Niobe | Opera review

Royal Opera House, London"All tears" is how Shakespeare famously described Niobe, the mythic queen of Thebes, whose pride was punished by the gods with the death of her children, and whose grief was so unremitting that she was eventually transformed into a stone that continued to weep. You won't, I'm afraid, be comparably distraught by the end of Agostino Steffani's eponymous opera, first performed in Munich in 1688. The piece languished in obscurity until its discovery by Thomas Hengelbrock, wh...

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