Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. Not so at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, where the opera premiered in 1831. Prior to its welcome new production, ...

On The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom, by David Woodman.

On a revival of Dvořák’s Rusalka, at the Bavarian State Opera. “I must destroy you,” sings Rusalka, the water nymph and title character of Antonín Dvořák’s only opera of enduring popularity, to the ...