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In a temporary home, Cologne Opera have mounted a remarkably joyful production of Beethoven’s single, wonderful opera.

Die tote Stadt’s bid for the mainstream proceeds with a musically strong revival of a perceptive if flawed staging at Oper Frankfurt

It took me a while to warm to director Christopher Alden’s revisionist production of Johann Strauss II’s chestnut and whipped cream torte of an operetta, but gradually the outrageous battiness of it won me over.The story that Alden and his team fashion into a Freudian farce with touches of Bram Stoker goes like this.

The Howard Gilman Opera House was filled from the orchestra to the balcony. Every seat sold for New York City Opera’s season opener La Traviata, on the occasion of their reinvention from an opera company in the city to an opera company going out into the city. La Traviata was their first production since their controversial move out of their time-honored Lincoln Center home.

Some operagoers contend that Carmen, the fatalistic gypsy doomed to die, is unlikable. She antagonizes other women at the cigarette factory. She seduces men with abandon. She makes an inexperienced corporal of the guard fall for her, manipulates him into abandoning his military career for a life of smuggling, and then heartlessly turns him out like a pesky stray.