Lyric Opera Community Contributor It is an incredible honor to direct Puccini’s Madame Butterfly as my debut as Lyric Opera of Kansas City. Bringing this beloved masterpiece to life offers a profound opportunity to explore its breathtaking music, emotional depth, and complex cultural legacy. Yet, for all its beauty and sincerity, Madame Butterfly is not without controversy. Over time, … Read more
In Madama Butterfly, Puccini, already celebrated for La bohème and Tosca, achieved something even more refined: long, seamless arcs of sound where voice and orchestra fuse into a single emotional current. Famous for his search for a piece’s sonic color or tinta, Puccini studied Japanese melodies and sonorities, weaving them into his late-Romantic language with … Read more
An anonymous reviewer in 1820 compared the enthusiasm for Rossini to a contagion: “No matter how many times we have been forced to hear these masterpieces, feeling the greatest unwillingness in the world, we were never able to leave the theatre without feeling inflamed with this delicious sentiment that secretly takes possession of the heart.” … Read more
Each character in this opera is reaching for something just out of their grasp—identity, belonging, and a sense of wholeness. They are misfits because of their heartfelt desire to be seen, heard, and to matter. They are all connected by a quiet ache, or in Don Magnifico’s case, a more boisterous one—a deep longing to … Read more
Julie Farstad, Associate Professor of Painting at the Kansas City Art Institute Born on a farm in the Wisconsin prairie and eventually finding her true home in the semiarid valleys and mesas of New Mexico, Georgia O’Keeffe marveled at the awe she felt in the natural world and spent her life trying to create paintings … Read more
Trey Hock, Assistant Professor of Animation at Kansas City Art Institute Born in 1864, Alfred Stieglitz was just twenty-five years younger than the medium of photography itself. As a young man, Stieglitz was driven by a love of theater, music, as well as the visual arts. It wasn’t until his late teens that he came … Read more
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