A picture may paint a thousand words, but nothing compares to the intimacy and immediacy of a handwritten letter. Hearing the "Letter Aria" from Jules Massenet's Werther will prove it. From an opera based on the Goethe novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, this scene finds the tortured heroine Charlotte re-reading the letters of the doomed poet.
In this episode, host Rhiannon Giddens welcomes soprano Isabel Leonard, pianist Mary Dibbern and author Peter Bognanni to explore why the words we write to each other have so much power – sometimes even more than the ones we say aloud. They'll reflect on Massenet's talent for showing Charlotte's deep connection to Werther and you'll even get a real-life story about how email brought two people together. Then you'll hear Isabel Leonard sing the complete scene onstage at the Metropolitan Opera.
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Revisiting Mozart’s Queen of the Night: Outrage Out of This World
Love Takes Flight: Catán's Florencia en el Amazonas
Davis’s X: The Life and Legacy of Malcolm X
Revisiting Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice: Don’t Look Back in Ardor
Good Things Come to Those Who Weep: Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore
Death, Faith, and Redemption: Heggie’s Dead Man Walking
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P.S. I Love You: Renée Fleming Sings Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin
To Be Or Not To Be: Dean's Hamlet
Potion, Emotion, Devotion: Wagner's Tristan und Isolde
Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Boy of Peculiar Grace
Verdi's Nabucco: By the Rivers of Babylon
Once More Into the Breeches: Joyce DiDonato Sings Strauss
Breaking Mad: Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor
Crisis in the Kremlin: Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov
Only the Good Die Young: Verdi's La Traviata
Guys and Dolls: Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann
Strauss's Elektra: Waltzing With a Vengeance
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