New Yorkers who visit Berlin often feel at home—the German city is busy, sprawling, decidedly unquaint, has efficient public transportation, and is packed with culture. Glass-enclosed malls rub up ...

Giacomo Puccini's "Tosca" is a very Italian opera - set in Rome, with its grisly denouement unfolding within a stone's throw of the Tiber River. But a glance at the cast for the Houston Grand Opera's ...

Grace Bumbry appeared destined for the opera stage, but her journey from Saint Louis, Missouri, to the opera houses of Europe was long and arduous. She knew what racism looked like. She grew up with ...

The long-serving French President François Mitterrand ordered a new opera house to be built in the early 1980s as one of his Grands Projets, like the I.M. Pei-designed Louvre Pyramid and the Grande ...

Great is Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera. But much of its scenery is hideous, most of its stagecraft pompous, hidebound, stodgy. In Europe, opera is everywhere sung in the language of the land, whereas ...