Phil's Opera World

Grand opera en cinq actes. Running Time: 2 hours 46 minutes. I am going through a countdown of 100 or so operas which I have been trying to review for years and the projects keep on piling up. Obviously, there would be a few Gounod among them. I have heard this opera in its (somewhat)…

Grand opera en quatre actes. Running Time: 3 hours 8 minutes. Jean-Leon Gerome’s The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, commissioned 1863, completed 1883. So I did Gounod’s disastrous Polyeucte (which is possibly one of the worst operas ever written by a well known composer), but what of Donizetti’s take on Corneille’s drama? Well, there are two settings, the first…

Opera in three acts. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. This is the review I started in August 2017 before getting an hour into the opera and then abandoning it, so if the writing style seems odd at the beginning, that is why. This is testament to Gounod’s compositional style throughout his operatic career which…

Opera in three acts. Running Time: 1 hour 45 minutes. The opera with every conceivable het-normative vice (literally, I think sodomy is the only thing NOT in this opera), Její pastorkyňa has grown to become perhaps the most popular Czech-language opera in history, although it took a long time getting there. This review was a…

Opera en trois actes. Running Time: 2 hours 10 minutes. Of all of Lalo’s operas, this one was probably the hardest to come by since, unlike the later La jacquerie and Le roi d’Ys, it languished in obscurity until 2006, 140 after it was written, to be performed. There is a single recording, issued in…