Dutch critics believe that no Italian singer can surpass light-timbred Dramatic Soprano Gre Brouwenstijn, 41, as an interpreter of Verdi.

For nearly a decade, those two warring soprano queens, Maria Meneghini Callas and Renata Tebaldi, have dominated the world of European (and U.S.) opera, leaving other postwar singers to peep about to find themselves honorable mention. But slowly, and largely unnoticed in the U.S., old Europe has fashioned a new…

The Germans started a Dutch opera with native singers and musicians and the Dutch loved it. At war’s end, they decided to keep it.

It took a national military defeat and four years of German rule to make the Dutch take grand opera and like it. It was not that Holland had plugged its dikes against all music: it has long had fine Bach societies and a great symphony orchestra, the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam…