With the opening of James Cameron's film Avatar last week, I started thinking about moments in opera history that were game-changing, that began revolutions in the art form.  Let's take a quick look!

Nabucco might have been Verdi's first success, but it was his third opera.  What were the first two like?  And how about the two that followed that success in 1842?  Let's explore the operas of Verdi, the early years.

San Diego Opera is producing the evergreen standard "La boheme" by Puccini, an opera that all opera lovers know and love.  But what about one of his lesser known works?  Not terribly long ago, I discovered "La Rondine" and realize what a get this opera is.  Let me introduce it to you so that you can come to love it as much as I do!

Maybe you haven't noticed, but recitative is treated differently in different  eras of opera history.  Earlier operas utilized harpsichord and other keyboard instruments to accompany recitative, later operas used the full orchestra.  But are operatic characters treated differently, even within the same opera?  Let's explore!

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??

Now here's a sample of wonderful music from operas that I'm sure you've either never seen or never WILL see!  You'll hear music by such diverse composers as Cilea, Catalani, Auber, Thomas and...Rossini.  Enjoy this excursion into the unknown.

Let's take a few minutes to listen to excerpts from our 2010 Season which feature the secondary principal singers, roles like Marcello, Ismaele, Mercutio and Germont.  You can have the greatest Rodolfo and Mimi in the world, but you'd better have a Marcello who can match them!

We've thrown this term around a lot in our podcast series.  It's time to define it and listen to some worthy examples from the operas of Richard Wagner.  It is summer, after all, with Ring festivals going on throughout the world!

Love duets are a part of just about every opera in the standard repertory, so much so that we don’t think about them much.  We just luxuriate in their beautiful melodies.  But there’s always a reason for those ebbs and flows of passion.  Let’s explore some of the love duets in the early periods of opera history and see what makes them tick!

The most fascinating aspect of Verdi’s La traviata is that the story is based on true events in the life of a real, 19^th century French socialite, who had many aristocratic, well-connected and famous lovers, went through numerous fortunes and died of tuberculosis at the tender age of 23.  Who was this remarkable woman?  Listen to this week’s podcast to find out!

One of the more unusual aspects of Charles Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet is the fact that the tenor and soprano who sing the two title roles have four (count ‘em, FOUR) love duets!  Let’s take a look at these duets and see what the challenges are in them for the singers as well as for the audience.

Nabucco was Verdi’s third opera and his first true success.  But what was the measure of success in opera in 1840s Italy?  What were other composers doing at the time?  Who inspired Verdi?  Let’s explore this opera by placing it in the context of music and drama of that time.

We've covered Puccini's masterpiece La boheme in our 2010 Season Podcast; but let's take a closer look.  The composer's sense of drama and his complete mastery of the use of melody make this an unforgettable work.  Here's our Director of Education, Dr. Nicolas Reveles, to give you an insight into what makes this opera tick!

And now for your semi-annual Italian lesson: the word is 'tinta', and it means 'color'.  Now that you know what it means to us, let's discover what it meant to composer Giuseppe Verdi, especially with regards to our next production, Rigoletto, opening this week!

Verdi's Rigoletto didn't just spring from nothingness: there were a number of baritone roles in his earlier operas that foreshadowed this brilliant creation.  Here are examples of two of them from Ernani and Macbeth.  Enjoy!

As we look forward to San Diego Opera's production of Verdi's Rigoletto opening in March, let's take a quick tour of the operas that put Verdi on the operatic map!