Did you know that there is a World Opera Day? It’s true! Established in 2019, World Opera Day is celebrated on the 25th of October, the birthday of Georges Bizet and Johann Strauss II, composers of possibly the world’s most famous opera and operetta. World Opera Day is an awareness campaign of the positive impact and value of Opera for society. Check out the list below for some books, music and movies relating to opera.
La Boheme by Giacomo Puccini
The full english text for the opera La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini. A romantic tragedy about the love between a poet, Rodolfo, and a seamstress, Mimì.
Director Franco Zeffirelli delivers one of the best-ever film versions of a classic opera, with the benefit of two of the genre’s greatest voices — Placido Domingo and Teresa Stratas — in Verdi’s operatic version of Alexandre Dumas’s novel Camille, in which a young nobleman falls in love with a doomed courtesan.
The Barber of Seville (1775) was originally a comic opera, or a mixture of spoken play with music. The story was based on an ill-fated alliance between Beaumarchais’ sister and José Clavijo, a Spanish writer. In addition, Beaumarchais raises a cry for the condemnation of the prevailing social system through his main character, Figaro.
Deep in the passageways below the Paris Opera lives a lonely, talented, horribly disfigured man who revels in terrorizing the theater’s employees as The Phantom of the Opera.
Includes the famous Carmen, Opera Suite No. 2: II. Habanera (Act 1).
Mozart Opera Overtures & Variations From “The Magic Flute”
Featuring highlights like The Abduction from the Seraglio KV 384: Overture.
Puccini: La Boheme by Leonard Bernstein
Music from the opera.
The wide world of opera is waiting!
-Katie , Head of Adult Services & Acquisitions