HISTORY

Madama Butterfly is an opera in three acts (originally two) by Giacomo Puccini (December 22, 1858 – November 29, 1924). Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, Puccini's librettists for Madama Butterfly, had also collaborated with the composer on his previous two operas, Tosca and La Bohème. The opera is based in part on the 1898 short ...

The Thomashefskys brings to life the words and music of the American Yiddish theater. The story's lead characters-Bessie and Boris Thomashefky-also happen to be the grandparents of San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas. Bessie and Boris emigrated to the United States from Eastern ...

Philip Glass's inspirational opera Satyagraha (Sanskrit for "truth force"), in the first revival of Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch's innovative 2008 production, airs on Great Performances at the Met Sunday, March 25 at 12 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). In New York, THIRTEEN will ...

The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater, a celebration of Yiddish theater pioneers Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky by their grandson, Michael Tilson Thomas, Artistic Director of the New World Symphony, airs Thursday, March 29 at 8 p.m. (check local listings), ...

The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov starring Rene Pape as Boris and conducted by Valery Gergiev, will air on Thirteen’s Great Performances Sunday, February 13 at 12 p.m. ET on PBS (check local listings). Stephen Wadsworth directs the company’s first new production ...

America's favorite soprano, Renee Fleming, and Russia's greatest living baritone, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, travel to St. Petersburg--the "Venice of the North"--where they perform great opera scenes in the magnificent palaces of the Czars in the former capital of Imperial Russia.

Watch choreographer (and original West Side Story dancer) Eliot Feld, Sondra Lee (one of Robbins' original "Opus" dancers), along with other Robbins' friends and colleagues join the current cast of dancers to contextualize the cultural and historical importance of Mr. Robbins' career and NY Export: ...

Tyler Stovall describes Arthur Briggs' role during World War II in the Montmartre jazz scene, the role of jazz during and after the war, and the origins of Bebop. Tyler Stovall: Arthur Briggs was somebody- he had come to Paris in the mid-‘20s with the ...

BACKGROUND In Shakespeare’s day there was neither television nor radio, neither dictionaries nor history books as we know them, not even newspapers or magazines.  Formal schooling took place in Latin and covered classical texts from ancient Greece and Rome.  University schooling generally prepared students for ...

Sir Philip Sidney Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) was a courtier, soldier, and poet, who, with the likes of Sir Walter Raleigh and Thomas Wyatt, were the English examples of the Renaissance man.  Also like Raleigh and Wyatt, he ran afoul of the reigning monarch, and ...