Met Opera Guild Podcast

Don Giovanni is an ingenious fusion of bumbling comedy and the earnestness of tragedy. Here is former Met radio commentator Father Owen Lee and his Talking About Opera presentation on Mozart's hit.

From the famous opening "Tristan Chord" to the final "Liebstod," Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is considered a revolutionary work. Today, a closer look at the musical and dramatic layers of Wagner's masterpiece.

Tristan und Isolde opens the Met's 2016-17 season in a new production starring Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton, conducted by Simon Rattle. In this episode, an insider's perspective on Wagner's towering drama, as Opera News Editor-in-Chief, F. Paul Driscoll, sits down with the Met's Assistant General Manager for Music Administration, John Fisher.

For this episode, we are going to dip our toes into the wonderful world of languages with soprano Jane Marsh. Jane is a regular lecturer at the Met Opera Guild, and she is a language enthusiast, fluent in English, German, Italian, French, and Russian. Jane will be our language expert for today’s episode, and she will be guiding us through the pronunciation of composer, opera, and singer names that we have on the roster at the Met this season, focusing on Italian, German, and French. There are also musical examples included throughout the episode to illustrate the flavor of each language as it is sung.

Today’s episode features an exploration of Wagner’s GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG, concluding our mini-series of episodes on Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

We are now moving into part three of a four episode series on Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Each episode in this series covers one of the operas in the cycle, so you don’t necessarily have to listen to them in order to follow the content of the lecture, but if you want to get a sense of the chronology of the cycle, then we suggest listening to episodes 43 and 44 before starting this one. Our lecturer is the legendary Met Opera Radio Broadcast Host Peter Allen, and today he will be taking us through Wagner’s SIEGFRIED.

This episode is part two of a Talking About Opera recording on Wagner’s Ring Cycle. This mammoth work is comprised of four operas with interconnected stories that Wagner fashioned by combining various elements of Old Norse mythology. So for this week and next week’s episodes, we are releasing one episode per opera, in a series of lectures featuring former Met Opera Radio Broadcast Host Peter Allen.

The second half of the summer is a special time for German opera fans, as people from all over the world make a pilgrimage to Germany for the annual Bayreuth Festival. This festival is entirely dedicated to the operatic output of Richard Wagner, including performances of the entire Ring Cycle. For the next several episodes, we thought it would be fitting to take a tour through these amazing works via a 4-part Talking About Opera program with former Met Opera Radio Broadcast Host Peter Allen. Episode 43 begins with the first opera in the cycle, DAS RHEINGOLD.

This week we are happy to present our third and final instalment of Memories from the Golden Horseshoe. This series features Met radio commentator Ira Siff, regaling us with his memories of performances he witnessed at the old Metropolitan Opera house in its final years between 1961 and 1966.

Picking up right where we left off in Episode 41, Part 1, this is Part 2 of a Talking About Opera lecture, with Bridget Paolucci discussing Verdi's FALSTAFF.