PUCCINI'S La Boheme is about Mimi, that pathetic creature who loves oh so briefly, then is snuffed out, coughing up her guts with a bad case of consumption. Never mind that she is able - poor and ill though she may be - to warble at the top of her spotty lungs and drive her lover to distraction. Mimi is a tragic maid.

Dear Mr. Kosman: How come we don't have any modern opera composers that approach those of the past? When you hear "Carmen" or "Tosca," you can hum the melodies of those compositions, but I dare anyone to hum the melodies of anything composed after 1930. It would be so nice to hear a new "warhorse" opera. Where is the modern-day version of Verdi, Wagner, Puccini or Bizet?

Sunday’s chess column was about Noam Elkies, a Harvard mathematics professor who is also a music composer and chess player. Though Elkies is unusual at being talented in all three areas, he is not entirely unique. Through the years, there have been a number of strong chess players who were excellent mathematicians or musicians.

Washington National Opera (WNO) and The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts have announced the retirement of Music Director Heinz Fricke. The announcement marks the conclusion of the German maestro's remarkable 18-year tenure leading the Washington National Opera Orchestra and the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, which cooperatively share a corps of 61 professional musicians.

Michael Tumelty’s trenchant criticism of the decision to reduce the orchestra of Scottish Opera to half-time working is high on anger and suggestions of mischief (“Hang your head in shame, Scottish Opera, you are a disgrace to the nation”, Herald Arts, August 28).

Die Berliner Philharmoniker unter Simon Rattle triumphierten mit Schönberg, Webern und Berg. Mit solch beredtem Ausdruck erfüllten die Berliner auch die bewegenden Totenklagen von Weberns.

Dies war der Fall nach seinem Debüt an der legendären New Yorker Metropolitan Opera in La Traviata im Februar 2006. Die Erinnerungen daran (Meinen die wirklich mich?) lässt ihn an die Anfänge seiner Karriere in Deutschland in der Provinz, aber auch an persönliche Krisen zurückdenken. Aber wenn eine große alte Dame der Opernkunst wie Christa Ludwig meint, nachdem sie Kaufmann zum ersten Mal gehört hat, das ist ganz große Kunst, dann lässt das aufhorchen.

Gothic sensibility permeated the Royal Albert Hall on Monday evening: euphoric, melancholic, sun-dazzled and moon-drunk.

Driven and obsessive, drawing on 1970s jazz funk, soul and gospel, Mark-Anthony Turnage's new BBC Proms commission Hammered Out burst noisily upon the world at Thursday's world premiere conducted by David Robertson. A scrunchy havoc of whip, sleigh bells, saxophones, bass guitar, as well as the full forces of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Nibelung note of a household hammer for good measure, bashed, danced and whirled through this 15-minute non-stop toccata.

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — The year in the photo is 1920. The great Viennese composer Alban Berg, 35 years old, stands at an open window of his Vienna home, gazing directly out at the camera yet also somehow beyond it. His face conceals like a mask. The breakthrough triumph of his first opera, “Wozzeck,’’ is five years in the unknowable future. We sense perhaps an air of reserved confidence, perhaps a tint of melancholy. But there is more to this picture.

Future operatic soprano Jasmina Halimic discovered Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" as a schoolgirl in Bosnia. But it wasn't until years later -- after moving to the United States in 1994 -- that she really got it: Tolstoy's masterpiece became an Oprah's Book Club selection in 2004, and Halimic reread it while studying music in Indiana.

By choosing Oceans Apart for his 2010 theme, Edinburgh International Festival director Jonathan Mills opened up fertile avenues for exploration in spoken theatre and classical music, while leaving little room for manoeuvre in opera. The obvious choice was Puccini’s wild west thriller La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West). Premiered in New York 100 years ago and never previously heard in Scotland, it conjures a picture of the New World that, though seen through the eyes of a composer who had never experienced it, effectively captures the values of a frontier community.

There are more ways of divvying people up than according to how much money they've got. A survey this week by Reader's Digest concluded that a large proportion of Britain is culturally impoverished, with one-third of those surveyed never having listened to classical music and three-quarters unable to identify Edward Elgar as the composer of Pomp and Circumstance.

On Gustav Mahler's 11th birthday, the story goes, a family friend asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. "Jesus Christ," said the lad. To the astonished "Why?" he replied: "Because I want to suffer for other people."

The celebrated tenor Rolando Villazon is renowned for his exuberance when it comes to his beloved opera but he's equally passionate about the music of his Mexican homeland.

Siegfried, Brünnhilde, Wotan and company are heading for Houston, as Houston Grand Opera prepares to tackle the Mount Everest of opera, Richard Wagner's monumental Ring Cycle.

L'Opéra de Paris lance sa rentrée en douceur, avec trois reprises de productions anciennes ( Le Vaisseau fantôme, de Wagner, L'Italienne à Alger, de Rossini, Eugène Onéguine, de Tchaïkovski): sans l'attrait de la nouveauté, on ira surtout pour les distributions, avec notamment la brillante Vivica Genaux dans les vocalises rossiniennes et l'immense Ludovic Tézier en Onéguine.

Arthur Honegger’s “Chant de Libération” was not a piece I intended to consult during a research trip to Paris in June 2009. Like others who knew of it, I thought the score was lost. Honegger had composed this song for baritone, chorus and orchestra in secret during the German occupation of France. Its only known trace was a tantalizing description of its October 1944 premiere in liberated Paris: a “triumph” by a “musician of the Resistance,” the music critic Maurice Brillant wrote.

The festival's New World theme has already offered up one baroque representation of the Aztec emperor Montezuma in Graun's opera seria - here it presented another in the form of Purcell's music for The Indian Queen. Dramatically, the play from which the music was taken seems to have been an unwieldy work. The outline synopsis runs to seven pages in the concert programme and contains more twists, turns, and complicated relationships than an entire basket of Handel operas - not in themselves known for either their concision or their plot rationality.