Lyn Richards
Unintelligible patter
Gilbert and Sullivan are usually credited with inventing the patter song in opera. They're certainly responsible for the classic...
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Lyn Richards
- Aug 30
- 4 min
Mozart can do no wrong
Yes, but what is it that women are the same as? Mozart's Cosi fan tutte has always been controversial, and more so more recently, for...
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Lyn Richards
- Aug 13
- 4 min
Comte de comedy
It’s not very subtle and not at all PC. It requires three brilliant bel canto voices from actors with a wicked amount of comic ability,...
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Lyn Richards
- Aug 6
- 2 min
Rossini's joke journey
Commissioned to write an opera to celebrate the crowning of a king (Charles X, in 1825), Rossini responded with a perky piece about a...
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Lyn Richards
- Jul 23
- 4 min
Beethoven's only opera
He started with a true rescue-opera story from the French Revolution, he blessed it with some of his most sublime music, then took a...
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Lyn Richards
- Jul 18
- 4 min
Rossini's laundry list
'Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind,' he was reputed to have remarked. And also, 'Give me a laundry list and I'll set it...
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Lyn Richards
- Jun 22
- 2 min
Favourite females in opera
Here's the program of choices for our end of term celebration of great female roles. We start with a tantrum - the Queen of the Night...
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Lyn Richards
- Jun 13
- 6 min
Lucia for our times
Donizetti wrote more than 70 works over a 30-year career, eight of them in three year period, composed one of his finest in 11 days and a...
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Lyn Richards
- Jun 6
- 3 min
Brünnhilde: Glorious Maiden
O hehrstes Wunder! Herrliches Maid! (Oh noblest miracle! Glorious maiden!) Thus sings Sieglinde to Brünnhilde, who has rescued her from...
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Lyn Richards
- May 16
- 6 min
"Eva in Paradise"
That's the punch line of the Prize Song that wins Eva in Wagner's late and only 'comic' opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868). ...
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Lyn Richards
- May 2
- 4 min
Obsession and redemption
Wagner didn’t make this story up (unlike the stories of some of his operas) but it hadn’t yet developed into Pirates of the Caribbean. ...
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Lyn Richards
- Apr 27
- 5 min
Women in Opera
A joke about opera most commonly features a hollering, overweight Valkyrie in compulsory horned helmet. Later this term, we’ll turn to...
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Lyn Richards
- Mar 30
- 5 min
Members' Choices
As an end of term special, our U3A Opera Group is holding a concert of performances by singers chosen by our members. Here's the program...
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Lyn Richards
- Mar 20
- 6 min
Finale! Ending an Opera
The end of a novel or play or a musical composition is always a challenge. It has to arrive, to conclude a journey, bring together the...
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Lyn Richards
- Mar 15
- 5 min
Just a seaside bromance?
How can Bizet’s two best-known operas be so different – in so short a lifetime? Between the early, much criticised mythical and romantic...
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Lyn Richards
- Feb 28
- 7 min
Beauty, handsomeness, goodness: Billy Budd
The book (1891) In his novel Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), Herman Melville set – on the ocean of course – a story of evil...
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Lyn Richards
- Feb 14
- 6 min
A Whale of an Opera: Moby-Dick
From the book to the film, then to the opera. We’ve seen this pattern before but in the making of Moby-Dick, the journey has been...
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Lyn Richards
- Jan 31
- 2 min
It is, it is a glorious thing...
Yes, we start the new year of our Opera Course laughing. Specifically, by popular demand, at Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance....
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Lyn Richards
- Jan 23
- 1 min
Opera and the Ocean
Welcome to Tuning in to Opera, 2023! Why start our year with a term whose theme is not an opera composer or a cultural focus or a period...
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