Customer Reviews

Opernglas

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Over the years I have mostly browsed this magazine at Tower Records, buying an occasional issue to study in detail. The demise of Tower ended this. As someone who has to look up every other German word, I can only give a general impression of it's content.

Before opera on VHS and then DVD, Opernglas was a way to study regietheater productions. By looking at the photos and translating only the photo captions I was able to get an impression of regietheater early on. Recently I have used auto-translate to get an idea of what is being covered. Of course auto-translate is not context sensitive, ie it does only half the job. Making sense out of some music articles in English can be hard enough, let alone reading the same material in German. I know people with far more language skills who don't follow German opera news stories, because it takes more time than is available to them.

Unlike Opera News which is mostly about the Met, Opernglas covers many opera companies, some of which are very small. Coverage is not limited to Germany. I cannot say this with certainty, but coverage seems to be even handed.

Opernglas is very good at covering emerging European singers long before they become known in the USA.

If you only want an occasional article, you can download them for about 3.50 Euro each. Unless you know the title, year and issue and enter that into Opernglas' search accurately, you will not find it. In other words there is no way to search for an artist name to see if there are any articles on that artist, unless you already have the year and month. Try running a search for 5 years, ie sixty issues, to find what you are looking for, not fun. Of course this is a good way to keep the print version viable.

Conclusion: This is a magazine that I would buy if I was going to do long term studies of the European opera scene. It would be nice if someone who reads it on a regular basis would give us a review. Low interest in this magazine in America is, in my considered opinion, a reflection on us, not the magazine.