For Joseph Calleja, tenor from Malta with voice ‘like sunshine,’ a star-making role at Met?

For tenor from Malta, a star-making role?

NEW YORK — There’s something about the honeyed sweetness of Joseph Calleja’s voice that seems to evoke memories of a golden age, as if this young tenor carried within his vocal cords a secret passed down from bygone generations.

Supreme Court justices, Ginsburg and Scalia, to appear in Washington National Opera production

WASHINGTON — Two U.S. Supreme Court justices are taking theatrics out of the courtroom — and into to a more suitable venue.

Rome mayor says Riccardo Muti agrees to lead city’s opera house

ROME — Riccardo Muti has agreed to lead Rome’s opera house as the Italian capital tries to raise its music profile in a country where Milan’s La Scala dominates the field, the city’s mayor said.

LA County leaders vote in support of Wagner opera festival

LOS ANGELES — County supervisors have voted to support the Los Angeles Opera’s planned festival next year celebrating Wagner’s epic “Ring” cycle despite one supervisor’s protest over the composer’s anti-Semitic views.

British conductor Edward Downes and dancer wife end lives hand-in-hand at Swiss suicide clinic

LONDON — He spent his life conducting world-renowned orchestras, but was almost blind and growing deaf — the music he loved increasingly out of reach. His wife of 54 years had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. So Edward and Joan Downes decided to die together.

German exhibit examines Nazi relationship to Bach and Mendelssohn in Third Reich

EISENACH, Germany — Richard Wagner is the classical composer most associated with the Nazis, but Johann Sebastian Bach was the one the party dubbed “the most German of Germans” and whose music was played at rallies to stir up nationalist zeal.

Review: Welser-Moest’s musical mastery suffuses Wagner’s Rheingold

VIENNA — The gods were OK. The giants looked neat and the evil dwarf was scary.

Review: Garanca and Brownlee shine as Rossini’s ‘Cinderella’ and her prince at Met opera

NEW YORK — As light and elegant as the wedding cake that fills the stage for the final scene, Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” (”Cinderella”) is helping to usher out the Metropolitan Opera season — providing a nice contrast to the heavier diet of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.

Otto Schenk’s Ring Cycle had profound impact at Metropolitan Opera

NEW YORK — When Valhalla burns and crumbles near midnight on May 9, Otto Schenk’s production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera will be retired.