OK, I'm a sucker for gorgeous melodies, the perfumed atmosphere of lush orchestrations and over-the-top dramatic singing.  No, not Puccini...but Massenet!  He's one of my all time favorite opera composers, call it a guilty pleasure.  Let me introduce you to some music that you may not know from Massenet's output.

Impress your opera-loving friends with your newly found knowledge of one of the most exciting musical events in most standard repertory Italian operas and that even occasionally shows up in the French and German repertoire!  The Concertato…here it is.  Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask.  Free of charge.

You may well wonder: was there such a thing as a German opera composer before Wagner?  His works so outshone every other German composer within his lifetime that we tend to forget about people like Weber, Spohr, Nicolai, Lortzing and Marschner.  Who??