Ron Moore

Richard Wagner’s "Parsifal," his final opera, was created in parallel with his greatest creations including "The Ring" and "Tristan." It took him just over 30 years and several revisions before it was finally presented in 1882.

It is viewed as his most refined and elaborate work and it at times leaves people feeling that it is too profound to even applaud. In a comic twist, this bothered the composer; when Wagner would applaud a certain scene he would be hushed by members of the audience.

I couldn’t have timed better the decision to replay my all time favorite Masterpiece Theatre Classic, "The Forsyte Saga," than the week the Metropolitan would broadcast its "Carmen." I had never really considered the fact that the two works and their heroine’s were so close; more sisters than cousins.

The similarities are striking

Lasting works that are so much a part of our lives and the general culture have often had the most improbable origins; it is one of music's greatest ironies.

The arduous birth of Wagner’s "The Ring" is the stuff of legends, and decades of work, sacrifice and immense debt. Berlioz' "Les Troyens" was a desperate, singular throw of the dice urged on by his correspondence with Liszt's mistress and his lifelong love of Virgil. But what about Verdi’s overwhelmingly popular "Rigoletto"? What happened there?

Ever evolving...

After more than 180 years (1832), audiences are still laughing through their tears at Gaetano Donizetti’s comic masterwork, The Elixir of Love.

It is a commonplace to say that comedy is more difficult than tragedy, but what about an opera that walks that delicate boundary between the two?

Taking as a starting part the most common of themes -- provincial love and its difficulties -- Donizetti achieves something almost miraculous.

Opening Night in New York

There are essentially two approaches to the supreme expression of opera, both of them dealing with what would seem to be the impossible.

Depending on your age, the name Marian Anderson can belong to the realm of indelible and haunting experience, or mysterious legend. 

There are essentially two views of Puccini. To his admirers he is one of the most beloved, most lyrical and at times moving composers of the modern period -- and successful beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings.

Detractors, however, have a different view. For all the dramatic (or melodramatic) force of his music and his undeniable lyric gift, finally he is enthralled by the mob. His lucrative populism is almost an embarrassment, and the joke he once told about his talent: "God touched me, but with his little finger," is perhaps, a truer saying than his fans care to admit.

Whether you believe that Mary Stuart was the most amoral, conniving and ruthless female of Elizabethan England or the most tragic victim of overwhelming and relentless circumstances and doomed to tragic grandeur, her life is one of the great historical dramas.

One of opera's most comical and telling facts was that Giuseppe Verdi was poised at the height of his middle period -- between "Rigoletto" and "La Traviata"  -- to first tackle nothing less than "King Lear," until finally deciding on "Il Trovatore" (The Troubadour).

Could any two themes be less alike?

With a mixture of trepidation and excitement, Hector Berlioz, the composer, critic and conductor, stood poised to lay aside many of the usual tasks and distractions of his life and give himself up to the dream of a lifetime: The composition of an epic on antique themes inspired by Virgil's "Aeneid," Les Troyens.