Opera After Dark

Today, we tasked ourselves with choosing one opera each that we absolutely love, and explaining why we love it. We hope that our gushing inspires you to either check out a work you've never heard, or revisit one that you know, to fall in love with it for the first time (or all over again)! As you can imagine, this episode also involves some glorious random tangents.

In this episode, we delve into the incredibly sad and tumultuous life of Tchaikovsky, and get very emotional about the incredibly beautiful music he gave the world.

In today's episode we talk about Carlo Gesualdo: Renaissance composer and prince and count of the seemingly made up Italian locals of Venosa and Conza. However, in addition to composing beautiful and progressive church music, Gesualdo was a MURDERER!

In the world of classical-music composers there is never a shortage of weirdness, and Erik Satie certainly gives us a lot to work with. Today we're talking about his quirky behaviors which extended to every aspect of his daily life.

On today's episode, we talk about Mozart's scatological obsessions, introducing you a very human side of this exalted classical music genius!

With Valentine's day just around the corner, we thought we would get all lovey-dovey for today's episode... so we indulged in some beautiful music and romantic chit chat all about Beethoven and the mystery of the Immortal Beloved!

Today we decided to extend our badass women series so that we could talk about one of the ORIGINAL lady badasses of classical music history - Hildegard von Bingen! Also known as "Gertrude," which became our code name for this episode because Kyle could never remember her real name.

In this episode, we explore the life of Alma Mahler... who was not a nice person. But her life was very interesting!

In our second installment of the Badass Women series, we talk about some of opera's most difficult divas!

In the first episode of our Badass Women series we discuss Julie d'Aubigny, known as La Maupin. She made opera singing her profession, but she also was a 17th century pants wearing fencing expert who liked to duel, drink, and seduce men and women across France.