Tag

love duet

A Few Love Duets and a Jazz Encore

December 29, 2019

The 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. […]

O Soave Fanciulla

February 13, 2017

Puccini’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. […]

Illicit Love

April 20, 2015

Opera 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 […]

The Pearl Fishers – The Other Duet

July 24, 2012

Everyone 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) […]

About the Editor

Neil Kurtzman

Physician. Professor. Writer.

Neil A Kurtzman MD is the Grover E Murray Professor Emeritus and University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of Internal Medicine at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock. He has combined careers in clinical medicine, education, basic research, and administration for more than 40 years.