Thinking with Opera

Who is Carmen? Is she really the exotic femme fatale of popular imagination, or is there more about her story that can be told? How could this be accomplished? In this special instalment of Thinking With Opera, recorded live at a seminar in the Howard Assembly Room at Opera North in February 2022, Professor Edward Venn looks at the many ways in which different operatic components come together to...

“What is the tension between this ugly ideology, the beauty of the music, and the agony of the man producing it?” The final podcast of our trilogy focusing on Wagner's epic last opera is a wide-ranging, unflinching discussion between the journalist, writer and filmmaker Paul Mason and Professor Frank Finlay of the University of Leeds. Paul traces the composer’s changing philosophical viewpoints, f...

In the second of three episodes focusing on Wagner's epic final opera, New Yorker critic and author of Wagnerism and The Rest is Noise Alex Ross and Dr. Áine Sheil of the University of York discuss gender, sexuality and ritual in Parsifal , and in Richard Wagner’s work as a whole. The multi-faceted character of Kundry – ‘Wandering Jew’, mother, seductress – is unpicked, and ambiguous readings of t...

Poet Laureate Simon Armitage and composer Gavin Bryars in expansive conversation about their respective art forms, and what happens when they are brought together. Chaired by Dr Kimberly Campanello, Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leeds, it’s a wide-ranging and warm conversation, illuminated by good humour and the two artists’ evident delight in discovering each other’s work...

How do music, plot, staging, action, dance and performance combine to produce meaning for an opera audience? Taking a close look at Thomas Adès's The Tempest , Professor Edward Venn of the University of Leeds and choreographer and director Aletta Collins – who choreographed the opera's premiere in 2004 – explore the conversation between different elements in opera. They also consider the notions o...

From Monteverdi to Monty Python, cross-dressing, gross-out humour and a preoccupation with the grotesque seems to offer a release from the constrictions of moral codes and social conventions. A familiar face on the Opera North stage, tenor Daniel Norman takes a trip into transgression in the company of Alan O'Leary, Professor of Film and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Drawing on the...

“ In cinema you are a spectator; in opera you are present. I’m fascinated by the notion that we witness in opera: we have to endure .” Ranging from Ancient Greece to The Godfather, and focusing on the operas of Puccini and Verdi, the renowned art historian Professor Griselda Pollock discusses how violence is represented in painting, sculpture, film and literature, how it is performed in opera, and...