Make it your New Year’s resolution to explore some operatic roads less traveled.

THE“towering masterpiece” syndrome foisted on the public by symphony orchestras, opera companies, record labels, and their paid agents in marketing and public relations has obscured the fact that there are many worthwhile pieces that fall into the A-minus and B-plus realms that should be much better known and more often performed.

And, of course, some of what’s in the masterpiece canon doesn’t really belong there either, but that’s a subject for another story. Meanwhile, here are five highly worthwhile but lesser-known operas for your consideration: Rossini’s The Turk in Italy, Weber’s Der Freischütz, Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, Ravel’s L’enfant et Les Sortilèges, and Thomson’s The Mother of Us All.

The Turk in Italy

A few decades ago, Gioachino Rossini seemed like a one-anda-half-trick pony, famous for the often-performed Barber of Seville and the overture to William Tell, while his many other operas languished. That’s not the case today, when Tancredi, Semiramide, Cinderella, and The Italian Girl in Algiers are frequently performed, among others — but there’s still a curious exception.

It’s The Turk in Italy, an 1814 comedy that followed The Italian Girl by just one year and suffered from the mistaken perception that it was simply an inversion of the earlier opera’s locale and storyline, with a lot of recycled music as well. (Rossini was sometimes guilty of the recycling charge, but not here.)

For one thing, it’s Rossini’s most Mozartian comedy, reflecting especially the ironies and intricacies of Così Fan Tutte, which was being performed at La Scala in the months before The Turk in Italy’s premiere there. The preponderance of ensembles in Rossini’s opera is also believed to be a Mozart and librettist Lorenzo da Ponte influence.

In addition, it’s a piece of zany meta-theater, thanks to the early appearance of Prosdocimo, a playwright in search of a comic story drawn from real life, and, as luck would have it,

he’s just stumbled into a Neapolitan gypsy camp full of romantic and sexual intrigue.

Prosdocimo is sometimes part of the action and sometimes a Greek chorus-style commentator on it, delightedly proclaiming “Local color!” when he first spies the gypsies and later explaining to a pair of lovers that a chair needs to be found posthaste, since they’ve almost arrived at the moment when the heroine typically faints. (Her subsequent failure to do so elicits complaints from the playwright about the heroine not following the rules of drama.)

There are actually two Turks in this Italian opera. The first is Zaida, who was once engaged to Prince

Selim but had to flee Turkey when jealous rivals convinced her fiancé to sentence her to death. The second is Selim himself, whose arrival cranks up the intrigue level several more notches until he and Zaida are finally reconciled. As they sail back home, Prosdocimo dots the i’s and crosses the t’s on his comic drama.

Most of the The Turk in Italy score is Rossini at his finest, often in the madcap-energy vein, but also when he steps back, à la Mozart, for reflective moments of great beauty and sensitivity. Recommended CDS are either of the recordings conducted by Riccardo Chailly, as well as Sir Neville Mariner’s set on Philips; good DVDS are on the Arthaus Musik label from the Teatro Carlo Felice and on the Naxos label from the Rossini Opera Festival.

Der Freischütz

The greatest German-language opera composed in the 50-plus years between Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman is undoubtedly Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz.

The title means “The Marksman,” and the opera premiered in 1821 to great acclaim, becoming the most frequently performed German opera of the 19th century. (By 1850 it had been staged in locales as remote as Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, and Sydney.)

Weber’s melodic skill was part of its success. He was often called “The German Bellini,” and his tunes in Der Freischütz are so memorable and spontaneous sounding that many commentators mistakenly believed they were folk songs. He was also a pioneer in the idea of combining dramatic, musical, and design aspects into a unified whole, as well as a superb orchestrator.

The plot is based on a ghost story of the same name, published in 1810, and involves a love triangle between two of the village’s most acclaimed hunters, Max and Kaspar, for the hand of Agathe, who earlier rejected Kaspar. He’s now in league with the devil Samiel and lures Max to the ominous Wolf’s Glen, with the promise of casting seven magic bullets that will help Max win a shooting contest and thus wed Agathe.

Terrifying apparitions visit Max and Kaspar while they cast the bullets. Unknown to Max, Samiel will guide the final bullet in the contest to hit a dove, representing Agathe, who will die. Fortunately, the dove is only wounded, and Samiel claims Kaspar’s life in place of Agathe’s. The local prince promises to let Max wed Agathe after a year of probation.

The Wolf’s Glen scene is the musical and dramatic high point of the opera. Weber used inventive harmonies and orchestrations, monotone choruses, spoken and sung dialogue, and leitmotifs to create an atmosphere of increasing terror, conjuring up trampling horses, wheels of fire, thunder, lightning, hail, meteors, and fire.

Like Otto Nicolai (See The Merry Wives of Windsor, below) Weber died before his 40th birthday, robbing the German lyric theater of an extraordinary talent.

There are several good options when it comes to CDS of Der Freischütz, including the versions conducted by Sir Colin Davis (Philips), Marek Janowski, with the red-hot soprano Lise Davidsen as Agathe (Pentatone), and Nikolaus Harnoncourt (Teldec.)

On the DVD side, the best contemporary versions come from Naxos (a La Scala production) and Unitel (a Dresden State Opera production with Sara Jakubiak, a former Santa Fe Opera apprentice, as Agathe.) Traditionalists when it comes to stage direction and design may prefer the 1960s-era video that’s been released as a DVD on the Arthaus Musik label. (It’s the one conducted by Leopold Ludwig.)

There’s also a good film version of the opera, Hunter’s Bride, shot on location in Germany and boasting a fine cast; it’s available as an Arthaus Musik DVD.

L’enfant et les Sortilèges

Charm. Wit. Wisdom. Variety. Tunes galore. Unforgettable orchestral sonorities. Bravura theatricality. Magical transformations. All those attributes and more grace the 45 minutes of L’enfant et les Sortilèges, a 1925 opera by Maurice Ravel with a text by Colette. (The hard-to-translate title literally means the child and the magic spells, which in this case refers to objects that come to life and animals that suddenly can talk.)

The opera’s theme is the moral awakening of a young boy, who discovers for the first time the profound impact of his destructive actions.

Sent to his room without dinner by his mother, the child lashes out at his possessions, which suddenly start coming to life. The armchair, clock, teapot, a Chinese cup, and two cats all have a short solo or duet in which they describe the injuries they’ve suffered at his hands. Even the numbers in his math book and the shepherds and shepherdess on the wallpaper rebuke him.

He fares no better in the outdoors, where he encounters trees he’s carved into with a knife and a dragonfly and a bat whose mates he killed. As more of his victims surround the child, a squirrel injures its paw, which he bandages. Astonished by the show of kindness, the animals have a change of heart and gently lead him back to his home and his mother.

Ravel began work on what was originally conceived of as a fairy ballet in 1917, then set it aside for several years. During the early 1920s, he became entranced by ragtime, jazz, and American musical comedy, especially those by George Gershwin.

In 1924, he and Colette returned to the piece, recrafting it as an opera in which dance retained a major role. At the time of its premiere he wrote, “Our work requires an extraordinary production: the roles are numerous and the phantasmagoria is constant. Following the principles of American musical theater, dancing is continually and intimately intermingled with the action.”

A superb staging by Laurent Pelly for the Glyndebourne Festival in England is available at encore.glyndebourne.com. It’s a reasonably priced subscription service at $8.99 per month with many

recent productions, and it’s cancelable at any time. (Pro tip: Skip any of the DVD versions currently available on Amazon.) Worthwhile versions on CD include those conducted by André Previn and Lorin Maazel, both on Deutsche Grammophon; by Leonard Slatkin on Naxos; and by Simon Rattle on EMI Classics.

The Mother of Us All

In 1934, the premiere of Four Saints in Three Acts, with music by Virgil Thomson and a text by Gertrude Stein, knocked the American music world on its ear. An avant-garde theatrical event of the first order, it combined Stein’s non-linear text, featuring more than 20 saints, at least four acts, and lines such as “Pigeons on the grass alas,” with Thomson’s seemingly simple, diatonic score, and visual artist Florine Stettheimer’s scenery, most of which was made from that new-fangled invention, cellophane.

Some were puzzled but many were entranced and emotionally moved by the pageant-like production, which featured an all-black cast and transferred to Broadway for a 38-performance run. Despite its success and their mutual intentions, Thomson and Stein didn’t collaborate again until 1945, on The Mother of Us All. (The composer later wrote, “I am sorry now that I did not write an opera with her every year. It had not occurred to me that both of us would not always be living.”)

Thomson suggested 19th-century American political oratory as the central sound for their second opera, and Stein proposed basing it on the life of the suffragette Susan B. Anthony. She finished the libretto shortly before her death in July 1946.

Thomson, a flinty Missourian, coupled her text with marches, waltzes, sentimental songs, patriotic ditties, and hymns redolent of his Southern Baptist and Midwestern upbringing; it premiered a year later in a professional production at Columbia University in New York City.

Their opera is peopled with supporting characters real (Daniel Webster, Andrew Johnson, and Lillian Russell, among others), imaginary (Jo the Loiterer and Indiana Elliott), and autobiographical (Gertrude S. and Virgil T., who function as interlocutors). It kaleidoscopes through late 19th- and early 20th-century American history and attitudes as Anthony fights to secure women’s voting rights, which finally happened in 1920, 16 years after her death.

The Mother of Us All is especially notable for Thomson’s musical setting of the sounds and rhythms of American English and for the cumulative emotional impact of its quiet finale, in which a ghostly Anthony reflects on her life and struggles while a statue of her is unveiled at the U.S. Capitol. Music critic John Rockwell has rightly called it “one of the most moving concluding scenes in all opera.”

The Santa Fe Opera staged a celebrated version of the opera for the American Bicentennial in iconic designs by Pop artist Robert Indiana. A recording of the 1976 production received mixed reviews at the time. It has been reissued on CD, but, like L’enfant et les Sortilèges, The Mother of Us All really must be seen for its full impact to emerge, especially at first acquaintance.

The best available (and cheapest) way to go is free on Youtube — a complete performance by advanced students from the Juilliard School that takes place in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American wing sculpture court. Check it out at youtube.com/ watch?v=d9zeuwyzhb8&t=547s.

First Runner-up:

Quite a few opera professionals share the same dirty little secret. They greatly admire Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff, but the comic opera about Shakespeare’s very errant knight that they enjoy just as much, if not more, is Otto Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, which is remarkably faithful to its source in dramatic construction and characterization.

A German-language singspiel with dialogue instead of recitative, it feels like the sort of opera Mozart would have written had he lived into the early Romantic era, with many brilliantly constructed ensembles and act finales. (Sadly, the 38-year-old Nicolai died two months after the opera’s 1849 premiere.)

The Merry Wives of Windsor would absolutely have been in the top rank if good audio or video versions of it weren’t so hard to come by. Sometimes copies of the CD conducted by Bernhard Klee, with an all-star cast including Edith Mathis and Hanna Schwarz in the title roles, plus Peter Schrier, Bernd Weikl, and Kurt Moll as Falstaff, show up on Amazon or other resellers. If they do, grab one.

The only downside of Klee’s version is a minor one indeed; there’s narration between the musical numbers rather than actual dialogue. The upside is that it moves things along even more quickly. Once you hear The Merry Wives of Windsor, especially in this recording, you’ll forever wonder why it isn’t performed much more often.

The Merry Wives of Windsor