Verdi

If Rigoletto didn't have bad luck, he wouldn't have any luck at all. This hunchbacked court jester gets tricked into helping his enemies kidnap his precious daughter, who gets turned over to the biggest lecher in town. Despite being essentially raped by that guy, the daughter falls for him and manages to foil her father's plans for revenge, taking the knife intended for the lech and leaving Rigoletto without kin or hope. Naturally, something that sad would have to make a great opera. So great, in fact, that even a ragged performance of Verdi's "Rigoletto" can be quite effective.

"I read with reluctance the librettos that are sent me," wrote Giuseppe Verdi, the great opera composer. "It is impossible, or almost impossible, for someone else to divine what I want." In the case of "Rigoletto," the musical tale of murder, treachery and tragedy to be presented this weekend by the Annapolis Opera, Verdi wanted a script that almost no one else liked. That play was Victor Hugo's "Le roi s'amuse," which opened and closed Nov. 22, 1832, after a single disastrous performance.

Giuseppe Verdi had a ready answer to complaints that his "Il Trovatore" was too depressing, too filled with death. "After all," he said, "death is all there is in life. What else is there?" The Washington Opera's production of "Trovatore," unveiled Saturday evening, takes that attitude and runs with it, often to extraordinary effect. As the audience arrives at the Kennedy Center Opera House, the curtain is already up, revealing bodies of slain soldiers lying on the stage amid ragged rows of swords stuck into the earth, as a heavy rain falls.

Editor's note: In this excerpt from her new book, "Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman," Baltimore Alice Steinbach describes her first visit to Milan, Italy. As is her custom while traveling, she wrote postcards to herself and sent them home as reminders of her expereinces abroad. Dear Alice, Milan seems like home to me. It's one of the big surprises of my trip. Today, sitting in the sun in the Piazza la Scala, an elderly man asked if he could sit next to me. I nodded.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that important novels are not published in December. A corresponding cliche offers that nature abhors a vacuum. Fine writing surfaces, even in December."Like A Sister," by Janice Daugharty (HarperCollins, 192 pages, $23) is a heartrending story of 13-year-old Sissy, called Sister, who bears the responsibility for her unnamed baby sister and twin hellion brothers. The year is 1956. Everyone but neglected Sissy knows "you don't sit and pinch the ends of your hair in public, or pick your nose, or scratch the ring worm on your butt."

I don't think anyone could have felt comfortable singing or playing at the tempo that Mario Venzago selected for the opening of the "Dies Irae" ("Day of Wrath") movement in the Swiss conductor's performance of Verdi's Requiem Mass last night in Meyerhoff Hall. But this is the music in Verdi's great nonoperatic masterpiece that depicts Judgment Day. That is likely to be a scary time for all of us. One suspects the composer, who surely did not want his listeners to feel comfortable, also did not want the orchestra, the four soloists and the chorus to take what they had to play for granted.

It took 22 years for Columbia Pro Cantare to perform its first Verdi Requiem.And when conductor Frances Motyca Dawson and her 150 singers finally got around to that most operatic of sacred masterworks Saturday evening at the Jim Rouse Theatre, they made it worth the wait.The Verdi Requiem is a tough nut to crack under the best of circumstances. It demands tremendous extremes of vocal sound, incessant attention to intonation and balance and technical mastery of some of the toughest choral passages ever composed.

Put pure and simple, the Verdi Requiem is the most electrifying piece in the entire choral canon.And why shouldn't it be, for Giuseppe Verdi viewed the Roman Catholic liturgy for the dead the same way he viewed everything else -- as a potential libretto for grand opera.Composed in 1873 to commemorate the life of novelist Alessandro Manzoni, Verdi's friend and fellow Italian nationalist, the Requiem is, above all, a work of incredible extremes, moving from barely audible pianissimos to the most thunderous eruptions imaginable.

About six weeks after 22 of its members returned from a singing tour of the Czech Republic, Columbia Pro Cantare, Howard County's premier choral organization, has announced details of its 1999-2000 concert season.Under the baton of conductor Frances Motyca Dawson, Pro Cantare will begin its 23rd season Oct. 30 at the Jim Rouse Theatre of the Performing Arts at Wilde Lake in Columbia with a performance of Giuseppe Verdi's monumental "Requiem Mass."Dedicated to the memory of Italian novelist and nationalist Alessandro Manzoni, the Verdi requiem is a dramatic musical treatment of the Roman liturgy for the dead.

Some six weeks after 22 of its members returned from a singing tour of the Czech Republic, Columbia Pro Cantare, Howard County's premier choral organization, has announced details of its 1999-2000 concert season.Under the baton of conductor Frances Motyca Dawson, Pro Cantare will begin its 23rd season Oct. 30 at the Jim Rouse Theatre of the Performing Arts at Wilde Lake in Columbia with a performance of Giuseppe Verdi's monumental "Requiem Mass."Dedicated to the memory of Italian novelist and nationalist Alessandro Manzoni, the Verdi requiem is a dramatic musical treatment of the Roman liturgy for the dead.