La Commedia

La Commedia is an opera in five parts composed by

Ivan Hewett of The Telegraph wrote, “Like all Andriessen’s best pieces, this showed a man constantly engaged, in the most passionate terms, with the unfathomable dichotomies of human life; passion versus rationality, matter versus spirit, life and death.”^[4] Andrew Clements of The Guardian rated the Dutch National Opera set four out of five stars and argued, “The tone is wonderfully varied – sometimes profoundly serious, sometimes wildly exuberant or irreverent – matched to a score that is equally diverse and eclectic.”^[6] In the Los Angeles Times, Mark Swed lauded it as a “profoundly moving, if slyly unsentimental, meditation on life, love and death [...] it is Andriessen’s “Italian” opera and has the depth, musical richness and (I predict) lasting power of late Verdi.” Swed praised “the humor, the ingratiating jazziness, the terrible fury and, in the end, the ravishing grace of the later scenes.“^[1] In a 2019 poll of critics and editors of The Guardian, the opera was ranked the seventh greatest classical composition of the 21st century, with Clements referring to the score as “wonderfully polyglot”.^[8]

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