Tea at Trianon: Opera in the Modern World

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, January 19, 2026

Opera in the Modern World

From the New York Post:

Jonas Kaufmann will no longer sing at London’s Royal Opera House — because, of all things, the pay is too low. “I don’t know how you do it,” the tenor recently told BBC Radio. In the same interview, he revealed that he won’t bother singing at the Metropolitan Opera anymore, either, though that’s about ideological differences. For a singer like Kaufmann — arguably the biggest star in all of opera — to swear off two of the world’s top-five opera houses is not merely eyebrow raising. It is cataclysmic.

“I feel so sorry for the next generation,” he lamented. Nearly every singer who has ever pursued an operatic career has pondered whether anything the business has to offer is worth the hassle: the heartache of losing engagements or rejection, the stress over one’s vocal health, the missed holidays, the travel, all of it. In the past, a comforting thought would have been that, if only one can perhaps achieve the top levels of the business, all will be well. And now, the very top of the business is telling us that all is certainly not well. (Read more.)