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Opera Garden Opera Kitchen

Apples in Opera

Opera offers a very varied fruit-bowl, with oranges, peaches, figs, grapes, pomegranates and plums all figuring in opera plots in various ways and with varying levels of significance but this edition of Opera Kitchen is devoted to apples, and there are many references to apples in various operas. We shall restrict ourselves to just four...

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Opera Kitchen

The Emperor of chefs and a peach of a pudding

In 1892, the great Australian soprano Nellie Melba was singing the role of Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and her patron and lover the Duc d’Orléans gave a dinner in her honour at the Savoy Hotel in London. The chef at the Savoy Hotel at the time was the...

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Opera Kitchen

Figs in Mozart and Paisiello

Fancy a fig? Opera can provide them. In Richard Strauss’s opera Salome, Jokanaan, or John the Baptist, imprisoned by Herod, prophesies a time when ‘the sun shall become like sackcloth of hair, and the moon shall become like blood’ and goes on ominously that ‘the stars of the heavens shall fall upon the earth like...

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Opera Kitchen

Tournedos Rossini

Gioacchino Rossini left his mark on the world of opera, but he also left his mark on the world of fine dining too; from the ‘rice aria’ in his early opera Tancredi, which possibly represents the first appearance of risotto in a work of art, to the many gourmet dishes which still bear his name...

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Opera Kitchen

‘Eccellente Marzimino’ – a peep into Don Giovanni’s wine cellar

If you have invited to dinner the statue of an old man whom you have killed, what do you give him to drink? In the last act of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Giovanni, in a fit of bravado, has invited to dinner the statue of a man whom he killed at the beginning of the opera,...

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Opera Kitchen

Myrtle in Cavalleria Rusticana

What does Mascagni’s opera Cavalleria Rusticana have to offer the Opera Kitchen? In the opera, Turriddu’s voice is first heard off-stage singing of the beauties of Lola – he praises her milk-white blouse and her cherry-red lips, but these are amorous adjectives used by a besotted man, so milk and cherries don’t really count as...

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Opera Kitchen

Operatic cups of tea

Here are several examples of tea playing a part in opera: one serves as a welcoming gesture but turns into a way of taking poison; one is a social rite for three Chinese girls relaxing and enjoying themselves; one is consolation in time of family stress; one as a substitute for vodka on the way...

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Opera Garden Opera Kitchen

Cactus in Cavalleria Rusticana: a fight to the death in a cactus grove

In Mascagni’s opera Cavalleria Rusticana, and in the play on which the opera is based, there is no specific setting given for the fight between the two rival characters Alfio and Turiddu which brings the story to its violent conclusion: in the play it is ‘just outside the village’ and in the opera it is...

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Opera Kitchen

Parsley, Puccini and the dead Parrot

It must have been a sad day for the first person who discovered that parsley is highly toxic to pet birds and can cause very serious health problems and frequently prove fatal. Parsley is such a widely-used herb and is so easy to grow in a garden or in an indoor pot, but owners of...

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Opera Kitchen

Parsley, Puccini and the dead Parrot

It must have been a sad day for the first person who discovered that parsley is highly toxic to pet birds and can cause very serious health problems and frequently prove fatal. Parsley is such a widely-used herb and is so easy to grow in a garden or in an indoor pot, but owners of...

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