Carmen with Elīna Garanča and Roberto Alagna

The Metropolitan Opera is offering free streams of their past performances. I have the luxury of two monitors at home, so I leave the performance up in a browser window and listen/watch throughout the day while I work in the primary screen. The process is a little more osmosis than active engagement, but by the end, I feel like I got 80% out of it as I would watching the first time.

One tip, I also pull up the synopsis of what happens in the opera in Wikipedia and it increases my understanding of the work immensely.

Opera sets seem to be a whole different type of stagecraft. All are spartan in some manner, “pointing” their construction to the performers. I watched the entirety of Carmen and they employed a complicated mechanism of rotating sets. The design and way the performers used this to dramatic effect was top-notch.

This week is Wagner week, and here is the schedule for The Metropolitan Opera.