Edward Nelson

The plot is almost identical to Donizetti’s Don Pasquale except that the “old man” is not a fool here and his relationship with his nephew, Henry, is loving. It is more human and tender but still has bite. All the old man, Sir Morosus, wants is silence. Richard Strauss' Die schweigsame Frau was first presented in 1935; Hitler and Goebbels refused to attend because Stefan Zweig, the librettist, was a Jew and Strauss refused to remove his name from the program after the Nazis had insisted it be excised. It was a great success but was withdrawn for just that political reason after only three performances. Presented here is the complete, with some minor tweeks, uncensored version.

Roderick Usher is the last surviving male member of his family, living as a recluse in the ancestral home with his twin sister, Madeline. She is slowly dying of a disease for which her doctor seems unable or unwilling to find a cause or a cure. Roderick begs an old friend to visit. Shortly after the friend’s arrival, Madeline is found dead and is buried in a vault beneath the house. In an attempt to calm the increasingly distracted Roderick, his friend reads to him a medieval romance. As the climax of the tale is reached, the figure of Madeline appears—she has been buried alive and has clawed her way out of the vault to find her brother. Roderick is overcome by horror and as he and Madeline both confront death, the House of Usher collapses around them

It is love at first sight when the knight Walther von Stolzing first meets the goldsmith’s daughter, Eva. But tradition trumps love in 19th-century Nuremberg. Her father has decreed there’s only one way to win Eva’s hand in marriage, and that’s to join Nuremberg’s guild of competitive singers—and beat them all in song.