It's the bittersweet, amazing opera that we call life.
This discounts not only the Wagnerian leitmotif, a tool virtually made for irony, but also any number of poignant, bittersweet moments in Mozartean opera and so much other earlier music.
There is a faintly bittersweet atmosphere at the Santa Fe Opera this summer, the company's 44th season and its last under the directorship of its founder, John Crosby.
The later opera echoes that work's bittersweet spirit but has none of its nostalgic schmaltz.
His first important films were Die verkaufte Braut (1932; The Bartered Bride), regarded as one of the best film adaptations of an opera, and Liebelei (1932; "Love Affair"), a bittersweet love story set in Vienna.
'WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE' There will be a bittersweet quality to this new production of Oliver Knussen's captivating opera based on the beloved, bracing children's book by Maurice Sendak, who died in May.
An amazing tracking shot through a white-on-white penthouse, the site of a furious and ugly romantic showdown, suggests Max Ophüls's bittersweet arabesques, and he does a point-of-view shot through opera glasses with a flourish that's worthy of Hitchcock.
Spears, too, has minimalist roots, and draws also on the bittersweet textures of Renaissance consort music and the vocal ornaments of Baroque opera.
They were followed by an altogether different sort of opera, Der Rosenkavalier (1911), again with a libretto by Hofmannsthal, a bittersweet comedy notable for the superb musical depiction of the central character (the Marschallin).
It mixes soap-opera sentimentality with playful, jumpy aggression and dresses a bittersweet, rags-to-riches fable in the bright clothes of pop satire.
