One of the nicest things about the Met’s production of Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment is that although it features two of the biggest names in opera, Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Flórez, the show feels like an ensemble piece. The opera is the ideal vehicle for Dessay and Flórez to shine their brightest, but in the HD telecast on April 26, the entire cast, down to chorus and the smallest roles, contributed to the sizzle and the general level of excellence. And best of all, everyone seemed to be having the time of their lives.

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Philip Glass’ Satyagraha is nearly thirty years old, and it’s proving to be one of his most durable creations. Metropolitan Opera director Peter Gelb calls it Glass’ greatest opera, a masterpiece, and based on the impact it makes in the Met’s vibrant new production, co-produced with the English National Opera, it’s hard to disagree. Satyagraha is a Sanskrit word meaning “truth force,” or “strength through truth,” which Gandhi coined while living in South Africa between 1893 and 1914, working for equality for the country’s Indian population. The philosophy of non-violent resistance that Gandhi and his followers practiced became the model for many of the most successful liberation movements of the twentieth century. The opera focuses on six pivotal events in Gandhi’s life during that period, preceded by a scene from Hindu mythology. The scenes are not arranged chronologically, and the opera’s Sanskrit text, taken from the Bhagavad Gita by Constance de Jong, consists of philosophical reflections rather than dialogue, so the opera obviously doesn’t conform to conventional narrative structure. Each carefully constructed scene makes sense as a dramatic unit, though, and the effect of the whole is powerful.

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The Metropolitan Opera continued its series of HD simulcasts to movie theaters with a performance of Tristan und Isolde on Saturday. This year’s run of the opera is likely to end up in the annals of performances that are, in the diplomatic words of Met General Manager Peter Gelb, “somewhat star-crossed.” This was to have been (and may yet be) an epoch-making Tristan, starring two of the greatest Wagnerian singers of our time, Deborah Voight and Ben Heppner, conducted by one of the greatest of the composer’s contemporary interpreters, James Levine, in a starkly but beautifully simple production by director Dieter Dorn and designer Jürgen Rose. But it was not to be.

Ben Heppner took ill with a viral infection and had to cancel his appearances, although he may have recovered enough to sing the last two performances later this week. His initial replacement was deemed inadequate and removed after a single performance, and was replaced by Gary Lehman. Then, at the second performance, Deborah Voight became ill in the middle of the second act and had to leave the stage to be replaced by her understudy. In the third performance, because of a malfunction in the stage machinery, Mr. Lehman was thrown into the prompter’s box (!), but fortunately didn’t sustain any serious injuries, and the performance was resumed. (Amazingly, these circumstances pale in comparison with those of the opera’s 1865 premiere: the Tristan, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, died of a heart attack soon after the premiere, although he was only 29, and Wagner blamed himself for writing a role so physically and psychologically grueling that it precipitated the singer’s death.)

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In some circles, Berg’s Wozzeck and Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten are considered the most important or significant operas of the 20th century. The outstanding recent Wergo release of the 1965 world premiere production of Die Soldaten prompted some thoughts about the relationships between the operas that go beyond their musical similarities and the subject matter — the brutalizing effects of military culture — that they share. Those connections in turn trigger a branchlike configuration of further associations….

The authors of the plays on which the two operas are based are curiously connected. In 1836, Georg Büchner (1813-1837), the author of Woyzeck, wrote a short story (based on fact) about the precarious mental condition of Jacob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792), author of Die Soldaten. In another musical twist, Wolfgang Rihm wrote an opera, Jakob Lenz, in 1978, based on Büchner’s story, adding to the growing numbers of Operas About Librettists (and Playwrights Whose Work Became Operatic Librettos), but that would be the subject of another feature.

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The DVD medium has had the unforeseen capability of clarifying the appeal of classical works that are germane to the theater. Adolphe Adam (1803-1856) was born the same year as Hector Berlioz and represents the other side of the Berliozian coin. If Berlioz represents a kind of early French Romantic avant-garde, Adam is like the derrière-garde, though still fighting the same battle. Whereas Berlioz produced three cantatas to win a Prix de Rome — the Paris Conservatoire’s seeming pre-requisite to practice as a French composer — only to discard the winning effort, Adam never succeeded in winning the Prix at all, and his family and professors alike persuaded him to find another line of work. Nevertheless, Adam prevailed simply by digging in and doing it. While Berlioz toured with his own symphony orchestra, singers and corps de ballet, Adam’s fate was at the mercy of the public, his fortunes rising and falling in line with how well his properties did in various Parisian theaters. Adam’s attempt to set up his own opera company was foiled by the outbreak of the Paris Revolution of 1848, and it took him six years to pay back the debt he incurred because of its failure. Ironically, one way he earned the money back was through teaching at the Conservatoire!

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A number of opera’s golden-age stars have passed away in recent years, but none quite so sadly as the tenor Giuseppe di Stefano who officially died yesterday, but whose life was effectively ended more than three years ago when, at the age of 83, he was beaten during a robbery at his Kenyan villa. He had been on life support in a Milanese hospital ever since, incapacitated by severe head injuries.

Di Stefano’s operatic career was comparatively short, starting in the late 1940s, hitting its stride in the 1950s, and effectively ending in the mid-1960s, but he did continue to sing in public in a limited capacity until the early ’70s. Di Stefano’s voice did not age well, arguably due to his choice to sing heavier dramatic repertoire that wasn’t suited to his essentially lyrical gifts, but in his prime he was one of the finest Italianate voices on the international scene. His 1953 recording of Puccini’s Tosca with Maria Callas in the title role and Victor de Sabata conducting is his most recognizable recording, and it was his continued partnership with Callas that cemented his status as a leading tenor. Ironically, or perhaps just fittingly, appearances with Callas on her farewell tour in 1973-74 — when both singers were suffering severe vocal decline — marked the official end of di Stefano’s public career.

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With Valentine’s Day upon us, it seems natural for opera-loving classical-music-type people to think about operas that relate to the holiday. It’s harder than you’d think to come up with much of a list of musical love stories that actually fit the spirit of the holiday. Just looking at some of the classic operas points up the problem:

Tristan und Isolde
La Traviata
Il Trovatore
La Boheme
Lucia di Lammermoor
Pelléas et Mélisande

So many of the great operatic love stories have such bummer endings! Usually the girl ends up dead or only very occasionally the guy ends up dead or they both end up dead. This is not the message most people would want to send to any current or potential Valentine.

So, what about comedies where guy gets girl or girl gets guy?

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In early February, Deutsche Grammophon is releasing a new recording of a semi-staged performance of Leos Janácek’s opera The Excursions of Mr. Broucek, with Jirí Belohlávek conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Singers. The standard reasons for giving this seldom performed opera a chance are that it’s by the master composer of Czech opera; it has a lot of comedy — usually the domain of operetta and musicals, not ultra-serious 20th century operas — and finally, this particular recording is based on a new critical edition of the score. But a not so standard reason for trying this out is the element of science fiction/fantasy in it. (Janácek would go on to write The Makropulos Case, which has a Twilight Zone-ish twist to it and was based on a story by Karel Capek, author of the play R.U.R.) The Excursions of Mr. Broucek tells the story of one man’s fantasies, a little bit like James Thurber’s Walter Mitty, a little bit like Baron Munchausen, or in the opera realm, The Tales of Hoffmann and Hary Janos.

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