19 March 2011: Donizetti, Lucia di Lammermoor

Matinee. Metropolitan Opera Live in HD. Production: Mary Zimmerman; Conductor: Patrick Summers. Lucia: Natalie Dessay; Edgardo: Joseph Calleja; Enrico: Ludovic Tézier; Raimondo: Kwangchul Youn

A splendid production, up to the usual Met standards, with Natalie Dessay an amazing Lucia, a petite dynamo with enormous stamina and unerring musical instincts. The libretto, adapted from the Scott novel The Bride of Lammermoor, is a good bit less silly than a lot of opera narrative platforms. It nonetheless features at its center the much put-upon and finally doomed heroine of many a tragic opera, a culturally revealing figure about whom so much has been written, notably Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (1993).