We are especially partial to the music of the later centuries--eighteenth through the twentieth, although we do listen with pleasure to music of the earlier periods. We have become increasingly fond of operas over the years and have attended performances of most of the operas of Mozart, even two productions of some of the operas. We have also seen a number of live performances of Puccini, Rossini, Strauss, and Verdi operas, plus the famed verismo operas--Caval1eria Rusticana and Pagliacci. In addition, we have gone to productions of many Wagner musical dramas, as he preferred to call them. Other operas we have attended are three productions of Beethoven's Fidelio, one production each of three Benjamin Britten's operas, Billy Budd, Peter Grimes, The Turn of the Screw, one production of Harbison's The Great Gatsby, two productions of Janacek's Kat'a Kabanovna and one of The Makropolis Affair, one of Mousorgsky's Boris Godunov, one of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, and one of a concert version of Tchaikovsky's La Pique Dame.
With the assistance of my friend and colleague, Joy Roach, I am doing extensive research into the use of classical music in the "Inspector Morse" and "Rumpole of the Bailey" series.
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