A Crash Course in Opera

Opera is a much maligned form of music these days, which makes Lord Bassington-Bassington feel obliged to come to its defense. For even if many people find opera noisy and tedious, these works of art contain much that will strengthen the moral fibre in their audience, as demonstrated by this information film.



However, opera is not just threatened by a lack of interest from prospective audience members or the philistines in the press. There are also forces at work within the opera community that threaten to drag the whole thing into the dirt, as the American periodical City Journal has uncovered.

While few operas of any substance are written today, lost and forgotten operas by the masters of the art are uncovered on a regular basis. Here, that scholar of Mozart, Mr. Victor Borge, has located one such lost opera and is introducing it to the world.



If Mozart is too challenging for you, perhaps you could go for some light opera, like that of Richard “Dicky” Wagner, king of the musical understatement. Here, Anna Russel gives her legendary dissertation on Wagner’s classic operetta, the short and sweet 15-minute – sorry, 15-hour – Ring of the Nibelung.