Today, the film Bad Moms hits theaters. It's a new movie, but bad moms are nothing new to operagoers. Here are some operas to take in if you want to meet some moms whose parental sins well outweigh those of Mila Kunis's onscreen character. (Like the onscreen Bad Moms, some of these moms aren't entirely bad — they're just a little irresponsible.)
The Magic Flute (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1791)
The Queen of the Night doesn't deserve a daughter like Pamina, who tries to save her mom from Sarastro's wrath even after the Queen tries to make Pamina kill the wise ruler.
Médée (Luigi Cherubini, 1797)
Moms don't get much badder than this: furious with her wayward lover Jason, Medea kills the two children they had together. (Not to be confused with Madea, who's such a devoted mother that she took a job as a pro wrestler to support her children.)
Hansel and Gretel (Engelbert Humperdinck, 1893)
Gertrud — the biological mother of Hansel and Gretel in this version — redeems herself by helping rescue her kids from the clutches of an evil witch, and deserves a break given that she has a drunkard husband to deal with, but still, you don't send your kids alone into a haunted forest. You just don't.
Elektra (Richard Strauss, 1909)
As in Hansel and Gretel, there are some aggravating factors here: to wit, the fact that Klytaemnestra's murder of her husband Agamemnon was in revenge for his murder of their daughter Iphigenia. When Klytaemnestra laughs out loud at the news her son was trampled to death by horses, though? That's just rude.
The Manchurian Candidate (Kevin Puts, 2015)
The plot of this thriller — adapted from Richard Condon's 1959 novel — is heavily dependent on surprises, but suffice it to say Sergeant Shaw's mother Eleanor doesn't always have her son's best interests at heart.
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