His music is often touchingly expressive, often magical, often joyous, and it perfectly suits the graceful characters -- too vulnerable to be quite heroic -- who dance through so many lyric tragedies, opera-ballets and other classical and exotic entertainments.
There is a theatrical mix of Greek tragedy and opera buffa to them.
As Jon Lee Anderson wrote last month, she has starred in a long-running political saga that is, by tradition, "a mix of Greek tragedy and opera buffa".
In light of this terrible tragedy our opera family is in mourning for wonderful colleagues lost, who had so much more to give.
"But, meanwhile, even the guy next to you on the subway is living through some big drama some big tragedy, some opera.
Joining the company of one Samuel Jerrold at Sheerness, Kent, for 15 shillings a week, he engaged to "play the whole round of tragedy, comedy, opera, farce, interlude and pantomime".
An earlier prophecy than Nietzsche's regarding tragedy and opera was made by the German poet Friedrich von Schiller in a letter of 1797 to Goethe: I have always trusted that out of opera, as out of the choruses of the ancient festival of Bacchus, tragedy would liberate itself and develop in a nobler form.
So it's the culmination of sort of slightly surreal elements and a romance with tragedy and opera and also realism.
One of the minor tragedies for opera today is Mozart's "Abduction From the Seraglio," which is filled with glorious music and lamed by period humor that seems inextricable from the plot and simply isn't funny anymore.
His radical harmonic notions found elegant expression in his lyric tragedies and opera-ballets, works he did not begin composing until he was 50.
