Glimmerglass Opera's Alice Busch Opera Theater. Credit: Bruce Scott, NPR

World of Opera continues its summer sojourn at Glimmerglass Opera this week with a Donizetti classic, Lucia di Lammermoor, based on the novel, The Bride of Lammermoor, by Sir Walter Scott. Actually, this production throws us just a bit of a twist -- it's actually Lucie de Lammermoor -- the French version of the opera.

Still, whether it's Lucia or Lucie, the opera contains some of the finest music Donizetti ever composed, and that's saying something when you consider that he wrote more than five dozen operas. One example is the beautiful sextet from Act I. That one's got a tune so catchy there's actually an arrangement for jazz band. But nothing in Lucia di Lammermoor is quite so well known and popular as Lucia's sensational mad scene. It's hard to top a fifteen-minute vocal extravaganza, sung by a beautiful woman in a bloodstained nightgown, wielding a dagger, on her wedding night! Once, the scene even showed up in a sci-fi thriller - sung by a space alien as part of an intergalactic recital in The Fifth Element.

This week's Glimmerglass production features a stirring interpretation of the title role by the American soprano Sarah Coburn.