expected. We get gags that now seem rather passé: bad Italian accents, jokes about bottoms, a sassy gay Pope, ad libs that recur whenever La Scala is mentioned (“La Scalaaaaaaaahhh”). But around the midpoint, Galas stalls and sputters. A lengthy yacht scene with Onassis—played à la Austin Powers by Caleb Eberhardt—had the dubious distinction of making a drug-addled orgy seem more befuddling than scandalous. We didn’t even see Madam Galas caught in flagrante in the lifeboat with Sock. Maybe it’s because we live in a post-scandal age, but it all felt surprisingly tame. By the end, the comedy leaches away, and we are left with Galas’s somber musings and an operatic death at her own hand. It was far too sad an ending for a show that also included a lisping Pope in 7-inch silver Pleaser boots spanking a mesh-shirted attendant. But Ludlam was writing during the AIDS crisis; far-too-sad endings were unfortunately far too familiar.

This revival does have its cast going for it—the ensemble knows how to do zippy broad comedy, with nice turns from Samora la Perdida, who was scene-stealing as Wagner-loving Pope Sixtus VII, decked out in a bedazzled miter and trading barbs with Galas. This diva-off was the highlight of the evening. La Perdida returned as both a La Scala mob man and the scenery (and pen-cap) gnawing Ilka Winterhalter, on board Soc’s yacht to write an absolute hit piece on Galas for Time mag. Mary Testa, as former-singer-turned-maid Bruna Lina Rasta, had perfected her exasperated eye rolls to delightful comic effect. And Carmelita Tropicana, in drag also as Galas’s husband, Giovanna Battista Mercanteggini (based on Callas’s real husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini), was another delight, each line wrung dry of comedy by the time Tropicana had delivered it.

The singing is kept to a minimum—only four short excerpts—which is a real shame; Costanzo’s voice is sounding sweeter and richer than it has in recent years, and he squeaked out a hilarious cracked high note during a brief Casta Diva excerpt that hinted at some vocal comedy that might have been. The fault is in the writing; as Galas, Costanzo is capable and compelling. He bears more than a passing resemblance to Callas and has captured much of her always phony-sounding mid-Atlantic drawl, even though at times he veers into Julie Andrews territory. He looks glorious in Jackson Wiederhoft’s costumes, which were splendid. One black cocktail confection had tulle spheres on the rear and wrists; this was Cruella de Vil drag, had she dispensed with Dalmatians and set her sights on the neighbor’s standard poodles. Elsewhere, he sported a wine-colored drop-waist ballgown as wide as he was tall.

But Costanzo’s earnest Galas was often at odds with the ludicrous caricatures that surrounded her, and the ludicrous caricatures are much more fun. He seems to respect his character too much to commit to a more outré satire of her—a noble impulse perhaps, given how much Callas suffered under the eyes of the media, but not always the most entertaining one.

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Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind takes its title from Alexander Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard”: “How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, each wish resigned.” That quote came to mind as I made my way back into the city after seeing Bohuslav Martinů’s Julietta at Bard’s SummerScape festival. Kaufman’s brilliant film makes the case for the importance of painful memories, even those we might long to forget, to our very humanity, while interrogating the nature of memory itself. Julietta asks similar questions and, like Kaufman but long before him, locates its inquiry in the surreal.

In search of a girl whose voice he heard three years earlier, Michel returns to the seaside setting of his encounter, only to find that the townspeople have lost their memories and now live in an eternal present. The townspeople range from goofy to sinister—there’s a town commissioner who describes the “echo machines” that exist on every corner of the street, a fortune teller who predicts the past, a man selling memories to anyone willing to pay—and all of them only befuddle poor Michel. The town cannot remember, so the townspeople place a high value on any memories they can latch on to; Michel is briefly crowned Captain of the Town (before everyone forgets again) by virtue of being the only person able to recall a childhood toy. The audience oohs and ahhhs rapturously at the memory, as if it is their own. Despite his mounting confusion, Michel eventually finds his Juliette—though by the time he reaches her, it’s hard to tell whether she is a figment of his imagination—only to lose her again.

Julietta is many things: an example of surrealism in music, a compelling psychodrama that is both humorous and moving and a prescient critique of the logics of fascism. Two years after its premiere in 1938, Martinů would flee the United States after being blacklisted by the Nazis. It has a picaresque plot, one piled with small incidents and encounters with colorful characters, but while the opera may be full of comedic interludes, at its heart are serious questions about the nature of reality, memory and the social structures of power.

Martinů’s score is a marvel; wide-ranging in its textures and timbres, shot through with lyricism, and with a delicate balance of wit and sympathy. Julietta’s extended tonal style retains all of the heady plushness of the Romantic while embracing the jagged clarity and twisty juxtapositions of modernism; it’s not folksy in the least, but the accordion theme that recurs throughout introduces a hint of the popular, while an early passage recalls a theme from Rhapsody in Blue. Especially in the hands of conductor Leon Botstein, the music is endlessly varied; from the humorous full-orchestra bombast that attends some of the townspeople to the wistful tune that Juliette sings with a solo piano for accompaniment, Julietta’s musical world is as colorful and surprising as a Dorothea Tanning painting.

As is typical for Summerscape, this opera was presented semi-staged, smoothly directed by Marco Nisticò. John Horzen’s projection and video design was both striking and clever, providing the necessary visual component in crafting this surreal world. A particularly nice touch: the setting for the town first appears as a line drawing, only to be slowly filled in as we meet more and more of the strange townsfolk.

Despite the opera’s length, which ran almost four hours with two intermissions, this was an engaging performance both visually and dramatically. An impressive ensemble cast reappeared in various roles, with especially good turns by Rodell Rosel, whose brash character tenor contrasted nicely with Aaron Blake’s softer edges as Michel, mezzo-soprano Isabelle Kosempa who appeared as a vaguely sinister little boy amongst other roles, mezzo-soprano Krysty Swann as over-dramatic bird seller and glamorous fortune teller and bass-baritone Alfred Walker, who gave an especially sympathetic performance as a blind beggar in the third act.

Blake, who sang the role of Michel at the Carnegie Hall concert performance of Julietta in 2019, returns to it here with great energy. With a buttery, supple tenor sound, he has both the dramatic ability and the vocal stamina for this role; he sounded remarkably fresh, even as the performance approached the four-hour mark, and his final mad scene was especially gripping. As Juliette, Erin Petrocelli had a robust, sweet soprano with a tinge of melancholy to it that grew brighter and more pointed as her character became more frustrating and elusive. Though she showed more signs of fatigue by the end, she was a fine match for Blake.

Both singers were at their best in the opera’s central scene, which pits two realities against one another to disastrous effect. When we first meet Michel, he seems like the fantasist in the couple. After all, he returns to this place in search of a woman he barely knows. But when outmatched by Juliette’s own penchant for fantasy, Michel comes apart. As she gleefully shops the cart of a memory seller, Juliette holds up photographs, a veil and a bracelet, inserting herself and Michel into these mementos, insisting that the two had traveled to Spain and seemingly hallucinating an entire relationship that never took place. When Michel gives her his own love story—hearing her voice, returning to find her—she finds it less interesting than the one for sale, and she flees when he refuses to join her false reminiscing. Distraught beyond logic, he fires a gun after her. We never know if the bullet hit, and when he returns to town, no one remembers Juliette at all.

Martinů’s opera draws a fine line between memory and nostalgia; while memory is untrustworthy, nostalgia is memory untethered from reality, a commodified and free-floating emotion that is ripe for manipulation. A spotless mind is one that is easily written on, easily filled with memories that aren’t yours or perhaps never happened.

As the opera progresses, Michel slowly begins to acquiesce to the false logic of this world, his protests fading in favor of telling his own pretty lies. In the end, he embraces that same false logic, refusing to wake up to a world without Juliette and going mad in the process. As a satire of the nostalgic obsessions of fascism—where the imagined past is both commodified and fetishized while its subjects are condemned to an inefficient eternal present—Julietta could hardly be timelier, both for 1938 and for our current world.

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Under the artistic direction of Will Crutchfield and musical direction of Jakob Lehmann and Elisa Citterio, Teatro Nuovo is a thoroughly learned company—their aim is historical reconstruction, which often means their performances are more musicological than dramatically satisfying. Their program materials, however, are works of art in themselves; the depth of research presented with such lightness makes clear the strength of Teatro Nuovo’s pedagogical project. Their works are semi-staged, performed without costumes; much rests on the caliber of the soloists and the orchestra as well as on the (ironic) novelty of hearing familiar works in long-lost versions. This is sometimes a losing gamble, and one walks away seeing all the merits of the revised scores one is used to hearing. If soloists falter vocally, there is little directorial vision to make up for the gaps.

This season, they presented a double bill: the 1847 version of Verdi’s Macbeth and Bellini’s beloved La Sonnambula of 1831, which here appears both in original keys and on period instruments. The combination of opera seria and semiseria made for a strong display of what Teatro Nuovo does best, even if it also highlights some of the pitfalls of their house style.

Verdi revised his Macbeth nearly twenty years after the opera first premiered, the composer having escaped the most productive—and the most miserable—period of his career that he called “the galleys.” The 1865 version is more dramatically concise, but the music is a mixture of Verdi’s early and mature styles. Therefore, it is fascinating to hear a version where Verdi had not yet become the first name in Shakespeare opera settings, and one where Macbeth had become popular Italian stage.

The 1847 Macbeth has a slightly lighter feel, despite its textual source, and its central couple is tipped slightly more into haplessness than cunning. Macbeth attributes his downfall to his trust in devilish prophesies, a bit of moralizing that anticipates the self-delusions of Rigoletto, albeit without the bitter irony of that opera. Instead of a somewhat cryptic power vacuum, Macbeth talks about himself more and needs more self-dispensed pep talks. Lady Macbeth is less monstrous here; she also appears less frequently, to the opera’s detriment. The third act, essentially a series of monologues for Macbeth with the witches as his audience, drags on too long. Without his queen, Macbeth is simply less interesting, though perhaps a fully staged version could at least give some visual heft to the supposedly terrifying surroundings.

It is fascinating to hear this music, though, if only to become reacquainted with Verdi’s tight, workmanlike early style. As directed by Lehmann, this was also a very satisfying performance. The orchestra played with a crisp vigor, especially as they settled into the evening.

In addition to upgrading to swanky new digs at City Center, Teatro Nuovo has upped the caliber of its soloists this year. Ricardo José Rivera, as the title character, has a staunch yet limber baritone and a good ear for Verdi, able to imbue the antihero with power and vulnerability. Cumhur Görgün as Banco was a fine match for Rivera, similar in power but with a more emotive quality to his fine, robust voice. Together with Martin Luther Clark’s Macduff, Görgün is the moral center of this opera. Clark, whose gleaming tenor is complemented by a beautiful stillness and intention in his physical presence, was another highlight of the show, singing Macduff’s showstopping aria in the fourth act with both command and raw emotion.

But soprano Alexandra Loutsion as Lady Macbeth was the revelation of the evening. She has a vigorous and powerful sound with adequate flexibility to match her strength. Most pleasingly, she retained a warmth even as her character became increasingly out of control. Loutsion is well-suited to the role’s wide-ranging demands, and her captivating presence commands attention. Time sped up whenever she appeared onstage and slowed when she departed.

Macbeth is harder to pull off in Teatro Nuovo’s performance style because it cries out for atmosphere. The witches need to be weird, the castle needs to be haunted and the various ghostly scenes need to be scary—these things are hard to pull off in a semi-staged format. There were moments of awkwardness, to be sure, and some unintentionally humorous moments, but overall, it was a more polished performance than I’ve ever seen from Teatro Nuovo. La Sonnambula worked best in TN’s performance style, in part because its humor is intentional and in part because the actors were given more to do.

Sonnambula saw the chorus in brightly colored formal wear, as if all of them were going to an Easter parade. All in all, they made for a much more entertaining village in this opera than the stiff and sore collection of courtiers and unhappy citizens they played in Macbeth. The town in Sonnambula (to use a cliché from film criticism) is a character in and of itself, driving the drama and injecting a welcome dose of humor and charm that worked well even in semi-staged format.

Citterio’s musical direction brought out much of what makes Bellini so beloved by fans, even if, as the program insists, critics took longer to come around. The music bubbles with clarity and joy, especially in the numerous chorus scenes, and the trumpet duet that starts off the second act is nothing short of delightful.

Tenor Christopher Bozeka has a bright, appealing sound as Elvino as well as a clever comedic instinct that made him lovable even in his character’s folly. Bozeka seems straight out of the golden age: relentlessly forward and wonderfully ostentatious. He struggled to ascend to high notes, though, which marred his otherwise smooth performance as the befuddled and jealous lover. As Elvino’s rival and long-lost Count Rodolfo, Owen Phillipson navigated the switchbacks of this uneven character nicely. He has a dry, brisk bass-baritone that will likely flesh out with time. Abigail Lysinger, as town-favorite Amina’s mother Teresa, and Vincent Graña both made meals of small roles, with Lysinger offering a tempered mezzo-soprano that belied her youthful appearance and Graña singing with a surprisingly bright and flexible bass-baritone.

But in Sonnambula, as in Macbeth, the leading ladies ruled the day. Teresa Castillo delivered a sterling performance as Amina and has all the makings of a renowned bel canto heroine, from her graceful coloratura to her warm and plaintive middle voice. Even the role’s rather surprising low notes left her unfazed; this was a near-perfect vocal performance, done with ease and a natural affability that suited Amina’s hometown-hero status as the popular girl who’s so nice that no one can even hate her for being the favorite.

The breakout star, however, was Abigail Raiford as the flirty, scheming Lisa (who finds she can hate Amina, at least for a little while). Her voice is silvery, agile and full of attitude, as is her physical presence. Raiford has all the sass and sharpness in spades for any soubrette role. Despite Amina’s obvious goodness, I couldn’t help but root for her to win the day—not the jealous and fickle Elvino, but the Count, or even better, a ticket out of this adorable town—all a testament to Raiford’s vivacious charm. Teatro Nuovo’s project has always been admirable, but they finally have the talent to make their case along vocal as well as historical lines.

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It’s one of the most famous tales of a bad boyfriend in Western literature—a lonely scholar called Faust makes a deal with the devil and drags everyone else down with him—but in Sara Holdren’s new production for Heartbeat Opera, the focus shifts to the women in Faust’s wake. When we meet the titular character in Gounod’s opera, he’s ready to end it all with a poison cocktail. Loneliness and age have gotten the better of him, and he calls out for the devil. Only this time, the devil actually appears.

Everyone watching knows that Faust is about to make a very bad bargain: one that will lead to an eternity of suffering for him “down below” after a brief period of Satan serving him up above. But as bad as it seems for Dr. Faust, one only has to imagine how much worse it is for his lover Marguerite—seduced, abandoned after giving birth to a possibly demonic child, sentenced to death for drowning that child. If anyone needs a do-over at youth and innocence, it’s her. She didn’t make this deal.

Holdren’s production takes this seriously at least, but also works hard to find the humor in the situation. Gounod’s music is so blushingly romantic that the darkness at the heart of the story is easier to overlook than might be expected—after all, Faust’s deal with the devil causes the deaths of Marguerite, her brother Valentin and his own child. Holdren’s production, which includes new English dialogue, makes this contrast even more jarring. Played on a minimal rotating black-and-white stage by Yichen Zhou and Forest Entsminger, Holdren’s Faust is as much a comedy as a tragedy; it’s full of modern idioms and contemporary references, ad libs and physical jokes—especially for Marguerite’s neighbor Martha, who is played as a horny middle-aged broad, full of dirty jokes and terms of endearment. Two puppeteers (Rowan Magee and Emma Wiseman) provide both the magic and much of the production’s dynamism; particularly fun was the introduction to Mephistopheles, who appears waving a few too many red leather-clad arms from behind Faust’s bookshelf. Elsewhere, they hold flashlights up to characters’ faces, casting them in silhouette.

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Sara Holdren casts Faust as a battle between shadow and light—a motif she also takes literally. This production is full of ideas: shadow puppetry, scrim silhouettes, puppet shows and an ill-advised silent film sequence in the final stretch. Some of them work: Faust and Marguerite’s love duet staged largely via silhouette was an interesting way to ironize the “romance” at the heart of the opera, and the choreography made for a dynamic physical progression, but taken together, the emotional heft of the story gets lost in the shadows. Holdren has a fine eye for the comedic, but this very skill works against her later in the opera, as the stakes feel at first muted and then suddenly, laughably, too high.

The two largest roles in the show were also the most subdued performances. Tenor Orson Van Gay II has a pleasing timbre as Faust, but his voice and presence were simply not sizable enough for the role, causing him to recede even with the cut-down orchestra. Similarly, John Taylor Ward made for a surprisingly low-key Mephistopheles despite looking dashing in his devil’s outfits. His baritone is lighter and sprightlier than most, lending him playfulness without much threat to underscore it.

Other singers fared much better. Rachel Kobernick’s Marguerite had a welcome blend of power and sweetness; her second aria was particularly strong. As the lovelorn bartender Siebel, mezzo AddieRose Brown had a warm and brilliant sound, dripping with pathos. Her doomed love for Marguerite was made more interesting by the choice to keep her in women’s clothes instead of the typical pants role styling. Alex DeSocio, as Marguerite’s possessive brother Valentin, was marvelous, with a rounded, rich baritone perfectly suited to Gounod’s emotional outbursts and the presence to command the space. Mezzo-soprano Eliza Bonet makes for a charming, sassy Martha, but her broad comedy seemed somewhat out of place in this otherwise disastrous tale.

Francisco Ladrón de Guevara’s arrangement is a little bit country (and a little bit rock and roll, for that matter); it cuts down Gounod’s sizeable Romantic orchestra to a tight group of eight, adding mandolin, harmonium and electric bass, and shuffling some of the rhythms to give a jukebox-bar feel. Heartbeat has a reputation for such radical rearrangements and, as usual, their irreverent spirit is admirable. But unlike their re-arrangement of Salome earlier this year—which was crazy in a good way—de Guevara’s cut of Faust never fully jells with Gounod’s sweetness nor with the production itself. Jacob Ashworth (who plays a mean mandolin!) kept tempi throughout that felt ever so slightly sluggish, taking both the comedy and the tension down a notch.

Holdren’s final image is a heaven without men—Marguerite, Siebel and Martha drinking white wine on the front lawn as birds chirp, while Marguerite gazes down at a sleeping baby. It’s a nice ending, one that seeks to recoup the tragedy of this story. After all, the innocent Marguerite suffers the most from Faust’s bargain. Instead of the divine transfiguration that ends most productions, Holdren concludes with a vision of women at peace in what seems to be this world. I share her desire for a different ending, but I longed for a bit more of the sublime.

We learn much of what we know about Antony and Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s eponymous play through something of a non-entity. Enobarbus tells us that “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety.” By the time he says this, we’ve met the queen and formed our own impressions; depending on how you take her, Enobarbus’s description might feel like a confirmation, or it might feel like spin.

Spin—and its darker cousin, propaganda—is everywhere in Elkhanah Pulitzer’s production of John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra, which comes to the Met after its premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2022 with a few cuts to the first half and the addition of ballet from Annie-B Parson. Pulitzer’s draws much of its imagery from 1930s newsreels and fascist propaganda flicks. This is not a production about Hollywood, even if it is set in the era of the city’s golden age, but rather one about another industry that manipulates facts to make people seem like gods.

Adams himself conducts his score, which neatly synthesizes much of what we hear in his other operas; rhythmic propulsion, an excellent grasp of orchestration, and natural dramatic declamation. It’s not a masterpiece, but it is, for the most part, a highly competent contemporary opera, especially in its slimmed-down form. Cleopatra (Julia Bullock) and Antony (Gerald Finley) are introduced nearly in flagrante. These are public personalities, and sex is equally public for them. Why keep their hands to themselves?  Pulitzer’s blocking is often highly dynamic and physical; characters are unafraid to grab, shove, and spin one another off-kilter. All the leaders are varying degrees of histrionic; Antony is impulsive and violent; Caesar is snippy and insecure; Cleopatra seems the most rational at first, but devolves into petty screams and slaps.

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Pulitzer’s setting produces many worthwhile resonances. Ancient Rome is full of protofascist mythology, much of which was taken up in the twentieth century. Caesar is styled like Mussolini, and Antony and Cleopatra feel a little like Edward VIII and Wallace Simpson, another couple where desire led to abdication of responsibility and media frenzy. Everywhere, people are being photographed and filmed as they enter and leave the halls of power. Parson’s choreography foretells disaster around the edges of the scenes, as dancers march and goose-step with sinister grace. The stakes are very high for Antony and Cleopatra’s love affair, and they only partly know it.

Mimi Lien’s hulking black set is seen through a giant camera lens, its aperture expanding and contracting to reveal various interiors from Alexandria, Rome, and Athens with tantalizing glimpses of water backstage. It’s an effective device, unlike the many projections of Julia Bullock’s face. Another time, it reveals Cleopatra in a film set drenched in gold lamé, as if participating in the 1930s craze for herself. Constance Hoffman’s costumes are at once sleek and resplendent, with a color palette ranging from neutral sands and beiges to metallic shimmers to rich jewel tones. This is a very good-looking production, one sure to photograph well.

The opera comes to life most fully during the face-off between Antony and rival Caesar. Caesar is powerful but has less commanding presence than his older counterpart; Antony broods in his chair like a lion while Caesar skitters around the office in a tizzy of outrage. Here, Adams’s music is marvelously intense, foretelling the eventual reversal of the men’s power, the tuba that accompanies Caesar emerging more solidly than the cimbalom that tells of Antony’s indecisiveness.

Paul Appleby was consistently excellent as Caesar, with a crisp, staunch tenor that cut like a dagger. Gerald Finley also had a fine night, after a bit of a rocky start, moving from an imposing scratchy baritone to something sweeter and softer by the second act. Jarrett Ott and Taylor Raven, making debuts as Agrippa and Cleopatra’s servant Charmian, respectively, each make positive impressions; Ott has a gripping, lucid baritone, while Raven possesses a potent contralto. Alfred Walker carries the weight of Shakespeare’s monologues as Enobarbus with a surprisingly subtle edge to his bass-baritone.

As a woman whose power is more perceived than felt, Julia Bullock is a dramatic powerhouse. She moves with a sizzling physical intensity, whether she is seducing, scrapping or breaking down in a fit of histrionics, and has a rich middle voice. But strained high notes meant that this infinitely varied queen did not have the vocal color to match her presence, especially as fatigue overtook her in the second act.

The first half finds a great deal of musical and dramatic tension in characters who are immobilized by their conflicting desires. Adams’s score, with its cimbalom, celesta and doubled-harp, thrums and jangles with restless torque, interspersed with nervous tenderness for poor Octavia (Elizabeth DeShong, who had something of a slow burn vocally but eventually acquired a beautiful richness).

The second half is simply immobile, a fault which lies more with the opera’s musical structure than with Pulitzer’s production. The arias for Enobarbus, Caesar, Antony and finally, Cleopatra herself are dramatically static, not least for coming one after another with little variety, and often are blocked without much motion. Caesar’s speech, which recalled mostly the balcony scene in Evita, hemmed Appleby into a box that, ironically, made him sound muffled from within its walls. And while Pulitzer’s images and use of color remain striking—Antony’s final aria sees him amongst projected clouds, while Cleopatra returns to die under a massive, eclipsing moon—they feel unmoored from the visual style of the rest of the opera.

The camera angle disappears entirely, leaving what should have been just the dramatic center of the opera: the love story between these two vain and deluded people. But here Adams gets in his own way, as the music becomes most predictable just as the opera should be reaching its emotional peak. Cleopatra’s final scenes are strangely muted for this larger-than-life figure; somehow, it feels like we know less about her, even as she finally tells us who she is.

It’s a strange irony in Adams’ book (and in Shakespeare’s) that Cleopatra is more interesting in description than in actuality. But then again, so is Antony, whom everyone describes inaccurately. Cleopatra herself is the worst offender, but Caesar’s eulogy is equally bizarre in its attempts to bury Antony with praise. Gentle? Noble? Brilliant? We see nothing of it, only a man who lashes out at his lover when he fails, reducing her from a multi-faceted creature to the flat epithet, “Egypt.” He’s rewritten the narrative. At its sharpest, Pulitzer’s production recognizes that this opera is about interpersonal propaganda as much as political propaganda. Love and death make us into all spin doctors.

How old is Salome when she dances for Herod and the head of John the Baptist? The Bible is ambiguous. In Aubrey Beardsley’s famous illustrations, she seems to shapeshift: at times, she looks young and androgynous, in other instances, she seems almost wizened, a crone older than Jochanaan. Is she 8 or 12 or 16 or 25? A young woman coming into a newfound sexual power, or a child who has had sexuality forced upon her from the time she could walk? In Claus Guth’s stellar new production of Salome, she is all of these ages and none.

Staged in deepest black and dingy white, Guth’s production is unapologetic in its symbolism. It opens on a girl playing with a doll in relative silence. She breaks off its arms moments before that famous clarinet solo announces the beginning of the opera proper. There’s a ram-headed statue in the corner of the cavernous black palace hall; animal-masked men menace a nude female dancer, her face also covered with a cat mask. When Salome descends into the cistern, a white-faced Jochanaan sits in one corner. In the other is a rocking horse along with other nursery toys. The same little girl from the prologue sits partly shaded from view. Phallic imagery (ram’s horns, spears, knives, play-swords) and dolls are everywhere. Salome herself is dressed like a doll. Her clothes are those of a very young girl, hung uneasily on a grown woman’s body.

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For Guth, Salome is first and foremost a story about sexual trauma: how it breaks apart a person, upends her agency, and warps her desires. This reading results in an intelligently directed and viciously watchable production by Guth and choreographer Sommer Ulrickson. Like all good Salomes, it’s deeply nasty. This opera is decadent, rancid, and marvelous, from its simile-laden libretto to its luscious score. Unlike many Salomes, Guth’s production has something to say about trauma.

With four planned productions of this story (not all by Strauss) in New York this year, we are living in the age of Salome. Sometimes such programming synchronicities just happen (sometimes they are even intentional), but I think this confluence of Salomes bespeaks a reckoning with opera’s past at the exact moment that women reckon with our present social and political reality. Earlier this year, Elizabeth Dinkova’s production for Heartbeat Opera insisted on inverting the gaze back onto the men, stripping Herod and Jochanaan both. It also seems that the rot cannot be removed; sometimes the whole family tree must be burned down. Guth’s production has very different aims. Salome is sadder here, her protests at Herod’s attempted seductions less bratty and more truly defiant. Salome is surprisingly sympathetic, even when she demands Jochanaan’s head. Of all things, we are rooting for her.

We’re also living in the age of Elza van den Heever, whom I suspect is the most outstanding Strauss soprano of her generation. Van den Heever was so searingly good as the Empress in the Met’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (where she got to play a much less complicated heroine) that it’s almost difficult to envision her as someone so young and so relentlessly screwed-up as Salome. Then she opens her mouth and out pour rivers of controlled, sparkling, and nuanced sound. Van den Heever’s Salome is anything but shrill; instead, the singer leverages her natural warmth to imbue Salome with a pitiable sensitivity, even as she swings wildly between aggressor and victim.

Her co-stars aren’t too shabby either, particularly Peter Mattei as Jochanaan and Piotr Buszewski’s Narraboth. Mattei, covered in white body paint with painful-looking skinned knees, seemed equally fascinated with Van den Heever’s princess as she was with him. His voice is powerful and a bit on the dry side, as if Jochanaan had been crying out in the wilderness for a long time. Buszewski brought a delectable tenor sound as the desperate captain who, in this production, impales himself on Salome’s spear (she barely notices). Mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, decked out in a spectacularly hideous orange dress and wig, offers a Herodias who hides in fashion, while tenor Gerhard Siegel was a wonderfully nasal and histrionic Herod. All had to contend with Strauss’s colossal score, here played with brassy vigor by the orchestra and conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

During the Dance of the Seven Veils, Guth and Ulrickson cash in all their symbolic checks. Salome “reveals” herself by unveiling six past versions of herself; first a child of only three or four, followed by girls of growing ages and heights. They each “dance” with a ram-headed double of Herod, who at first menaces and then openly abuses them, until finally, the current version comes to stab Herod’s doppelgänger as her stepfather watches in horror and arousal. The implications couldn’t be clearer; Herod has been raping her for years.

This is a shocking production not for its depravity, but for its honesty. It slices clean through the knot of euphemisms and the piling-up similes of the opera’s libretto, and—ironically, like the anti-poetic and thoroughly evil Herodias—insists on calling the moon the moon. What Herod has done to Salome, under the eye of her own selfish and ineffectual mother, has trapped her with her past selves and torpedoed her development. She’s unable to be the age she really is, having been simultaneously infantilized and forced into the adult world. The Dance is Salome’s way of witnessing her own trauma, of showing Herod back to himself. He doesn’t get it, but we do.

Some tableaux are truly stomach-flipping for their vile brilliance: Salome rubbing her face on the still-bleeding neck of a decapitated Jochanaan, Salome singing to the head as it rests on the shoulders of one of her younger doppelgängers, Salome resting her head in the space where Jochanaan’s should be. Guth’s production is not perfect. At times, its meanings are scattered, and it gets bogged down in symbolism. The projections are largely unnecessary, with one exception: when Herod worries about the wind, the projections make the whole stage shiver. A troupe of animal-masked dancers that haunted the background of many scenes felt overused after the first.

But the final cistern scene, in which Salome finally kisses the head, is a masterstroke. She is alone with the head yet still surrounded by all the versions of herself. The cistern suggests that Salome has never left this nursery-prison. We fear she might never leave it. But this production’s final moments make a bolder and better choice. Just as Herod calls for Salome’s death, the tetrarch himself collapses. As the black palace rooms recede, a blood-daubed Salome rises through the floor, coming face to face with the moon. She leaves her six other selves on the stairs and walks off into the night, Herod dead in her wake. The lights come down, catching her in freeze-frame. It’s an ambiguous ending, but it’s also a triumph. So is this production.

If Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum stepped out of The Threepenny Opera—Die Dreigroschenoper for the Herkunftssprechers—and into our world, he would probably be some kind of social media charity consultant. For a fee (and percentage), he can tell you what spin to put on your GoFundMe pleas to cover your medical bills. Peachum would know, as he does in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s early masterpiece, that sympathy in an attention economy is easily lost. These days, it takes an LLC just to beg for your bread.

Die Dreigroschenoper was John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera for Berlin in the late 1920s. It’s a testament to how little things have fundamentally changed that the Dreigroschenoper for New York in the late 2020s is still just The Threepenny Opera. Looking down the barrel of a possible recession and an ever-widening wealth gap, the parallels are all too easy to see. Luckily, Barrie Kosky’s Berliner Ensemble production—at BAM for a limited run of performances—doesn’t put too fine a point on these resonances, instead delivering a slick, glam and very funny show in a contemporary-cum-Weimar setting. Elaborate scaffolding takes up almost the entirety of the stage, with glittery black tinsel both in front and behind. The set recalls Art Deco wallpaper: stairs and mazes create rigid, geometric forms that you get stuck in and have to weasel out of. It calls for clambering, slithering and all-around athletic derring-do from the cast, especially its central character, the anti-hero arch-criminal Macheath.

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Berliner Ensemble was founded by Brecht himself and his wife, Helene Weigel, who became the company’s artistic director, and they have all the bonafides to revive one of Brecht’s most popular works: a long history with the piece, a strong cast and some excellent musicians. Weill’s sleaze-classical-dancehall score sounded remarkably lucid under Adam Benzwi’s direction, highlighting the numerous musical jokes from the fake arias to the fake Bach chorales. The entire performance was a clarified cocktail that went down with ease. We open with the most famous tune, “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” (“Mack the Knife”), here sung by a character called “The Moon over Soho,” in a cute take on the traditional street-singer and glitter-capped Josefin Platt’s smoky, consonant-chewing delivery established the vocal mood.

Die Dreigroschenoper is an opera where the singing—the quality thereof, I mean, not the fact of the songs—doesn’t matter in the least. What does matter is the flair with which the lines are delivered and the individuality and expressiveness of the actors’ voices. On that front, this cast mostly exceeded the task, with sharply drawn comedic characterizations and some rather excellent performances.

After a wonderful introduction to Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum (Tilo Nest, razor-sharp in a double-breasted suit) and the opera’s themes—poverty, cynicism, the threadbare morality of the upper classes—we finally meet Macheath, whose wedding to Polly Peachum (Maeve Metelka, gleeful and game) incites the interpersonal conflict of the whole show.

As Macheath, Gabriel Schneider is lithe and wiry, with a violent poise and sleazy showmanship that makes him riveting. He has an acrobat’s command of his body, able to create shapes, and a nice voice, to boot. The beginning of the second act felt longer for his absence. Metelka’s Polly is a good match for him—she sold “Seeräuber Jenny” with aplomb—but her role simply has less flair after the fireworks-laden numbers of the first act.

Apart from Schneider, who was in a class of his own, the other best-in-show may have to go to Kathrin Wehlisch, in drag as Tiger Brown, a corrupt police chief and former war buddy of Macheath’s. From Wehlisch’s splayfooted walk to her raspy harrumphs to her penciled-in mustache, she was a master of physical comedy. The final bit, where she attempts to feed Mackie his final meal of flaccid asparagus, delivered on a creaky cart, was a tasty morsel of comic gold.

Constanze Becker’s Celia Peachum was another valuable player; she was sultry, cruel and entertainingly world-weary, her long face and black-rimmed eyes like a Modigliani painting come to life as a dominatrix. Her scenes with Tilo Nest, including a tongue-waggling bit straight out of Rocky Horror Picture Show, were tiny triumphs. Bettina Hoppe, as Macheath’s other former lover and prostitute Ginny-Jenny, had a welcome soulfulness–her character is the only one who experiences anything like moral conflict–but her Salomonsong required either a stronger voice or a more creative staging from Kosky.

Laura Balzer’s Lucy Brown was the most outré, replete with shrieks, growls and chitters and a neon outfit that made her seem like a demented Furby or a psychotic sentient gumball machine. The performance was thoroughly amusing until it became overly broad.

Kosky has a sharp eye as a director, especially when working on the scaffolding. Without it, the direction lost a bit of focus. Too many numbers were simply parked and barked, like Ginny-Jenny’s and Lucy’s in Act II. Despite a dragging second act, the final scenes covering Mackie’s execution were both funny and poignant, giving Schneider one more chance to show off his vast emotive and comedic skill set. But lest you feel too much for the lovable rascal, Kosky brings down an illuminated sign reading “LOVE ME” in a pitch-perfect moment that catapults the opera into the age of millennial faux-joking desperation and refuses any emotion that isn’t at least self-aware in its theatricality.

Brecht and Weill draw from an unending (and earned) well of cynicism only to arrive at strange sympathy, one where manipulators and the manipulated know what’s going on. They certainly knew that the theater is not life—the fake-out ending says so—but survival often requires theater. After all, even an artfully ironic plea for help still expresses a sincere need.

New York parents, more than anyone else, should be freaked out by The Turn of the Screw. Why? When childcare in New York City costs, on average, around fifteen thousand dollars a year and most of the people doing that labor make, on average, around ten dollars an hour, things are bound to get tense. But Benjamin Britten’s opera about child care and the weight of unspeakable trauma is tense from its first moment.

The man we meet has two children in his “care”—not that he actually cares about them. He regards them as an annoyance and has hired a staff to raise them. The girl is the Governess, but this is 2025, so she’s a nanny. She’s a college kid, maybe, or a very recent graduate, dressed in half-styled Gen-Z clothing: wide-leg jeans, Chucks, a big button-down with a sweater vest and matchy-clashy tie. Just young enough and broke enough, in other words, to agree to an obviously shady deal: care for the two children of an absent uncle and never, ever write to him or speak to anyone about the job. She’s enthusiastic and capable but utterly unprepared for what awaits her at the beautiful manor house that will be her home. The children’s uncle (Jack Hicks) is styled as the devil himself: black suit with red accents, sunglasses, menace. The bargain is bad from the beginning, and it only gets worse.

A raised catwalk stage surrounds the orchestra (here conducted simply but effectively by Zachary Schwartzman) creating a square. Birnbaum’s use of space, as always, is strong; this production is at its best when things happen slightly outside the audience’s view. Actors scuttle and appear suddenly hanging from the walls, or action is partially blocked by the orchestra. Dozens of black trash bags stashed beneath the runway-style stage serve as reminders of this family’s baggage, all the trauma that they refuse to verbalize. Actors dump them out to find stuffed animals, dead leaves and the clothing of dead employees covered in either dirt or blood.

Birnbaum is unafraid to choreograph movements down to the measure. It makes her a compelling director, especially for this piece where the Governess finds herself caught in a dance where she neither knows nor likes the tune. The disturbing chorus of “Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son” in Act One is somehow even more so when staged with actors moving robotically in VR headsets.

Birnbaum is working with all adults in this production, which makes for surprising dynamics between the characters. Miles, approaching puberty but sung by a countertenor to indicate an unbroken voice, towers over the Governess. Flora’s tantrums are more frightening when she’s about the same size as her caretaker. Countertenor Felix Aurelius was a strong choice for Miles. His voice is a silvery soprano that imbued Miles with a tender sadness rather than the subtle malignancy I’ve seen and heard in other productions. Aurelius also blended nicely with the promising Kerrigan Bigelow as Flora.

The opera does work better with children, but this casting does afford Birnbaum certain opportunities that would be inappropriate or downright unethical with child actors. She can make the latent sexual themes more explicit. When Mrs. Grose (Kayla Stein) kisses the Governess, it feels like a proposition because it is one. Their uneasy solidarity took on a new dimension; these women are allies, but are they themselves at risk of replicating the Quint-Jessell affair? The ghosts of Miss Jessell and Peter Quint have a mild sex scene, while Quint’s sexual interest in Miles is more overt but also somewhat less nauseating, at least until you remember that Miles is supposed to be about twelve.

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On the side of evil, Peter Quint was played by an attention-grabbing Colin Aikins, clad in a rather chic outfit of a gauzy see-through top and combat pants that made him a queasily attractive predator. He is a very fine actor, with presence and sizzling physical energy, and his Quint was more than sufficiently terrifying. Soprano Page Michels’ Miss Jessell felt out of place despite singing well throughout. Her styling—a swishy black caftan with ample cleavage and bare feet—was the biggest visual misstep, both too mature and too sexy, and her character is less nuanced and less compelling than Quint’s.

As for the good characters? Natasha Isabella Gesto had an astonishingly warm and mature sound as the Governess and the right mix of naïveté and precocious authority to remind us all just how young this woman is. She still reads Teen Vogue, eats Twizzlers and wears a “Slay the Patriarchy” t-shirt; she can’t be much more than twenty-two (though to be clear, Twizzlers have no age limit). Kayla Stein was surprisingly sympathetic as Mrs. Grose and had a powerful, rich soprano.

This production reminds us more clearly that The Turn of the Screw is an opera about the class dynamics of childcare, a job that almost always falls to underpaid women. Nannies and housekeepers may get to stay in their charges’ Hamptons mansions and may even be hailed as “members of the family,” but they are always employees. They’re there at the discretion of the parents and the children and can be dismissed at any time. The potential for exploitation is ever-present for nearly everyone involved, from children to carers to parents, and the work is difficult. Some of the most affecting moments in Birnbaum’s production were when we see Mrs. Grose and the Governess doing the daily labor of childcare—zipping wriggly kids into jackets, watching them play with expensive toys that surely cost exponentially more than the women’s hourly salaries and picking up after them.

By the end, only the Governess is left with a dead child and her life in tatters. She cleans up Miles, too, folding his corpse into the bag. While the trash bag conceit was effective in the first half, by the end of the second, it tipped into heavy-handedness. The final image of the Governess wrapping Miles’s body in the black plastic, while striking, made its final point by selling out her character, who throughout seemed to care for the boy sincerely. The Turn of the Screw is about the unspoken; the Hefty bags spoke too loudly. But Birnbaum’s point stands: in the twisted dynamics of family secrets, it’s the women and servants who have to deal with the trash.

In Bordeaux in 1887, New Orleans-born composer Edmond Dédé finished an opera called Morgiane and, perhaps unknowingly, made history. His magnum opus is the oldest grand opera and the first known opera by a Black American composer. Sometime after Dédé set down his pen, the over-500-page manuscript for Morgiane disappeared for over a century, reappearing in Harvard’s library in 2011. Almost no one had heard it until last week.

Morgiane is the product of painstaking reconstruction from Dédé’s manuscript through a collaboration by two opera companies, Opera Lafayette and Opera Créole. Getting this opera into performable shape after it languished in archives for over a century was no mean feat; it required skill, money and time. That’s why the work of music librarians, musicologists and projects like Opera Lafayette and Opera Créole are so essential in rediscovering lost works and getting them from page to stage. Here, all this labor yielded manifold returns. Morgiane is historically significant, musically viable and worthy of a full staging.

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In this version, a team of over 100 scholars, editors and engravers completed Dédé’s orchestration and prepared a modern edition. In this concert version, the material is cut down to a tidy, engaging two hours, excising the ballets that were the mainstays of 19th-century French opera. The libretto by Louis Brunet adapts material from “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves.” Amine, daughter of Morgiane and adoring stepfather Hagi Hassan, marries her beloved Ali in the first scene. Their happiness is threatened, however, first by her mother’s revelation that Hagi Hassan is not, in fact, her biological father. Morgiane fled an abusive husband soon after Amine was born but won’t reveal his name. Before the family can process this bombshell, a servant of the Sultan kidnaps Amine for his king, who wants to marry her. Hassan, Ali, and Morgiane band together to get Amine back, entering into the Sultan’s court in disguise. The family faces the Sultan’s wrath but is saved from death when Morgiane reveals that Amine’s father is, in fact, the Sultan, who promptly drops his amorous suit along with all charges against his former Sultana’s family.

The resolution is rushed and a bit confusing, but no more so than most 19th-century opera plots. At its heart, the story is about a family wanting to stay together in the face of forced separation. While Dedé, a free man of color, wrote this opera while living in France, there’s something especially poignant about a fantasy of families who insist on staying together when one recalls the history of familial separations and alternative forms of kinship that mark the history of slavery in the United States. Dédé, who had himself left his home and family and whose lifetime was bisected by the American Civil War, may well have had such ideas in mind when he chose this story. But the opera is certainly not about these issues. Instead, it is fairly lighthearted for all its tragic inciting incidents, and its Persian setting fits into the larger trend of 19th-century Orientalism.

Dédé’s score is always pleasing and occasionally even thrilling, displaying a mix of period styles from both sides of the Atlantic. There are moments that recall Donizetti and early Verdi, some overtures tinged with Tchaikovsky-esque grace, some brass parts that sound firmly American, and even a few Caribbean influences in the rhythms. But Dédé does have a sound all his own, one defined by his heavy use of winds and brass, which gives the whole orchestral part an almost voice-like quality, and by his contrastingly light, tuneful melodies. Dédé also writes well and generously for the voice; every character gets at least two arias. The fourth act, which features an achingly lovely a cappella quartet as the family resigns itself to execution and a whopping, showstopping aria for Morgiane herself, had the finest music of all, beginning with an unexpected small ensemble for winds that felt almost Baroque in its tightly woven melodies.

Opera Lafayette’s concert production was elevated by a strong cast, especially Mary Elizabeth Williams in the title role. Williams is a compelling performer with a honeyed, indulgent sound and magnetic presence that made Morgiane both sympathetic and staunch. Another standout was fiery bass-baritone Jonathan Woody as the Sultan’s Behar, who has a unique brightness to his sound and considerable propulsive power that made his every entrance into a shot of adrenaline. Soprano Nicole Cabell, as Amine, had a flexible, savvy sound and navigated the coloratura sections with enviable control. Chauncey Packer’s powerful, metallic tenor as Ali sliced through the thick orchestration with ease. Joshua Conyers was tender as loving stepdad Hagi Hassan, with a baritone that acquired more warmth as the evening progressed. Kenneth Kellogg did not enter until the second half but had a steely, insistent bass-baritone as the Sultan.

Neither this opera nor this performance was perfect. At times Dédé’s phrases can be overly symmetrical, and the near-constant doubling of vocal and instrumental parts (especially for the Hagi Hassan character) meant that the orchestra frequently drowned out the singers. There were moments when the Opera Lafayette orchestra sounded a bit muddy or where the brass and winds had a slightly off-kilter tuning. But perfection is not required for a work to enter the repertoire. Opera Lafayette and Opera Créole have provided proof of their concept and then some. This opera has plenty to captivate; Morgiane should be here to stay.

Almost everyone in Salome wants something they shouldn’t. A king desires his stepdaughter, a servant desires a princess and a princess desires a prisoner with equal parts fascination and repulsion. We, too, look upon them all with horror and a shameful allure, seduced as much by Strauss’s score as by Salome herself. It is a nasty piece of work but a depiction of desires too powerful to be contained.

Strauss’s opera, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s shocking play, is about desire and depravity, but even more so, it’s about the gaze. The first scene, with Narraboth (here sung by a sterling-voiced David Morgans) and the page, establishes the central question. What does the desiring gaze do to the object of its fascination? The moon is a beautiful princess. No, she’s a dead woman. Salome’s interest in Jokanaan expands on it. Jokanaan’s eyes are like clusters of grapes. No, they’re like writhing vipers. Everyone speaks in similes that transform their objects. This transformation can be as beautiful as it is violent, imposing a new shape on another person.

By the end of Heartbeat Opera’s sly, brilliant new production by Elizabeth Dinkova, it’s very clear that everyone in Salome’s horrifying incestuous family is responsible. If she’s a monster, it’s because they looked upon her and made her into one.

Salomé is a challenge for a small opera company for both practical and political reasons. The practical: how to slim down a huge Strauss orchestra to fit in a small theater. The political: what to do with the opera’s centerpiece and centerfold, the Dance of the Seven Veils, which leaves Salome nude before Herod and us all. Heartbeat, never ones to play it straight, has found ingenious solutions to both.

For the former, music director Dan Schlosberg (perhaps the wittiest arranger of his generation) has rescored the opera for eight clarinets, most doubling or tripling on other wind instruments and a percussion team that includes both chimes and bells and drumset. It’s crazy—crazy like Aubrey Beardsley, crazy like Oscar Wilde—and it works, especially as conducted by Jacob Ashworth. For the latter, Dinkova has made the Dance of the Seven Veils an act of defiance. Here Salome doesn’t strip; Herod does. And from then on, everyone dances to the princess’s macabre tune.

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All of this brings me to the biggest challenge of all: who should play Salome, and how? Summer Hassan was an excellent choice, especially with Dinkova’s exciting take on the material. Here, Salome is played young, her styling perfectly stomach-churning. Dressed in a corset top and a flouncy pink tutu, she could be anywhere from six to sixteen. She often hides under tables or crawls on all fours like a dog. Salome is a woman disguised as a girl—and a girl whose womanhood is forced onto her by the lusts of others. Hassan was by turns bratty and beguiling, her voice voluptuous and vicious. Her final scene with the (very realistic) severed head was magnificently disgusting. At one point, she pushes her fingers into its bloodied mouth in a moment more shocking and visceral than the kiss we all know is coming. Hassan herself seemed close to vomiting.

Her fascination with Jokanaan, who appears in grubby briefs and a torn polo shirt with eyes red and swollen, feels more like a response to her horrendous family circumstances; tired of being looked at by men, she fixates on a man who is powerless to stop her gaze. When he looks back, with hatred tinged by lust, she crumbles. Nathaniel Sullivan, as Jokanaan, has a healthy, impassioned sound (it helps that his character has the loveliest music that Strauss can muster). His Jokanaan is tempted by the princess against his will and judgment. He only narrowly resists her and welcomes the headman as his punishment.

Herod doesn’t try to resist Salome and is completely undone by his desire for her. Sung in a marvelous and utterly vanity-free performance by baritone Patrick Cook, this king is even more effete and mewling than ever before. Herod here is a pathetic pedophile, humorous in his cartoonish leering and indecisive weakness. Cook is revolting, and he’s impossible to look away from. His wife, Herodias, an elegant and supple-voiced Manna K. Jones, stands in contrast to her husband; she’s the only character who can see things clearly. To her, the moon is just the moon, Jokanaan is just a dangerous political prisoner who should be removed. But she is canny enough to know how powerful the force of the desiring gaze can be. She may not like how Herod leers at her child, but she will use it to her advantage.

Dinkova is attuned to the operations of the gaze in the text and in the opera house. Narraboth surveils everyone, especially Salome, on security cameras that show us spaces beyond the opera house. Jokanaan’s prison is a glass box in the center of the stage. We can see right through it to his painfully bare legs, and his beheading is only hidden by a blanket. The moments before his execution, where he nods assent to Jeremy Harr’s servant-cum-executioner, were among the most affecting.

Dinkova also makes a big point by ensuring that the audience sees more of the male body than the female one. Herodias is covered from head to foot in yellow satin, Salome in pink tulle with bike shorts underneath. Jokanaan is dressed in grubby briefs and a torn polo shirt, which he removes to wash himself. Herod sings the latter half of the opera in his underwear.

During the Dance of the Seven Veils, all the characters end up inside Jokanaan’s prison cell, where we see them writhe in an orgy behind glass and under the camera’s unblinking gaze. In the end, the page (an affecting and increasingly outraged Melina Jaheris) shoots the whole family, not just Salome. They’re all complicit. After all, the gaze requires more than one person, the viewer and the viewed.

Heartbeat’s productions of canonical works are required viewing for a reason. Their relentless innovation and light-handed flexibility with the operatic canon mean that they can take their texts even more seriously than a traditional production. By letting these operas change, they grant these pieces a different kind of power and allow them truly modern force. Dinkova dares us all to objectify Salome; just try it, and you’ll end up exposed yourself.

Working with the texts of an exciting, exacting poet and a singer-muse who has inspired almost all of his operatic work, composer Michael Hersch probes the infinite distance at the heart of relationships. Two people embrace, their hands and bodies covered in white clay slip. They smear each other with streaks of the material, temporarily freezing their forms before motion causes the clay to crackle. It’s a striking image—a couple who try to fix one another into objects, only to find that they cannot. This is Michael Hersch’s opera and we, each, a narrative constructed from the poetry of Shane McCrae that follows the slow, agonizing process of a relationship breaking down and the occasionally beautiful patterns that can form in the cracks.

I spoke to Hersch and McCrae in the lead-up to the opera’s New York premiere at National Sawdust. McCrae found Hersch’s work through a review over a decade ago and was attracted to the characterization of Hersch’s symphonies as “doomy and gloomy.” McCrae “wanted music to sound, generally speaking, unhappy and angry,” and Hersch’s pieces fit the bill. McCrae wrote Hersch a fan letter, and they started a correspondence, but it wasn’t until years later that Hersch asked to collaborate on an opera.

The libretto itself has something of a unique story. Unlike many operas, which involve considerable direct collaboration between librettist and composer, here Hersch was working with existing material while also commissioning more. Almost two-thirds of the libretto comes from already published work by McCrae, with the remaining material written for the opera at Hersch’s request. This ceding of creative control means that and we, each is almost a chimera of Hersch and McCrae; not necessarily a homogenous collaboration, but McCrae’s words refracted through Hersch’s sensibility, then reframed yet again by McCrae.

What results is a piece that is both fragmentary and deeply lyrical, full of McCrae’s rich language. The imagery is often startlingly visceral, even violent, but as McCrae tells Observer, it is not the violence itself that is of interest. “Violence in art can function as a preliminary move; it kind of breaks the reader or viewer or listener complacency in such a way that you can then seed other, more interesting thoughts.” In and we, each, these moments function to get at the fraught process of knowing another person, the pain and distance that can seep into relationships almost without the lovers knowing they’re there.

Hersch has written five operas, all but one explicitly for soprano Ah Young Hong, who has been his muse and collaborator for over a decade. Casting Hong for his first opera, a lengthy, virtuosic monodrama entitled On the Threshold of Winter, was something of a risk. The soprano had no experience with contemporary music, and Hersch’s work is demanding, both physically and dramatically. But Hersch says that Hong’s artistry blew him away; he was so impressed with her performance that all of his subsequent operas were written for her. Through Hersch’s work, she’s embodied both Medea and Poppea, women of mythic reputation who are defined and damned, in one way or another, by their relationships. Here Hong and baritone Jesse Blumberg are characters without names; they exist only in the context of one another.

Early in the opera, one member of the couple sings, “I write you to make a wound write back.” It’s a line that easily applies to a breakup, but it wasn’t written with this scenario in mind. McCrae wrote it in a poem about the death of his grandmother. There, he considers the whole process of addressing the dead, which he describes as “writing to get an understanding of yourself”—a way to address the “particular woundedness” that comes with our feelings about people who are absent. In and we, each, this line changes context, now speaking to the difficulty of relationships more generally, the infinite distance and complex projections that separate us even from the people with whom we are the most deeply intertwined. Closing that gap is the work of any relationship, a process McCrae describes as moving from a model of acquisitiveness, a “peace according to which what one wants is acceptable to another person,” to one where each person can be seen in their “fullness.” “The work,” as he puts it, “is recognizing the other without putting yourself between your vision of the other and the other themselves.” and we, each is about the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility, of succeeding in this endeavor, of truly seeing one another with clarity and without looking away.

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Opera is particularly able to speak to that difficulty, McCrae and Hersch tell me in very different ways. One of the beautiful opportunities that opera presents, Hersch says, “is that it allows composers—it allows me—to escape myself; it allows a different kind of projection of the self outwards. That illusion allows for a kind of escape from one’s demons.” Hersch tells me that he “lives in a world of hearing,” but opera is the space where the visual, the bodily, the relational becomes as central as sound. McCrae and I get to this question circuitously. I asked him about epics and relationships, not only because of scattered references to The Aeneid that haunt and we, each, but because McCrae’s upcoming book is a riff on Dante’s Inferno. What did he think of this connection, particularly with regard to opera? For McCrae, epic poetry and performance are inherently relational. They aren’t just about human relationships; they arise “out of a communal performance”; they “imply a listening” that also implies someone there to listen. Opera, a genre that in its early history frequently depicted epics, works in a similar way. “I think opera can’t help but be better tuned to what an epic does,” McCrae says, because opera also is written with communal performance in mind.

The narrative of and, we each recalls for me another epic scene—the meeting of Odysseus and Penelope at the end of Homer’s Odyssey, where the long-separated lovers tentatively, apprehensively try to make sense of one another, to slice through the haze of absence and fear and see what still lies between them. The encounter, full of desire and terror, ends happily enough for those mythic lovers. But the modern ones in and we, each are somehow too close together and too far apart to reach one another. They aren’t heroes; moments of clarity are fleeting or arrive incomplete. The Odyssey isn’t just an archetypical journey. It also asks an epic relational question: can we ever really know anyone, even those we love the most? The couple in and, we each asks that, too, but adds to it another, perhaps more frightening question: what happens when we know someone too well, as well as not knowing them at all? Can we keep loving them?

Hersch is a composer who is comfortable with possible impossibility. He recognizes that sometimes he writes music that might not be performed, either soon or ever, because of its difficulty. One of his pieces, sew me into a shroud of leaves, took him fifteen years to write, and would take a musician almost ten hours to perform its 153 movements (though it was performed in 2019). Hersch’s work has often been cited for its darkness and intensity, and both artists are no strangers to these qualities. In 2023, McCrae, by then a respected poet, published a memoir about his childhood. Born of a white mother and Black father, McCrae was kidnapped at the age of three by his white supremacist grandparents, who robbed him of his history and distorted his reality, all while purporting to love him. In Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, the poet describes how he clawed his sense of himself back. Hersch has written, as he did in an article for Nautilus, about the death of his grandfather and a close friend from cancer, along with his own experiences with that disease and a cardiac event that nearly killed him. The composer prizes the ability to look into the abyss of pain and loss with an unflinching gaze.

But for Hersch, a flat darkness isn’t the only thing to see when staring into the void; there’s almost infinite shading there, perceptible once the eyes adjust. As Hersch put it, “Human beings are unbearably complicated; I’ve spent my life trying to get at that, and I think I mostly fail. That’s why I keep being so excited about composing.” Here, Hersch and I return to Dante and the ending of Inferno. Having been through hell, Dante and Vergil travel so far down that they find themselves right-side-up, looking at the stars. We may not all get there, Hersch says. “But even if you don’t, most people want to be there.” That failure is not depressing but affirming of art’s power: “One could argue that that is the nature of optimism—that effortfulness.”

A multiracial musician who rose to the heights of society in pre-revolution France, a virtuoso violinist and champion fencer, a military commander, and, most of all, a composer, Joseph Bologne was an exceedingly interesting person in his time and now. Much of his music survives, including some elegant violin concerti, string quartets, and symphonies. It’s a shame, then, that we have only one opera of his, and, in a different way, a shame that that opera is L’amant anonyme (here presented in its English title, The Anonymous Lover), a work whose own interesting qualities begin and end at being Bologne’s only opera. That’s plenty for the historically curious but not quite enough to make for a compelling comedic performance.

A cute comedy about a secret admirer and a pair of friends whom everyone but the female member of the couple can see should immediately start kissing, The Anonymous Lover is an amusing trifle in gleaming Galant style. Its conflict is threadbare; the hapless Valcour is in love with his rich widow friend Léontine and has been writing her anonymous love letters for four years, to the delight and exasperation of their friends, Ophémon, Dorothée, Jeannette, and Colin. Valcour is afraid to reveal himself as the lover; Léontine is afraid to open her heart up to love again. There are many missteps and gaffes, but all ends happily with a smooch and a song. Musically, it fares far better; the opera is chock full of graceful, charming tunes and lovely writing, especially for the character of Léontine and for Bologne’s own instrument, the violin.

This production, presented in English dialogue but French singing for Opera Philadelphia and co-produced with Boston Lyric Opera, handles the material capably but never finds enough of a spark to elevate its material. Rather surprisingly, experienced director Dennis Whitehead Darling seemed to have no particular visual or physical take on the story apart from the basics required by the script. In a show like this one, which is mostly silly, success depends on the actors’ and director’s skills in physical comedy. Can they deliver dialogue in snappy, naturalistic, and funny ways? Can the director create interesting, appealing configurations of bodies in space? Comedies are much harder to get right than tragedies; singers are often less confident in spoken dialogue, and comic timing is rare even amongst actors, let alone amongst exceptional vocalists. The sillier the piece, the more challenging it is to make it funny.

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In Darling’s production, sadly, there were plenty of comedic stones left unturned and many moments that needed a swift injection of adrenaline. Overlong overtures could have been interestingly blocked, perhaps with the first violin emerging from the orchestra pit, or given some other visual flair; but instead, we merely watched the curtain both times. Singers could have been more carefully choreographed, or their actions and settings heightened to an amusing degree. Instead, the characters simply move sedately through their actions. I wouldn’t mind seeing Valcour sitting in a two-foot pile of crumpled love-letter drafts, with bits of paper coming out of his wig, or engaging in some other such farcical trope. Why not go for broke? This opera, perhaps more than any I’ve seen, needs blocking and lots of it, to make its emotions dynamic. When the actors had clear direction or had clearly come up with a bit themselves, “L’Amant anonyme” charmed; when they didn’t, the opera sagged, as they almost always did in the lengthy dialogue scenes. Even Kalena Bovell’s lucid conducting never quite felt fast enough to move the pace along.

Symone Harcum, a soprano so elegant and dignified that her whole being seems to cry out for Verdi, had the most difficult and the most beautiful music as Léontine. While she is not an effortless comedienne, she is a compelling, skilled vocalist with a nuanced and pleasing instrument, well worth seeking out in other shows. Travon D. Walker, as the earnest Valcour, has an astoundingly light, lovely tenor and a warm presence. Ashley Marie Robillard, as the servant Jeannette, is a soubrette’s soubrette; bright, charming, and bursting with energy and a silvery, powerful sound. Her scenes with husband Colin—an amorous Joshua Blue—were flirty and fun. Sun-ly Pierce’s open countenance and winking humor concealed an impressive, rich mezzo-soprano as Léontine’s BFF Dorothée. But every scene was stolen by Johnathan McCullough as Ophémon, who had both a full, lively baritone and the best comedic skills of the cast. All of the true laughs in the dialogue belonged to him, and each time he stamped a gold-slippered foot or fluttered his fingers, the energy level jumped.

Static, scattered sets and cheesy lighting helped no one on stage, giving the actors little to work with and making the production feel strangely post-secondary for a professional ensemble that I have seen pull off sleek, high-quality productions. I suspect budgetary constraints are responsible for some of the visual problems; the set pieces—all from different eras—felt cobbled together from stock in the scene shop, while the lighting was bare-bones, as well as way too blue (it might have been the bluest lighting I’ve ever seen, a distinction I had not ever imagined bestowing on anything). The other problems seemed to stem from the text itself and Darling’s approach to it, which was almost too reverent, playing it too straight instead of slimming down and then pushing to the heights of silly insanity. This show might be worth seeing simply for its historical value. It was no small feat to occupy the space Bologne held, then and now, and I want to see many more operas with mostly non-white creative teams. But the witty, urbane Bologne would have surely wanted his audiences to laugh a lot more.

Poet William Hoffman paints a scene of the paths of Fort Tryon Park, the rambling tangle of land upon which the Cloisters sits like an alien jewel, with “Alone in these woods, among vagaries of leaves and plummeting berries, we founder and flee into dreams of permanence.” The Cloisters is a place worthy of poetry and—as John Corigliano, who set Hoffman’s words in the 1960s, knew—of music, too. This weekend it was the home of a new opera, Primero Sueño, about an artist who herself founders, flees and dreams in search of infinite vision.

A collaboration between Paola Prestini, composer and director of National Sawdust, amongst other things, and Magos Herrera, Mexican jazz singer, songwriter and educator, Primero Sueño is a processional opera made for The Cloisters about Mexican writer, nun, mystic and early feminist figure Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In addition to writing some of the most beautiful poetry of her era, Sor Juana was also a passionate advocate for women’s education in an age that consistently sought to forbid her access to knowledge. Prestini and Herrera depict Sor Juana as, rightfully, a visionary but also a creature of blood and bone, someone who has to fight and ultimately embrace her own humanity to see herself clearly.

Future collaborations between these fully-fledged artists should be swiftly funded—they work fantastically well together (this isn’t their first time doing so), with Prestini’s sharp, occasionally spiky harmonies both clarified and mellowed by Herrera’s depth and radiance. Their score is medieval meets modern meets Latin jazz meets Mexican folk. Anchored by two musicians, who take up a bevy of instruments, including theorbo, Spanish guitar, harp, charango and various types of percussion, Primero Sueño is a deeply satisfying blend of styles, one that nevertheless tends toward the gentle, the mystical and the joyous.

Herrera herself sings Sor Juana with a gentle strength; her voice is a marvelous instrument, shimmering and hazy, earthy and light at once. Six nuns flank her, sometimes her Greek chorus, other times the environment around her, other times just her sisters, with whom she shares her days. Prestini writes beautifully for choir, as Primero Sueño displayed to great effect. One scene has nuns passing notes from one throat to another, like hands passing the shuttle of a loom. Other times, the nuns chatter, hiss and buzz with a stuttering n-n-n or ch-ch-ch that brought us firmly into the present day of extended vocal techniques.  Her nemesis, the Archbishop (dancer and choreographer Jorrell Lawyer-Jefferson), attempts to keep the nuns from singing. Herrera and Prestini wisely render this character silent, but the threat is serious indeed.

Together they weave a libretto out of history and poetry, liberally dipping in and out of Sor Juana’s immense, luminous “Primero Sueño” of 1685 to craft their narrative of a woman both in and out of the world. Many of their words are Sor Juana’s own, translated in rich and mystical beauty. But this is their story, and its scope is both narrow and infinite. This is an opera about a woman trying to finish a poem. Various things collude to stop her, firstly the nasty Archbishop who forbids women to write and to sing, then a vision of Death (also Lawyer-Jefferson), who frightens Sor Juana and her nuns, and then, at last, her body fails her. How can she finish it? Any artist knows such a task is as easy as it is impossible—ask Sondheim about what it takes to finish a hat. It’s also an opera about grand visions, striving and the beauty of failure.

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As she ascends the pyramid of her vision, attempting to capture all in her gaze, she becomes too dizzy. She’s betrayed by her own flesh. She carves out a line in her own blood, breaks her pen and gives up. Only the memory of another story, that of Phaeton, who tried to drive the chariot of the sun but lost control, can recall her to her mission. He fell but was remembered in the stars. As in the real “Primero Sueño,” Sor Juana’s attempts to get beyond herself are doomed, but they’re not useless. The attempt is valuable, if only as a reminder to be grateful for our pitiful, beautiful bodies, and our sharp, fallible vision.

Director Louisa Proske, a neighbor of the Cloisters (like myself), revels in her setting—amongst the strangest and most enticing in the whole city—leveraging its startling anachronisms to tell the story of another creature out of time. Her use of space and materials is ingenious, particularly when it came to projections; a nun’s silky habit glides off to become the projection screen for the translations. Andrea Lauer’s costumes are a marvel. Escudos (like the one you can see on Miguel Cabrera’s portrait of Sor Juana), looking like tambourine heads and nichos and bombs all at once, are strapped to the nuns’ chests and glow like flaming hearts—one is revealed to be a minuscule projector, shining a heart onto Sor Juana’s breast. Juana pulls a length of cloth out of her own robe, onto which a sketched version of her soul was projected. It gently turns and tumbles above her sleeping form as if it, too, were breathing. David Herrera’s breathtaking sculpture design—a massive eye, a wire bird—merges the piece even more fully with the space, as do Jorge Cousineau’s simple, stunning projections of hand-drawn sketches and handwritten lines.

Prestini and Herrera’s opera is a work of great beauty and clarity, alighting on small phrases like “kind labor” to depict the daily rhythms of art and life as providing delicious, surprising translations of some of Sor Juana’s most challenging mystical language. This rich, meditative opera succeeds where other operatic treatments of Sor Juana do not, in part because it eschews strict biography in favor of poetry. When she finishes her poem, we rejoice with Sor Juana, not only because we want to know how this artist confronts her failure and triumphs anyway, but because the end of the poem itself is about artistic renewal, a cycle that repeats like the sunrise. Proske’s directing brings poetry of its own. At the end, Sor Juana stands alone in the chapel, music swirling about her. Death approaches, poem in hand. Juana clasps her text to her heart and leans forward, pressing her forehead to Death’s in an embrace. The sun rises, and she sings, “The world illuminates, and I am awake.”

It was a good week for Russian song at Carnegie Hall, where two concerts by vastly different artists featured overlapping repertoire from Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. The first, from tenor Piotr Beczała and pianist Helmut Deutsch, saw an otherwise extroverted performer shift to intimacy. The second, from soprano Asmik Grigorian and pianist Lukas Geniušas, turned intimacy outwards.

Beczała’s program, given in the Stern Auditorium, was bookended by the works of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, many of which appear on an album of romances by those composers recorded with Helmut Deutsch last year. He also included songs from Edvard Grieg, Robert Schumann and Mieczysław Karłowicz, a lesser-known Polish composer who died at thirty-two.

Beczała excels at passionate, extroverted repertoire. Now 57, Beczała has retained a youthful air, and his voice sounds well cared for. He has a confident swagger and a large, outgoing sound best suited for declarations of love or boasts of conquest. The more intimate lieder genre does not always suit him, however. While some of his softer moments were nicely rounded, at other times, quiet and contemplative sections caused him to pull back from his voice, leaving it flighty and hollow and us to chase after the core of his sound.

On pieces where he could open up without reservation—on the Grieg songs or during standout of the evening, “O you, my field” from Rachmaninoff’s Six Romances—his voice became more robust and his features more animated. Unlike the early pieces, he could bring himself to us with warmth, especially in the final six songs. Helmut Deutsch, frequent accompanist for the recitals of Jonas Kaufmann, delivered clear and determined playing that supported Beczała without pulling any focus from the tenor. The two artists work well together; the sound is professional and confident, but there’s no magical synergy.

Beczała’s program takes a tour of Romantic song and its various poetic obsessions—flowers and nature, longing, love that you hate to love—but kept its subject matter largely on the lighter side. It was well-programmed for vocal effect, as each set built to the highest emotional peak in the final two songs and was sung with increasing openness and richness.

The length of the program, the repetitiveness of the texts and the stylistic similarities of many of the composers flattened its emotional effectiveness overall, however, and made a rankings-type comparison nearly inevitable. The overwhelmingly passionate Rachmaninoff was a clear winner, both vocally and dramatically. The Grieg was hymnic, immediate and gentle, the Karłowic novel allowing for some heavier singing from Beczała, the Schumann nice but expected (though I never tire of “Widmung”), and the Tchaikovsky nice and somewhat less expected. Beczała and Deutsch are both highly competent artists, and this evening did little to push either of them. Beczała sang four encores, which were announced in a surprisingly soft voice and met with cheers of recognition. He knows where his bread is buttered.

Asmik Grigorian’s program in the smaller Zankel Hall, on the other hand, had about half as many pieces and was half again more effective. Like Beczała and Deutsch, Grigorian and Geniušas have recorded these works in the last year or so; they’ve been touring with this program, which is by now well-polished. Although some of the pieces overlapped with the Beczała concert, the overall mood was more intense—instead of flowers, Grigorian chose songs about loneliness, distance, and unfulfilled, bittersweet dreams. Each composer’s songs were divided by two solo pieces for Geniušas, a very fine accompanist who clearly won’t be content to play second fiddle.

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Grigorian, who recently appeared as Cio-Cio San in Madama Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera, has a dark, dimensional soprano sound and exceptional dramatic control over her instrument. Texts that felt flat on the page were infused with nuanced color, and familiar Romantic sentiments turned surprising in her voice. The Tchaikovsky selections began somewhat subdued, including Grigorian’s poignant rendition of the beloved “None but the Lonely Heart.” The isolation gave way to brief moments of Romantic expansiveness. A particularly striking number, “I bless you, forests,” Op.47, No. 5, began with a funereal introduction for Geniušas before Grigorian sang with palpable warmth of holding all nature in her own embrace.

Geniušas plays with an unusual weightiness; each note emerges as if it’s being pulled out of him with some reluctance on his part, like a forced disclosure that’s both desired and feared. It makes for extremely compelling stuff, as does the physicality of his playing. There was a moment in Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in D-flat Major, Op. 32, No. 13—the pianist’s final solo for the evening—where Geniušas nearly ejected himself out of his seat in the final bars. Both his work and Grigorian’s ensured that this program was more thoughtful and more feeling than Beczała and Deutsch’s: the playing rawer and more intense, the singing more eloquent and centered.

Tchaikovsky’s elegant melodies once again paled against the blazing fervor of Rachmaninoff. Here Grigorian, already sensitive interpreter, delivered each word like it was a tiny pearl of feeling, rounding them out with immediacy and capaciousness that brought the audience into her sound. A series of pristine, pianissimo B-flats were hair-raisingly beautiful, if chillier than the rest of her range. The final piece, a lengthier song called “Dissonance” that sees a speaker affirming her true love after being married to another man, had an aria-like emotional variety that synthesized Grigorian’s technical skill and generous phrasing with Geniušas’s simmering passion. After thunderous applause, the soprano only sang one encore, though she could have done three or even five more. She proved that she’s a real talent and a fully-realized star; now we only need to hear more of her in New York.

My first apartment in New York made me aware, with blaring clarity, how much living here makes you a hostage to sounds. Each night at 3:00 a.m., an illegal garbage pickup took place outside my street-facing window: thundering metallic clatters, reversing beeps, the frustrated horn-honking of drivers caught on the one-way street as this nightly noise concert kept them from wherever they were trying to get to at that late hour. I never slept through it. Sound engulfs us, invades us, forces us to orient ourselves around it. Only the homes of the wealthiest get any protection from sound’s most frustrating incursions, and even they can’t block it all out.

It was only a few years and a few apartments later that I could volunteer with such alacrity to live for a week with composer and sound artist Michael J. Schumacher’s Living Room Pieces, a sound installation for the home that algorithmically generates sounds made using combinations of more than 7,000 samples collected by Schumacher over decades. He has been experimenting with the idea—at-home sound art—for a while now; the first Living Room Pieces was a twelve-channel work that ran for a full year in Antoine Laval’s Chelsea Hotel apartment in 2005. The algorithm dates back even further, with Schumacher starting work on it in the nineties. Subsequent versions ran at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and at the Singuhr Hoergalerie in Berlin, where visitors could book time in a residential apartment to experience the piece.

In 2021, a two-channel version of Living Room Pieces—now running with a Raspberry Pi processor—was released on a rental basis. In 2024, one can purchase the piece from Chaikin Records for $300 (the initial production sold out, but more are coming). Compact and simple, the user need only plug it in. While the piece runs on a seven-day cycle, the algorithmic nature and the massive body of samples mean that, theoretically, the artwork could play infinitely.

Schumacher’s influences are clear: musique concrète, indeterminacy, Marcel Duchamp… John Cage’s work on silence (Schumacher told me, “Silence is the basis of the whole thing”), and Living Room Pieces doesn’t so much push these ideas further as it moves them laterally from the art gallery or concert hall into the home. There’s a whiff of gimmickry to be found here for the cynical, but Schumacher’s concept packs enough of a punch on its own terms.

With the work, he strikes a balance between artfulness and chaos, with each day following a set of clearly defined rules and patterns that cohere around a series of prime numbers, indivisible and infinitely expandable. There is a lot of quiet: hours when the speakers are hushed, and I half-forgot they were there. But in the context of Living Room Pieces all of the daily sounds of apartment living felt heightened; my neighbors’ creaks and muffled television, the whir of the electric heating and the clattering of recycling in the back of the apartment were made momentarily unfamiliar and even slightly romantic. I lived with Living Room Pieces for seven days, with a few ground rules for myself. I wouldn’t turn the work off at any point, but I also wouldn’t orient myself around it by attempting to be home or planning to be out more than usual. The piece runs for twelve hours a day, and which twelve depends on when you first start the piece; I turned it on at 11:37 a.m., and it ran through to nearly midnight.

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To some extent, Living Room Pieces reminded me that living in proximity to others means you are always living in some level of sound installation—a composition created by you and everyone around you. The rhythms eventually become familiar, only noticeable when they break into your space in jarring ways. What Living Room Pieces offers is a way to view these sounds as interlocutors and cohabitants, to take delight in their ability to surprise and amuse us.

In my brief conversation with Schumacher, the composer told me he was most interested in how coincidental occurrence offers itself up to meaning-making. My week bears that out; it took only a few seconds of listening to start personifying the sounds. The power of the algorithm is in how we relate to it—how we make it feel both human and prophetic and fold it into our own lives. It’s easy, in the concert hall or a gallery space to cede the context of sounds to the artist; in your home, personal association is inevitable because the context is your own. This is its own source of delight, this human capacity for making external things internal. What follows here are my notes about the experience of this unique artwork, condensed and edited for clarity.

Day one: The setup

I am tired and slightly hungover when I pull Living Room Pieces out of its compact box, unfurling wires, two speakers and a minuscule Raspberry Pi computer. As per the instructions, I position the speakers as far apart as I can; one speaker rests on a chair in the corner; the other is positioned next to my television on the other side of the room. My living room is strewn with papers. Art leans against the wall, and there are three mostly empty wine bottles behind the passive speaker. I switch the speaker on, and it gurgles pleasantly. After a silence, the artwork comes to life with an inquisitive xylophone. I’m joined by another listener, a tiny brownish mouse. I yelp, and the mouse retreats. But it peeps its head back out as the distorted xylophone hoots around us, as if soundtracking this little interspecies exchange. It scampers into a hall closet. I tell it sternly to stay there unless it wants to be part of my article. Minutes later, it emerges again—the little fame hound. I clap at it. Living Room Pieces is silent now, but my claps echo. Throughout the day, the speakers chitter intermittently; it clicks and judders while I call my mother. A voice emerges, intoning some lines from e.e. cummings: “bang is the meaning of gun.” Later, around 10:00 p.m. after a lengthy silence, I jump as a voice passes between the speakers, saying “the hills are alive with the sound of stress,” offset by a few milliseconds. I start laughing, alone in my house.

Day two: Elvis

My upstairs neighbors are doing their Saturday morning ritual, which involves loud television, the heavy footfalls of toddlers and what sounds like dragging around every piece of furniture. All through brunch with a friend, we wait for Living Room Pieces to come to life. When it does, we pause to listen: Keith Richards’ voice fills the room talking about Elvis, who “probably heard more Black music than he did white.” Richards’ voice begins to skip, breaking apart across the two channels. My friend compares the experience to that of having schizophrenia; voices appear and they must be heard or consciously ignored. To ignore is active, requiring effort. This interview plays, distorted and chopped up, all day. Later, I think that getting Living Room Pieces was like placing my apartment on an Airbnb for ghosts; a voluntary invitation to be haunted by sounds.

Day three: Capture

Living Room Pieces chatters to life almost exactly at the beginning of its time; the sound is like a stick being dragged along a fence. I hear something else, a scrabbling, but it’s not from the speakers. It’s coming from a corner, where the mouse is in the trap. I joke later to a friend, after I release the mouse into a pile of leaves in the park, that he clearly didn’t want to live in a sound art installation. Maybe this mouse is a tiny philistine, or maybe he’s heard this type of thing before. Later, Living Room Pieces creaks and squeaks over the sound of a kettle coming to boil, and it feels like company. Much later, I’m reading John Berger’s tiny, lovely “A Mouse Story,” Living Room Pieces passes zips of sound, string plucks sped-up, clipped out and filters, between the two speakers, with me caught between them.

Day four: Interruptions

At 1:00 p.m., LRP shakes to life with a sound like metal cicadas over a slight but rapid heartbeat. There are electronic chitters, string samples. The ghost is more energetic today—everything has a brisk rhythmic quality, and the sounds are more densely packed. I have to turn the system volume down twice. There is a low crowd sound, too muffled to make out words. Someone laughs from the speakers, but I’m feeling sort of graciously exasperated.

Day five: Antagonists

I am late on all of my deadlines and working frantically while trying and failing not to watch the political coverage. Living Room Pieces zips and murmurs with tangy, metallic noises. For the first time, this artwork feels like an enemy, an intruder in my space. I tell it to shut up and retreat into my bedroom, where I can still hear it anyway, and where, cowering below my radiator, is another mouse. I go out for the rest of the day.

Day six: Outside

I awaken at four in the morning to the sound of car alarms surging in a chorus; I think Living Room Pieces is malfunctioning but then realize they’re real cars. I wonder, absurdly, if somehow Living Room Pieces is calling other sounds to me, and fall back asleep. The first I hear of Living Room Pieces after I wake up properly is bird song and a cymbal, then the sound of objects clattering to the floor. The boundaries of my apartment feel transparent, as if all the sounds outside it come right through. Then a startling sound of something revving, a metal buzz that startles, and the reverbed pluck of a low string. An hour or so later, there’s a metallic scraping, like someone scouring metal pots or moving file cabinets. Later, it punctuates a conversation with a friend with little zips so perfectly timed that it feels like it’s responding directly to us, though I know it isn’t.

Day seven: Party

I throw a party for Living Room Pieces, which, after an exceptionally noisy sixth day, thrums with ambient chords. While the combinations of pitches are randomized, most of the chords have some kind of major triad. I am slightly crestfallen about the chill vibes; after days of acting up, it’s suddenly on its most demure behavior. Anticipating its departure, I feel warmly towards it. People pile into my apartment, and we talk so loudly that sometimes it takes a few seconds of sound before we all stop to listen. The singers in the room, including myself, can’t help but hum or “ooh” along with the chords, but the chatter quickly rebounds around the sound. We drink a toast to the work, and when it finally falls silent for the evening, the house feels emptier. I put on music for the first time in a week.

Dvořák’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 33—his only in the genre—has been lambasted for being both too difficult and insufficiently virtuosic, as if its effect as a star vehicle is not worth the technical challenge required to put it together. While it has begun to be played more often, its popularity pales in comparison to the composer’s other, more beloved concerti for violin and cello. The first movement sounds like a lively but disjointed conversation between the Classical and late Romantic; Mozart references abound. The finest moments come in the second movement, which releases the past in favor of gentle ruffles of lyricism. Throughout, the soloist emerges and recedes from the orchestra, less of a star player than the leader of a relay, culminating in the passionate exchanges that characterize the final movement.

Russian virtuoso Daniil Trifonov is the latest to tackle this difficult but somewhat underwhelming piece, which appeared with Leoš Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass on the final evening of a week of concerts celebrating Czech music at Carnegie Hall. I found Trifonov’s playing almost glass-like: lucid and solid, but also delicate and slightly chilly. In contrast, his physical presence was warm and very engaged. After the close of a phrase, his hands arced in a slow pattern over the keyboard as if resisting the urge to begin conducting before migrating upwards to brush a lock of hair away from his eyes, which often closed in a grimace of passion. But for all the visible feeling and audible precision, the emotional impact of Trifonov’s playing got a bit lost in translation, leaving a performance that was undeniably beautiful but just shy of stirring. He received four ovations, however, during which it was also revealed that the Czech president Petr Pavel was in the audience. The encore, a charming, brief arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s “Silver Fairy” from Sleeping Beauty displayed a wry humor and felt more genuinely spirited.

Semyon Bychkov led with a relaxed focus throughout. While Dvořák is the Czech Philharmonic’s bread and butter, they sounded more scattered on that composer’s piece; the violin section had occasional lapses in synchronization, and there were a few moments of off-kilter tuning that blurred a bit of the sheen. After intermission, however, the ensemble took on both energy and precision.

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This may be the result of the difference of piece. While the Dvořák has moments of intense excitement, its uneven quality makes any imperfections more glaring.  Janáček’s vigorous, spiky Glagolitic Mass, on the other hand, has a fervent immediacy quality that the Piano Concerto lacks. Written by an atheist composer two years before his death, it sounds as much like a refusal of the Mass as it does an embrace of its rhythms. It’s fitting then that Janáček omits the “Dona nobis pacem” from the Agnus Dei; little true peace can be found here. Instead, it moves swiftly between bursts of triumph and terror, even bouts of insubordinate anger, intercut with moments of mystery, flashes of acceptance and shouts of “Amin!” One hears an artist who is railing against death, ambivalent towards the almighty but insistent on elevating folk melodies to the heights of holiness. It includes a shockingly original organ solo with a hymn-like theme that is constantly interrupted by rattles of brass, expertly played by Daniela Valtová Kosinová. The piece closes with an Exodus movement titled “Intrada”—Entrance—as if the mass is only the prelude to another spiritual experience that cannot be contained within the genre’s rigid forms.

It’s been over a decade since this work last appeared at Carnegie Hall. I certainly hope we don’t wait so long to hear it again; even excellent recordings do not capture the full force of its doubt and passion. Together, Bychkov and his ensembles proved it should come to American stages more often.