Its music, the most tragic anyone ever composed, makes almost concrete the Aristotelian abstractions of fatally flawed characters hurtling to their doom.
Their tragic heroines sing music composed more than 200 years apart.
Trying to turn these downtrodden peasants into looming tragic figures, de Falla composed a brooding, weighty score, with clear touches of Wagner, Puccini and Debussy.
From the 5th century bc there survive fragments of paeans by Pindar (who was especially fond of the Pythian Apollo of Delphi), Bacchylides, and the tragic playwright Sophocles, who composed a paean to Coronis (the mortal mother of Asclepius), who was killed by Apollo or his twin, Artemis, for being unfaithful.
OperaUpClose are preparing for a new production of Carmen starting on August 5, and last month they gave a makeover to La Traviata, Verdi's angry exposé of the prevailing sexual double-standards of 19th century society, 150 years after he first composed his tragic tale of illicit love amid the glamour, hypocrisy, and social hierarchy of 1850s Paris.
The glory of the "Goldberg" Variations is that they include some of the most tragic, grief-filled music Bach ever composed (Variation No. 25) and some of the most comedic.
As he suffered from illness in his later years, Shostakovich composed his three last quartets: exquisite, tragic masterpieces, projections less of an individual beaten by a regime than of a frail man cornered at last by death.
Narai also wrote the final version of the poem of tragic romance, Pra Lo ("Lord Lo"), which had first been composed by an anonymous author in a much earlier reign.
It was composed for a production of Goethe's tragic play of the same name, which chronicles the true story of a 16th-century Flemish warrior who led the resistance to the Spanish domination of the Netherlands.
(Vivien Schweitzer) ★ 'Oresteia' (Friday through Aug. 4) The Russian composer Sergei Taneyev, whose music has largely faded from view since the late 19th century, composed a single opera: the ambitious "Oresteia," based on Aeschylus's tragic trilogy.
