The works themselves — what happens in them, why they were written, and what makes each one its own problem to solve.
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The jealousy, the religion, the doomed love — Verdi used all of it as cover for a single obsession: who holds power over whom, and what it costs the powerless to speak.
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The most-performed opera in the world contains a libretto that almost no modern production can stage without making a choice it would rather not explain.
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Debussy's only opera refuses almost every tool opera composers reach for — and its power comes entirely from what it withholds.
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The most rigidly structured opera of the twentieth century sounds, from the audience, like the world coming apart. That is the point.