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Must Opera Be 'Relevant'?

The new opera season is upon us in New York as the Metropolitan Opera prepares to raise its curtain—though it rarely uses its iconic gold silk curtain anymore—on Monday. The company will present a new...

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Review: Metropolitan Opera Searches Dark Heart of 'Otello' in Season Opener

As Metropolitan Opera opening nights go, the 2015 edition had less gala hubbub – few barricades, no protesters and celebrity guests such as Bette Midler and Helen Mirren making relatively quiet...

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The Magic Flute: Recycling

The use of blackface is a dying trend, but it was fundamental to one of the most popular operas of all time, Mozart’s hit comedic opera, “The Magic Flute“. Over the last few decades a number of opera...

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Otello: UNMOORED

“Otello” debuted in Milan in 1887, just two years after European nations gathered in Berlin to agree on a campaign to carve up and colonize the African continent for their own profit. Giuseppe Verdi’s...

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Otello: Haters

This week on Every Voice with Terrance McKnight, we go deeper into Giuseppe Verdi's character of the “Moor of Venice." Otello is a celebrated general in the Venetian army, and as a Black man in a...

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Otello: Black Handkerchiefs Matter

Giuseppe Verdi's Otello rose from enslavement to the ranks of army general and marries an aristocratic Venetian woman. It’s difficult  to imagine the rich cultural heritage of Otello’s African past;...

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Otello: The North Star

As the one Black man in Shakespeare’s play and Verdi’s opera, Otello was not only tokenized, but villainized, criticized and minimized. With such an emphasis on Otello’s flaws, how is it that Desdemona...

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Aida: Red Heart, White Eyes

In Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida,” Princess Aida is torn between her homeland of Ethiopia (ruled by her father, King Amonasro) and her captor, the Egyptian leader Radamès who loves her and whom she loves in...

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Aida: Off the Chain

At the heart of Verdi's opera “Aida” is an African love story, where an Egyptian general and an Ethiopian princess fall in love. It premiered in Cairo in 1871, but the truth is, very few Africans went...

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Aida: 100% Egyptian Cotton

“Opera has always been not just adjacent to colonial conquest, but perhaps … quite a large part of it.” Pranathi Diwakar, Every Voice with Terrance McKnight researcher. When the US and British cotton...

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Aida: America’s Confederates in Egypt

When “Aida” premiered in Egypt in 1871, it delivered some not-so-subtle messaging in the dramatization of light-skinned Egyptians dominating dark-skinned Ethopians. Within two years, the man who...

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