V WHO emerged in better shape from this year's Venice Film Festival: Martin Scorsese ("The Last Temptation of Christ") or Franco Zeffirelli ("The Young Toscanini")? Mr Scorsese, although the opening night of his film was attended by police cars, saw his work...

Radio When you are so addicted to writers' works and feel bereft after finishing all their novels, you become restless and fretful. It happened to me last year with the Aurelio Zen detective novels of Michael Dibdin, as I lamented in The Spectator...

The New York City Opera may lose its home at the State Theater for the 2008-09 season to allow for reconstruction, then return to the Lincoln Center venue for the start of Gerard Mortier's regime.Susan Baker, City Opera's chairman, said a decision probably will be...

Opera, it might be said, is a kind of madhouse: Musically, it pushes vocal capacities to the breaking point; dramatically, its protagonists are often in the grip of something so grievous that suicide may be the only way out. In Cooperstown, N.Y., where Glimmerglass Opera...

Death in Venice is "visual" in the very worst sense—stuffed with extravagantly pretty pictures that only obscure the themes of Thomas Mann's novella. This film does a disservice to cinema as well as to literature…. (p. 643) Mann's novella, published in 1911, is probably one of the central works of twentieth-century literature, dealing, as it does, with sexual ambiguities, the moral failures of art, and some of the disturbing tensions in the German temperament—...