We cannot approach opera from the position of snobbish dismissal. We cannot write operas while at the same time lamenting the deficiencies of the genre....

We cannot approach opera from the position of snobbish dismissal. We cannot write operas while at the same time lamenting the deficiencies of the genre. We must fulfil our own ideal by making use of that which the stage has to offer, so wrote Kurt Weill in 1926. At the time, he had just begun seeking a new musical genre, one that would supersede the conventional opera. The resounding success of Die Greigroschenoper proved that the path he had taken was the right one; the new genre emerged at an appropriate time, and it seemed that the audience had been waiting for opera's resurgence too. The adventurous journey Weill pursued for half a century, led from Germany to Paris and finally to New York City. The result of his efforts were considerable simplification of the musical idiom, inspiration by pop and jazz, and the assignment of the vocal parts to actors without traditional professional vocie training. It was a true revolution. And that represented a challenge for the mezzo-soprano Dagmar Peckova, who throughout her illustrious career has appeared on the world's most prominent stages as an artist acclaimed as a refined performer of music by Mozart, Mahler, Bizet...