The message of Voltaire’s novel Candide, ou l’Optimisme is that rationality and reason, rather than custom, faith or authoritative orders should determine all human activity, and although this quintessence of the Age of Enlightenment sounds self-evident nowadays, a visit to the newspaper kiosk shows us otherwise: a lot of luridly-titled guidebooks and magazines try to talk us into believing that a
On Saturday, Vienna’s Volksoper will premiere a double bill with a twist: Pagliacci will not be paired with Cavalleria Rusticana, but rather Hans Werner Henze’s first opera, Das Wundertheater.
