With the current La Scala production of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West Robert Carsen reminds us where opera comes from and what it originally dealt with: myth. Not of course classical myth of late-Renaissance Florentine earliest operas, but rather the modern myth Puccini chose after Madama Butterfly to experiment a further path in the hey-day of his success: the myth of the Golden West – as the title of David Belasco’s original play calls it. A myth which has been able...

What a happy idea Stéphane Lissner had for his first season in reprising the last (and necessarily melancholy) production by Hugues Gall a little more than 10 years ago, when he left the Paris Opera:there is an implicit homage, and the sign of a desire for continuity in excellence.For the excellence is there, in the prodigious staging by Robert Carsen, perhaps one of his most successful:in this setting, which is an elegant mise en abyme of the Opéra Garnier, the...

The creation of Ariadne auf Naxos originally led to a novelty in music history. It was the desire to support the work of their friend Max Reinhardt that Richard Strauss and his genius librettist Hugo von Hoffmannsthal brought the intention to combine a play with a lyric opera in one piece. So, they brought together the drama by Jean Baptiste Molière Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, enriched with ballett music and the Greek tragic story of the unhappy love of Ariadne, liberated by the god...