The Metropolitan Opera announced the schedule for its 2010-2011 season today. It’s good timing for me, because I’m currently putting together the syllabus for next January’s J-term course on “New York and Modernity,” and I’d like to include a series of co-curricular trips to the opera, the symphony, and the theater.
I’m thinking that a good choice might be the production of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West, which I’ve never managed to see live in more than a quarter-century of opera-going. The production marks the 100th anniversary of the opera’s premiere at the Met and stars two wonderful singers, Deborah Voigt and Marcello Giordani. If we can manage to get tickets (which may be tough, since the only performance that would work is the Saturday matinee), I can pair it with the first chapter of Alex Ross’s marvelous study of twentieth-century classical music The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which includes a brief account of the genesis of the opera in a trip that Puccini made to the U.S. in 1907. Most of that chapter is about Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, and guess what — the New York Philharmonic is featuring some Mahler in the first week of January. Now if only there were an O’Neill play next January …
[Click here to read the press release about the Met's new season. And click here to read the New York Times's take on the season (written by one of my college classmates).]
