Opera spends so much of its time killing off female protagonists that it's refreshing to come back to The Makropulos Case. In it Janáček, in one of his many moments of generosity, imagines what might happen if you allowed a woman not just to live but to live forever. The answer? They become a bloody nightmare.

Gounod's Faust is many things: vaudeville act, sentimental romance, Gothic tragedy, Catholic catechism, in short, a wholly unrealistic but winningly schizophrenic work that should be taken about as seriously as an episode of Sunset Beach. Director Des McAnuff's attempt to marshal this melodrama into revealing truths about Nazism, war crimes and the morality of modern science was always going to be a bit ambitious.

Ever since I can remember, the composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg has played a walk-on part in histories of Soviet music. If you find him in an index at all (probably under Vainberg or Vajnberg, and usually with the first name given him by a box-ticking Soviet border guard in 1939: Moisey, or even Moshe), you’ll usually end up reading one of those melancholy and unhelpful lists: “Shostakovich’s followers include...”

Since his death at the San Marino Grand Prix in 1994, the legend of charismatic Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna has grown to almost mythic proportions. Last year the three-time world champion was voted Best Driver in F1 History in a drivers’ poll in Autosport magazine, and a new documentary about his career is due in cinemas this autumn from Working Title Films.

Perhaps we can drop the "sir" here, as he preferred, though most of the contributors below only knew him in his knighted later years. No death of a musical great, at least since the departure of Mstislav Rostropovich, has caused such a flurry of tributes and reminiscences, even if many of us were long prepared for the end and marvelled at the way he soldiered on to give more great performances in his final year.

Sir Charles Mackerras has died at the age of 84. In tribute to one of the most highly respected and best-loved of conductors, theartsdesk republishes here an interview he gave on the eve of conducting Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera last October. Despite bouts of ill health, he found time to talk about his friendship - and falling out - with Britten, his time conducting the opera under Britten's watchful eye, his experiences in Prague in 1948 as a witness to the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, his pioneering performances of Mozart from the 1960s and his run-ins with Richard Jones and Christopher Alden over their "monstrous" modern productions.