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Murder amidst orientalist excess: Opéra de Baugé's Aida
A note in the programme honestly records the trepidation Opéra de Baugé felt in taking on Verdi’s Aida, a tougher prospect than the other operas with which it’s in rep, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore and Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus.
Finding Nemorino: A truly excellent L'elisir d'amore from Opéra de Baugé
If Debussy intended Pelléas et Mélisande as a deliberate anti-Tristan, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore perhaps stumbled into the role. Donizetti was of course not responding to Wagner’s opera (which would not be written for another three decades) but to the legend Wagner would also draw on, with results that were rather more... German, shall we say, than the sunlit uplands of L’elisir.
Eisenstein beached: Opéra de Baugé provide an entertaining Fledermaus
It’s a curious thing that when operatic characters are drinking at a party, they invariably sing about how nice it is to be drinking at a party – never sports results, or the weather, or how all them bleedin’ ’ungarians are coming over to Austria and taking all our jobs...