Bel Cantanti Opera Visitors", at St. James Episcopal Church in Leesburg, Virginia. Bel Cantanti has had continued success with its productions of : Donizetti's "L'elisir d'Amore", Verdi's "Rigoletto", Menotti's "Amahl and the Night Visitors", Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin", Rossini's "Il barbiere di Siviglia", Donizetti's "La fille du régiment", Humperdinck's "Hänsel und Gretel", Rachmaninoff's "Aleko", Tchaikovsky's "Iolanta", Mozart's "Le nozze di Figaro", and Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor". The company's 2007-2008 season produced fully staged versions of Mozart's "Die Entführung aus dem Serail" ("The Abduction from the Seraglio", performed in German, March 2008) and G. Puccini's birth with an abridged version of "La bohème". In December
Persian Letters texts and renewed perspectives. Particularly important were the extensively annotated edition by Paul Vernière and the research of Robert Shackleton on Muslim chronology; also studies by Roger Laufer, Pauline Kra and Roger Mercier, which put new focus on the work’s unity and integrated the seraglio into its overall meaning. Others who have followed have looked into the ramifications of epistolary form, the structure and meaning of the seraglio, Usbek’s contradictions. Beginning about 1970 it is religion (Kra) and especially politics (Ehrard, Goulemot, Benrekassa) which predominate in studies on "Lettres persanes", with a progressive return to the role of the seraglio