There are countless rankings of the best deaths in opera that grade by the most memorable (“La Bohème,” “La Traviata”), the most epic (“Dialogues of the Carmelites,” “Götterdämmerung”), and the most difficult to stage (“La Wally,” “La Juive”). All of those criteria are well and good, but what I want—what I really, really want—in an […]
Category: Rankings & Roundups
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Ten of the Best Composer Love Letters
People often look to classical music for Valentine’s Day inspiration. Which is great, unless your inspiration is Carlo Gesualdo. While there are plenty of bad mixes (and one actually good classical music for sex playlist), looking directly into the private lives and letters of composers also offers a trove of possibilities for everyone from your […]
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The Sex Lives of Women Composers, Ranked
We are regularly bombarded with information about Schumann’s syphilis, Mozart’s interest in rimming, and Tchaikovsky’s unfortunate love for his nephew. But what about the kinky exploits of women composers in history? In the name of gender equality in music, I have ranked the sex lives of 30 women composers in absolutely objective order of worst […]
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Cooking the 1988 Metropolitan Opera Cookbook
In the summer of 2022, a second-hand bookshop in Oslo was having its closing sale. In the very back, past the classical music biographies and encyclopedias, Aksel found The Metropolitan Opera Cookbook (1988). He dropped everything and took to Twitter, and a few weeks later, amid Kevin’s transatlantic move to New York City, they once […]
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Every Olympics “Carmen” Performance, Ranked
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a figure skater in possession of an Olympics program, must be in want of a “Carmen.” Mirroring its ubiquity in opera houses season after season, it’s hard to think of a Winter Olympics in the last 50 years that hasn’t included at least one singles competitor or pair […]
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Domestic Primadonna Assoluta
In the autumn of 2021, neatly coinciding with the release of her latest album “Amata dalle Tenebre,” Russian soprano Anna Netrebko published her first (cook)book, the German-language Der Geschmack meines Lebens (“The Taste of My Life”). Upon discovering this a few weeks ago, our only course of action was to throw multiple-course Anna Netrebko-themed dinner […]
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Every Classical Singer’s Christmas Album, Ranked
I love Christmas: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever, about that. The register of my joy at this time of the year is secured by the glühwein, the television specials, the tree markets, and the carols. I love Christmas like Kanye loves Kanye. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of […]
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Every Schubert Song, Ranked
In her 2019 review-cum-retrospective of John Updike, writer Patricia Lockwood noted that her assignment felt “like a flamboyant completist stunt, like one of those Buzzfeed articles where someone ranks every episode of the original Care Bears cartoons.” I would like to situate this ranking of every Schubert song in the same hallowed pantheon as the […]
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Piano Entanglements
In the spring, while stuck at home avoiding the coronavirus, I read Lea Singer’s forthcoming novel, The Piano Student, which tells the story of Vladimir Horowitz’s affair with a 23-year-old male protege, Nico Kauffman. Drawing from Horowitz’s actual letters to Kauffman, Singer depicts a forbidden relationship in which Horowitz vacillates between ardently declaring his love […]
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Every Scarlatti Sonata, Ranked
Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757) wrote a lot of Sonatas. Fair enough: what else was there to do all day before Twitter was invented? Listening to all these pieces in 2020 proved another challenge. I’ll make no claim to have heard each work in monkish concentration, and I make no guarantees for the correctness of my observations. […]