Author: David Evans

Of all the myths that have passed from antiquity into the operatic canon, none has proved more irresistible than the story of Orpheus. It has attracted composers across the centuries — Monteverdi, Gluck, Offenbach, and many others — precisely because it poses, in the starkest possible terms, the central question that all great love stories…

There is a figure who haunts Western literature’s imagination of love with unusual persistence. He is the man who desires everything and commits to nothing, who moves through women like a conqueror through provinces, and who meets his end not at the hands of any lover but at the hands of the supernatural. Don Juan…

The story of Dido and Aeneas carries the full weight of Western classical antiquity. Its roots lie in Homer’s Odyssey, where the wandering hero Odysseus is detained for years by the nymph Calypso, and again by the enchantress Circe. Each is a version of the same archetype, the dangerous, consuming feminine that threatens to deflect…

Love in the arts is rarely straightforward. It almost always involves complications and reversals that may or may not be resolved. Of all art forms, opera dwells most intensely on love, often in its most extreme, passionate and tormented forms. In opera we rarely see balanced attachment, conscious communication, or negotiated boundaries. Instead we encounter…