When things go from bad to worse for Tosca, Puccini’s tragic heroine, she turns inward and prays. “I lived for art,” she tells God, “I lived for love.” What did I do to deserve all this? Tosca's despair and the moving way Puccini captures it musically speak so directly to artists, to audiences, to all of us, that "Vissi d'arte" has become one of the most famous arias in opera. In this episode, host Rhiannon Giddens and guests Sondra Radvanovsky, Rufus Wainwright and Vivien Schweitzer consider what it means to "live for art" and how Tosca's lament has given them much needed strength, whether facing personal struggles, the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic or the persistent sexual harassment that sparked the #MeToo movement. Plus, you'll hear Sondra Radvanovksy sing the complete aria from the Metropolitan Opera stage.
Love and Other Drugs: Gounod's Roméo et Juliette
You Don't Own Me: The Myth and Magic of Bizet's Carmen
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
Aria Code Returns for Season 4!
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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