Tag Archives: love duet
A Few Love Duets and a Jazz Encore
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 29th December 2019The days are short; accordingly there’s a lot of darkness around. So, I thought I might brighten things up a bit with a few love duets. Of course, the best of these duets portray characters who typically don’t survive the opera’s end. But they are lovely and make us forget that they lead to death….
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O Soave Fanciulla
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 13th February 2017Puccini’s La Boheme is popular beyond comment. It has been performed 1295 times by the Met since the company’s first performance of the opera on tour in Los Angeles in 1900. Incidentally, Los Angeles was also the site of the work’s American premiere three years earlier. Aida is far behind in the Met’s second spot….
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Illicit Love
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 20th April 2015Opera abounds in love duets. Here are three that define both their genre and their time. All three involve a man (a tenor, of course) in love, or in lust in the last example, with another man’s wife. Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde were written about the same time – the…
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The Pearl Fishers – The Other Duet
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 24th July 2012Everyone knows the first act duet for tenor and baritone from Bizet’s opera The Pearl Fishers. Less well known is the second act love duet for soprano and tenor – ‘Léïla! Léïla!…Dieu puissant, le voilà!’ The story which I’ve resisted summarizing in previous posts on this opera is a love triangle. A Ceylonese Vestal Virgin (Léïla) …
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