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      36 Things That Stuck With Us in 2024

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      The movie scenes, TV episodes, song lyrics and other moments that reporters, critics, editors and visual journalists in Culture couldn’t stop thinking about this year.The Last Scene in a Film‘Challengers’Mike Faist in “Challengers.”MGMReal tennis, like real dancing, happens when the body is rapt and alive, where visceral sensation takes over and the only thing left is the crystallization of every nerve and muscle, both aligned and on edge. That last match was a dance.— More

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      How a Soprano With Dyslexia Rose to the Heights of Opera

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      Elza van den Heever, a star of “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” at the Metropolitan Opera, no longer sees dyslexia as a hindrance — just a different way of learning.When the soprano Elza van den Heever was hired to sing the role of the Empress in Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” at the Metropolitan Opera, she was elated. It was a dream role — the kind that could cement her reputation as a leading singer.But van den Heever was also nervous. She has struggled with dyslexia since her childhood, in South Africa. And “Frau” is one of opera’s most daunting works, not least because of its dense libretto.“I just sort of assumed in life that I would never be able to sing this kind of complicated music,” she said. “I knew this would be my Mount Everest.”For three years, van den Heever followed a rigorous routine, learning the “Frau” music five to 12 measures at a time and studying the text “as if I were a toddler learning a new language,” she said.Then the pandemic hit, and the Met’s revival of “Frau” was called off.“I was devastated,” she said, “100-percent gutted.”Finally, van den Heever is getting her moment. “Frau” was rescheduled, and is now onstage at the Met through Dec. 19. Van den Heever has won praise for her shimmering voice and seamless virtuosity, and this run of “Frau” has been hailed by critics as a must-see opera.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Shadow of a Childless Woman: The Mythic Roots of Strauss’s ‘Frau’

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      What’s behind the strange emphasis on childlessness in “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” the Strauss-Hofmannsthal opera now at the Met? Look to the ancients.Although the music of “Die Frau ohne Schatten” (“The Woman Without a Shadow”) is often transcendentally beautiful, it is among the least performed of the Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal operas at the Metropolitan Opera. Its relatively rare appearance on the Met stage is, I believe, in large part because of its weird, somewhat incomprehensible, and to some contemporary tastes offensive, libretto. The opera compounds the felony by being (at over four hours) the longest of all the Strauss-Hofmannsthal operas. Only “Der Rosenkavalier” comes close, but as “Rosenkavalier” is the best loved of all the pair’s operas, the length of “Frau” cannot be the only culprit.It’s the libretto. Any summary immediately brings to mind Anna Russell’s satire on the convoluted plot of Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” which she excused by remarking, “But that’s the beauty of Grand Opera: you can do anything so long as you sing it.”The “Frau” libretto concerns the Empress, the daughter of the invisible spirit god Keikobad and a mortal woman, who has married the Emperor (a mortal man) but cannot bear children. The sign of her defining lack is that she has no shadow; because she is part spirit, she doesn’t have enough substance to generate a shadow or a child.Many Strauss aficionados have long been uncomfortable with the opera’s strange emphasis on childlessness. But the return of “Die Frau” to the Met’s stage (through Dec. 19) comes at a fraught moment when audiences are dealing with abortion and transgender issues, not to mention concerns over a declining birthrate. They might be apt to criticize it for what they see as a natalist stance. Men and women, however, have been caught up in the convoluted dance of mortality and fertility since the dawn of history, and “Frau” draws upon that tradition, allowing us to see our present preoccupations in both the ancient wisdom and the ancient folly that still bedevil us.Mortality and fertility become real issues when the Empress learns that unless she gets a shadow within three days, her father, the god, will turn her husband, the Emperor, to stone. So she goes to the world of mortals to try to buy a shadow from the malcontented wife of a very nice but very poor man who wants children. He is named Barak, and he’s a dyer, which can be heard, for those listening in English translation, as “a dier,” one who dies, which is the defining characteristic of the dyer and his wife.Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss in 1912. Their opera “Die Frau ohne Schatten” premiered in 1919, in the wreckage of World War I.Fine Art/Heritage Images, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Classical Music Our Critics Can’t Stop Thinking About

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      Watch and listen to five recent highlights, including performances by Davóne Tines and Lise Davidsen, and a new album by Ethan Iverson.The New York Times’s classical music and opera critics see and hear much more than they review. Here is what hooked them during the past month. Leave your own favorites in the comments.Davóne TinesAn installation view of “Living Room, Orlean, Virginia,” part of “Making Home — Smithsonian Design Triennial” at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAndrew Carnegie’s 1902 mansion on Fifth Avenue, a Georgian homage on an immense, Gilded-Age scale, is currently the home of a more modest domestic scene: the bass-baritone Davóne Tines’s childhood living room.As part of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s triennial exhibition, “Making Home,” Tines has worked with the director Zack Winokur and the artist Hugh Hayden to create “Living Room, Orlean, Virginia,” an uncanny, poignant replica of the house of Tines’s grandparents, who raised him.‘Living Room, Orlean, Virginia’Sonic composition by Davóne Tines and Zack Winokur with Alma Lee Gibbs Tines, and John Hilton Tines Sr. Sound engineered by Al Carlson.The “Living Room” tableau, arranged on an enormous rocker, is a meditation on “home” as something soothing yet precarious for a musician like Tines, who spends much of his year on the road. On closer inspection, this installation, with its cozy arrangement of furniture, an upright piano and even a rug over carpeted flooring, has a dreaminess to it: Eerily, the photo frames are empty.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Strauss’s ‘Die Frau Ohne Schatten’ at the Metropolitan Opera

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      “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” a dense ode to fertility, may not sound appealing at first. But in this performance, the fairy tale comes movingly to life.It’s not easy to make “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” sound appealing.Believe me, I’ve tried. But when you describe Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s most opulent creation, which opened on Friday in one of its infrequent, glittering revivals at the Metropolitan Opera, the piece always seems dense and ponderous.Starting with the title: “The Woman Without a Shadow.” In this fairy tale, being without a shadow is both a literal condition and a representation of the inability to bear children. The idiosyncratic symbolism only deepens as the plot probes layers of fantastical realms, complete with a singing falcon, a choir of the unborn and the clock ticking down to an emperor’s transformation into stone. Two couples — one human, one demigod — face temptation but persevere through trials to achieve enlightenment and happiness. Oh, and fertility, too.You might think a four-hour allegorical ode to pregnancy isn’t your thing. But I’m here to tell you: Just go.With its formidable length and daunting vocal, instrumental and scenic demands, “Frau,” written around the time of World War I, has much in common with Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, to which it nods. And both tend to seem stilted and overblown when summarized.But like the “Ring,” “Frau” comes alive in performance — its royalty and commoners, flashes of magic and heavy-handed symbols, ending up movingly real and relatable. Hofmannsthal’s elegantly stylized, exquisitely poetic (and, for some, pretentiously contrived) text is warmed by the intensity and compassion of Strauss’s music.Last seen at the Met 11 years ago, “Frau” has always been an event for the company. The Met premiere, conducted by Karl Böhm in 1966, was a historic highlight of the first season in its Lincoln Center home.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bringing the Magic of ‘Fanny and Alexander’ to the Opera Stage

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      A new opera by Mikael Karlsson and Royce Vavrek, directed by Ivo van Hove, aims to capture the lavishness of Ingmar Bergman’s film, in half the time.Ingmar Bergman’s film “Fanny and Alexander” luxuriates in space. In its longest version, a television mini-series that spanned more than five hours, the camera lingers on interiors that in their accumulating details say as much as the characters, who themselves say quite a lot.Bergman made another edit of the film, of a little more than three hours, for theatrical release. But the longer “Fanny and Alexander” spends 90 minutes alone on a single Christmas Eve and morning in the lives of the loving but complicated Ekdahl family in early 20th-century Uppsala, Sweden.Opera, too, is a slow-moving art form that luxuriates, but in different ways. Composers and singers relish sound, not sight. And so, in a new opera based on “Fanny and Alexander,” opening at La Monnaie in Brussels on Dec. 1, that Christmas scene takes half as long as it does in the TV cut. It’s one of several changes that were made for this adaptation, composed by Mikael Karlsson to a libretto by Royce Vavrek, and with a starry team that includes the director Ivo van Hove and the singers Sasha Cooke, Thomas Hampson and Anne Sofie von Otter. (The production will be streamed on multiple platforms on Dec. 13.)The director Ivo van Hove and the singer Anne Sofie von Otter, rehearsing the new opera. Ingmar Bergman, van Hove said, is “a realist about human emotions, but he is also poetic.”Simon Van RompayMost obviously, the opera has a running time of two and a half hours, less than half that of the longer cut of the film. Still, the stage version will be recognizably “Fanny and Alexander,” Bergman’s partially autobiographical coming-of-age tale, in which fantasy lives freely alongside reality as a vast tableau of human experience is seen through the eyes of a child. Bergman, who had planned for it to be his last film, said around its release, in 1982, that it represented “the sum total of my life as a filmmaker.”The film plays on television every Christmas in Sweden, and Karlsson, who is Swedish, said he felt the most pressure to get that holiday scene right. When he, Vavrek and van Hove met early in the opera’s development, van Hove suggested hurrying through Christmas to get to the wedding: the marriage of Alexander’s recently widowed mother to the local bishop, the precipitating event of the story’s darkest dramas.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Angelina Jolie Plays Opera Diva Maria Callas. We Went With Her to the Met.

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      The Metropolitan Opera House was awash in pearls and tuxedos on a recent gala evening. Socialites traded political gossip by the bar, and bankers discussed coming vacations in the Maldives.Then a golden elevator door slid open and a glamorous figure slipped out.Heads turned, cellphones clumsily emerged and people began to talk. Is that really her? What is she doing here? She seems taller in person. Look at those tattoos!I had invited Angelina Jolie to the Met to see a performance of Puccini’s “Tosca” ahead of the release of “Maria,” a new film starring Jolie as opera’s defining diva, Maria Callas.Jolie and Larraín at the Met. “There’s an authenticity here that is beautiful,” Jolie said. “There’s a poetry to it all.”Jolie is one of the most recognizable people on the planet, commanding attention wherever she goes. But her night at the opera got off to a bumpy start. She had a problem with her dress, a black, floor-length Yves Saint Laurent with a velvet cape. (The seamstresses in the Met’s costume shop were summoned, but Jolie soldiered on without help.) And when I met her in the foyer, she seemed to be having last-minute doubts about me shadowing her, saying it might spoil the experience.“I just want to enjoy the evening,” she told me. “I want to take it all in.” More

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      Puccini Died 100 Years Ago. So Did the Great Opera Tradition.

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      There’s a knock at the door.A poor young poet is struggling to write in his attic apartment when he is interrupted by the sickly seamstress who lives downstairs. Her candle has gone out; can he light it?Barely 15 minutes later, these two strangers are singing ecstatically about their love. Implausible, right? But when a performance of Giacomo Puccini’s “La Bohème” is working its hot magic, nothing could be more believable.And nothing could be more essentially operatic than such a scene, with the emotions compressed and heightened through music. Puccini, who died 100 years ago, on Nov. 29, 1924, proved himself again and again a master of moments like this: unleashing a Technicolor extravagance of feeling while at the same time conveying plain, simple truth.A painter assuring his jealous girlfriend that her eyes are the most beautiful in the world. A prince, pursued by a city desperate to know his name, promising that it will remain a secret. A teenage geisha convinced her husband will come back to her.Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) was the Dickens of opera, able to manage the elusive combination of nearly universal accessibility and deep sophistication.A. Dupont/Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs DivisionOnce you know these passages, just thinking about them can bring you to tears. Spoken, the texts would be generic, sentimental, even laughable. Set to Puccini’s music, they suggest the most sincere and profound experiences that humans are capable of. More