The moral became that “homoerotic attachments are acceptable, provided they manifest within the boundaries of socially appropriate behaviour,” states Andrew Sutherland in Queer Opera, his survey of homoerotic elements in the history of opera.
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Libretto is filled with dramatic complexity, but Wadsworth steers the story to resolution, clarifying subplots with brief recaps. Her dialogue comes across as direct and sophisticated, reflecting careful observation of how people talk, with curiosity and brisk ripostes. Like the narrator in Light, Coming Back, Ally comes to understand “old perceptions of love and loss” and to imagine new possibilities for her vagabond writing life.
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The opera The Hours brings to the stage the LGBT love lives (including their failures) of Laura Brown, Kitty, Clarissa and Sally, and Richard and Louis. Indeed it adds one same-sex relationship to the mix. A key incident in both Mrs Dalloway and in the 1990s Clarissa story involves Clarissa buying flowers for the party. In the opera, the florist, Barbara (sung beautifully by Kathleen Kim), has an extended coloratura flirtation with Clarissa as well.
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DAVID DANIELS occupies a rarefied category of classical singer: the countertenor, a male range above tenor that corresponds to a mezzo-soprano range. Widely regarded as the leading countertenor of our time, Daniels sings a repertoire that includes both classical opera and an extensive recital repertoire.
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Monk’s polyphonic music has been recorded by her own ensemble in eighteen recordings. Jean-Luc Goddard, the Coen brothers, Terrence Malick, and David Byrne have featured her music in films. The Kronos Quartet, St. Louis Symphony, and San Francisco Symphony have commissioned new scores.
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… Golden Age is a provocative meditation on the overlapping nature of sexual love and artistic creation. Both the artist and the lover strain to grasp what is ineffable, creating in one’s mind a beauty that can never be fully realized, much less tangibly enjoyed. …
MoreBefore Night Falls, the memoir by Reinaldo Arenas, gay Cuban novelist and poet, political dissident and prisoner, foe of Castro’s repressive regime, was published posthumously in 1993 to immediate acclaim. … Several of my gay friends were reading the book and enthusiastically recommended it to me. One of them finally put a copy in my hands and I read it; instantly drawn in, I too fell in love with Arenas and his story, so engagingly told, so full of adventure, vivid personalities, sex, escapes, suicides, betrayals. I was gushing about it to a friend who said, “Why don’t you turn it into an opera?” Reflexively, I said that was impossible: far too episodic, with way too many characters. How could Before Night Falls possibly be staged?
MoreOPERA QUEENS are not in short supply, but gay men who love Lieder seem to be few and far between. The German word Lieder is the plural of Lied, which means simply “song.” But it has acquired a particular association, especially among English speakers, with the Romantic German art song. Mozart and Beethoven may be considered the earliest composers of Lieder, though the genre only came into its own with Franz Schubert, who was followed by Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss, and others.
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