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In Michael Nyman's Facing Goya, the artist's head ends up in the worst possible hands.

Toshio Hosokawa’s opera Matsukaze is in many ways a model of modern cross-cultural creation. Premièred in Brussels in 2011, it sets a story from the traditional Japanese Noh theater in a more or less Western operatic framework. And the text is in German.

“I put into your hands manuscripts that I very much wish will remain after me,” wrote Émilie du Châtelet shortly before the birth of her fourth child in 1749. “I hope... that my lying-in, which I am expecting at any moment, will not be fatal, as I fear.” Her fears did prove fatal, and she died days after giving birth, at the age of 42.