It’s almost Mother’s Day! Why are so many operatic moms depicted as murderous women on the verge of a nervous breakdown?

Photo: AFP/Getty Images

During the chaos and oppression of China’s Cultural Revolution, one curious new theatrical and operatic genre was born — and it was the child of the Communist Party.

Photos: Zhang Yaxin/Courtesy of the see Gallery, Beijing and the Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto.

Peony Pavilion is one of China’s most famous operas, but uncut performances of this romantic 16th century work can take more than 22 hours. An adapted version of the dream-like opera will take place at the Metropolitan Museum.

Photo: Zhang Yi

Terrorism, worrying about China and immigration from Mexico — these sound like topics for Obama vs. Romney, but these pressing political issues have also found their way into today’s opera houses. Watch excerpts from five contemporary operas that grapple with these hot potatoes head-on.

Is opera healthy today, or is the 400-year-old art form struggling for its life? We assembled a panel of experts to try to answer some important questions about where opera is today and what it might look like in the future. 

Photo: Strauss Peyton/State Library of New South Wales via Flickr

wnyc:

A treat from our sister station WQXR:

Patti Smith’s Top Five Operas

Watch an intensely physical and deeply felt performance by Danielle De Niese, a soprano who brings operatic elegance and rock glam to music by Handel, Dowland and Monteverdi at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York.

Composer Kevin Puts based his winning score on the French film Joyeux Nöel, which tells the true story of a surprise cease-fire among German, French and Scottish soldiers on the battlefields of World War I.

Hear Silent Night, the opera that won the Pulitzer Prize for music.

Photos: Michal Daniel/Minnesota Opera 

Discover Debussy’s floating harmonies, a late-blooming Janáček, the operatic melting-pot of Gershwin and more in a 20th century introduction to opera. 

wnyc:

thesmallercity:

#ShowOfTheNight: The Ring Cycle, like you’ve never seen it before …

We must let our sister-station WQXR know about this….—A.P.

Here I was thinking that my Rocky-inspired Ring Cycle had never been done before. Alas, the collective unconscious.

Related: It sure looks like tenor Jonas Kaufmann is thinking along the same lines.