Peter Rose
In 2001 Peter Rose became the Editor of Australian Book Review. Previously he was a publisher at Oxford University Press. He has published several books of poetry, an award-winning family memoir, Rose Boys, and two novels, the most recent being Roddy Parr (Fourth Estate, 2010). His latest poetry collections are Rag (Gazebo Books, 2023) and Attention, Please! (Pitt Street Poetry, February 2025). His extensive criticism appears in a variety of publication, including ABR. Rose writes and performs short absurdist plays with The Highly Strung Players.
A week in Paris (Billy Strayhorn’s moody panacea) gave ABR Arts a perfect opportunity to savour some of the city’s abundant musical life. We’ll start with an important revival at the Opéra National de Paris, performed at the Bastille.
Decades ago, during what we might now regard, a little wistfully, as the heyday of the national company, the operas of Leoš Janáček (1854–1928) were fix ... (read more)
Saturday. The usual 9 a.m. flight. The man beside me hefts a Gladstone. ‘I haven’t seen one of those in years,’ I say, this being sociable Saturday. I recall a worn one from my twenties owned by someone else. Always empty it went everywhere with him, like a statement of intent. This one
... (read more)
Poetry in English has lost one of its paragons, Australian literature one of its finest ambassadors, and Australian Book Review a beloved friend with the death in London of Peter Porter, aged eighty-one. He died on 23 April – Shakespeare’s birthday – by which time our May issue had already gone to print.
Peter Porter’s first collection, Once Bitten, Twice Bitten, appeared forty-nine years ... (read more)
The fecundity of Gaetano Donizetti in the 1830s – when he was in his thirties – was exceptional, even during those rampant years for Italian opera. His successes were frequent: Anna Bolena (1830), L’elisir d’amore (1832), Lucrezia Borgia (1833), Maria Stuarda (1834), and Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), perhaps his finest achievement. Donizetti, who wrote about seventy operas in all before his ... (read more)
for Craig Sherborne
‘Grief wrongs us so.’ Douglas Dunn
... (read more)
Amilcare Ponchielli (1834–86) wrote ten operas, but only one of them is still performed – La Gioconda – and few attending Opera Australia’s concert performances in Sydney will have heard it often.
Ponchielli – Italy’s leading composer between Verdi and Puccini – was born in Paderno, near Cremona. He was taught music by his father, the church organist. After graduating at the Milan C ... (read more)
Inspired by everything he had learned and seen at the Mannheim Court in 1777–78, Mozart, aged twenty-four, was primed when he received a commission to write an opera for the 1781 Munich carnival. His years in Mannheim had been formative, exposed as he was to Elector Carl Theodor’s court, which rivalled that of Frederick II, king of Prussia, in discrimination and cultivation.
The vehicle was t ... (read more)
Of all the major operas, Siegfried had the most curious gestation. After completing Act II in 1857, Wagner put it aside for twelve years, ‘as if weary of Siegfried’s progress: this improbable hero’s search for love, fulfilment, individuation’, as I suggested in my review of Opera Australia’s production in 2016. During those years – in a matchless digression – Wagner wrote Tristan und ... (read more)
One hundred and seventy years after thousands of desperadoes and gold-cravers trekked to a place called Sandhurst, Wagnerites set off to Bendigo on Friday afternoon (in rather more orderly fashion it must be said, along the potholed Calder Freeway) for the opening night of Melbourne Opera’s first full production of Der Ring des Nibelungen
A complete Ring cycle, presented over a week, is a ... (read more)