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Alceste, Wq. 37 (the later French version is Wq. 44), is an opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck from 1767. The libretto (in Italian) was written by Ranieri de' Calzabigi and based on the play Alcestis by Euripides. The premiere took place on 26 December 1767 at the Burgtheater in Vienna.
The second of Gluck's so-called "reform operas" (after Orfeo ed Euridice), it was first performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 26 December 1767. A heavily revised version with a French libretto by Leblanc du Roullet premiered in Paris on 23 April 1776 in the second Salle du Palais-Royal. The opera is usually given in the revised version, although this is sometimes translated into Italian. Both versions are in three acts.
Revised for presentation in Paris, Alceste became an essentially new work, the translation from Italian to French necessitating several changes in the musical declamation of text, with certain scenes significantly reorganized with new or altered music. Some of the changes were made upon the advice of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of Gluck's greatest French admirers. The bulk of the libretto adaptation, however, was made by French aristocrat Le Blanc du Roullet, with improvements by the composer.
Gluck fought several efforts to make the new version of Alceste conform to French tastes, resisting pressure to end the opera with an extended ballet. The new libretto does, however, introduce several subsidiary characters for dramatic variety, and, following the example of Euripides, on whose work the libretto is loosely based, even calls in Hercules in the final act.
In Don Giovanni, written in 1787, twenty years after Alceste and the year Gluck died, Mozart used exactly the same chord progression for the Commendatore speaking to Don Giovanni in the garden scene that Gluck used for the line of the High Priest when saying that Alceste will die if no one takes her place. Hector Berlioz notes how this section of Don Giovanni is "heavily in-inspired or rather plagiarized". Berlioz further discusses the authenticity of some of the arias. For example, when Gluck went to Vienna, an aria was added to act 3. Berlioz comes to the conclusion that Gluck was under so much pressure that he let it happen. Also, Berlioz notes corrections added by Gluck during rehearsals, and misunderstandings in the score, due to what Berlioz calls Gluck's "happy-go-lucky" style of writing.
Maria Callas starred as Alceste in a production at La Scala in 1954 which was recorded. It was her first collaboration in a stage performance with director Luchino Visconti.
The Metropolitan Opera has presented Alceste in three different seasons, with four sopranos starring in a total of eighteen performances. The Met premiere of the opera, on 24 January 1941, featured Marjorie Lawrence. There were four more performances that season, two starring Lawrence and two starring Rose Bampton. In the 1951/52 season, Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad sang Alceste in five performances, including her farewell performance with the company on 1 April 1952. On 6 December 1960, Eileen Farrell made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Alceste. She sang the role a total of eight times that season. Her final performance of the role, on 11 February 1961, marks the last time to date that the opera has been performed at the Met.
The Lyric Opera of Chicago opened its 1990 season with a performance of Alceste starring Jessye Norman, while Catherine Naglestad appeared in ten performances of Alceste with the Stuttgart State Opera between January and March 2006. It was given by The Santa Fe Opera as part of its summer festival season in August 2009 with Christine Brewer in the title role.
The first UK performance took place at the King's Theatre, London in 1795. More recent productions have included those in Scotland at Ledlanet in 1972 and by Scottish Opera in 1974.
Industry:Drama
Alceste (Alcides; HWV 45, HG: 46b, HHA: I/30) is a masque or semi-opera by George Frideric Handel.
It was written as incidental music to a lost play by Tobias Smollett, which was rehearsed at Covent Garden Theatre but never performed. There was an overture and songs for Acts 1 and 4, 19 movements in total. It was composed from 27 December 1749 to 8 January 1750. Handel later used the music in The Choice of Hercules, HWV 69, and revivals of Alexander Balus, HWV 65, and Hercules, HWV 60.
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Alceste, ou Le triomphe d’Alcide is a tragédie en musique in a prologue and five acts by Jean-Baptiste Lully. The French-language libretto is by Philippe Quinault, after Euripides’ Alcestis. It was first performed on 19 January 1674 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal by the Paris Opera.
The opera was presented in celebration of King Louis XIV’s victory against Franche-Comté, and the prologue features nymphs longing for his return from battle. The opera itself concerns Alceste, princess of Iolcos and queen of Thessaly, who in the first act is abducted by Licomède (Lycomedes), king of Scyros, with the aid of his sister Thetis, a sea nymph; Aeolus, the god of the winds; and other supernatural forces. In the battle to rescue her, Alcide (Hercules) is triumphant, but Alceste’s husband, Admète (Admetus), suffers a mortal wound. Apollo agrees to let Admète live if someone will take his place in death. Alceste volunteers herself but is rescued by Alcide, who loves her. The opera ends with a celebration of Alceste’s return from the underworld and of Alcide’s noble gallantry in returning her to her husband and relinquishing any claims to her.
Alceste is Lully’s second tragédie en musique, after Cadmus et Hermione.
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Alcina (HWV 34) is an opera seria by George Frideric Handel. Handel used the libretto of L'isola di Alcina, an opera that was set in 1728 in Rome by Riccardo Broschi, which he acquired the year after, during his travels in Italy. The plot was originally taken from – but partly altered for better conformity – Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso (like those of the Handel operas Orlando and Ariodante), an epic poem set in the time of Charlemagne's wars against Islam. The opera contains several musical sequences with opportunity for dance: these were composed for dancer Marie Sallé.
Alcina was composed for Handel's first season at the Covent Garden Theatre, London. It premiered on April 16, 1735. Like the composer's other works in the opera seria genre, it fell into obscurity; after a revival in Brunswick in 1738 it was not performed again until a production in Leipzig in 1928.
The Australian soprano Joan Sutherland sang the role in a production by Franco Zeffirelli in which she made her debut at La Fenice in February 1960 and at the Dallas Opera in November of that year. She performed in the same production at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1962. It was performed at Ledlanet, Scotland, in 1969. A major production was that of Robert Carsen, staged originally for the Opera de Paris in 1999 and repeated at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, which featured Renée Fleming in the title role.
Industry:Drama
Alessandro (Alexander the Great, HWV 21) is an opera written for the Royal Academy of Music (1719) composed by George Frideric Handel in 1726. Paolo Rolli was the librettist and based the story on Ortensio Mauro's La superbia d'Alessandro. This was the first opera where Handel had cast together in the same opera the famous singers Faustina Bordoni, as Rossane, and Francesca Cuzzoni, as Lisaura. Handel made use of their real-life professional rivalry in his treatment of the story. The original cast also included Francesco Bernardi ("Senesino").
Handel had originally planned Alessandro to be his first contribution to the 1725/1726 season of the Royal Academy. However, Bordoni did not arrive in London in time to stage Alessandro, and Handel substituted his own Scipione in March and April 1726 until his arrival. The opera received its first performance on 5 May 1726 at the King's Theatre, London.
The story is based around Alexander the Great's journey to India, where he meets Poro, the king of India, who was the subject of another Handel opera of that name.
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Alessandro nelle Indie (En. Alexander in India) is an opera seria in two acts by Giovanni Pacini, with libretto by Andrea Leone Tottola, based on Alessandro nell'Indie by Pietro Metastasio. It was premiered in Naples, Italy at the Teatro di San Carlo on 29 September 1824, and had a total of 38 performances in its first season.
This opera is only one of some 70 operatic works using Metastasio's text about Alexander the Great, most of which were written in the 18th century, starting with the work by Leonardo Vinci (1730).
Industry:Drama
Alexandre bis ( 'Alexander Twice' in English translation, 'Dvakrát Alexandr' in Czech translation) is a surrealist comic opera in one act by Bohuslav Martinů, (H. 255), composed in 1937 to an original libretto written in French by André Wurmser.
The opera was intended by Martinů, who was then living in Paris, for performance at the Paris World Exhibition of 1937. However, various delays (including the intervening World War II) prevented its performance during the composer's lifetime.
The opera's first performance was given at the Opera House, Mannheim, on 18 February 1964, when it was conducted by Georg Calder. Shortly afterwards it was given its first performance in Martinů's native Czechoslovakia by the Brno Janáček Opera.
The opera is subtitled 'The Tragedy of a Man who Had His Beard Cut', and the surrealist libretto is set in Paris about 1900. Although Martinů had asked Wurmser for a libretto including a singing cat, he compromised on Wurmser's suggestion of a singing portrait, which acts as narrator to a tale of bourgeois infidelity.
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Alzira is an opera in a prologue and two acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Salvadore Cammarano, based on the play Alzire, ou les Américains by Voltaire.
The first performance was at the Teatro San Carlo, Naples, on 12 August 1845. The contemporary reviews were mixed, and the first run of the opera received only four further performances.
The opening performance received a complimentary note of approval in Naples' Gazzetta Musicale: "Beauties so delicately contrived that the ear can hardly take them in". However, the general reaction in Naples was not positive, even worse when Alzira was staged in Rome in November 1845 and, worse still, after the 1846 presentations at La Scala, resulting in the worst press that the composer had seen since the failure of Un giorno di regno in 1840. It was staged in Ferrara as part of the Spring 1847 carnivale season , after which it disappeared from the repertory.
Prior to 1940, the opera was not performed very often; however, there was a 1938 concert performance in Berlin with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Other recordings show that there has been a steady flow of presentations, many only in concert form, especially since 2000. Postwar stagings include those given by the Rome Opera in February 1967 (with Cornell MacNeil as Gusmano). According to Budden this "proved that the score in genuinely alive" and he concludes by noting that it is "not downright bad" and that "no Verdi opera is totally negligible".
It was not until January 1968 that it was first given in the US: a concert version was given in Carnegie Hall, New York on 17 January 1968 with Louis Quilico. Its UK premiere took place on 10 February 1970 at the Collegiate Theatre in London. Also, in the 1970s, the Orchestra and Chorus of RAI in Turin under Maurizio Rinaldi gave a radio performance which was broadcast.
In February 1981, it was staged by the Teatro Regio di Parma and in July 1996, a performance was given at the Royal Opera House in London
In March / April 1998 it was given in the Stadttheater in Passau; it was included in 2000 in the Sarasota Opera's "Verdi Cycle"; and it was revived at the Teatro Regio di Parma in May/June 2002, with Vladimir Chernov. Periodically, between January and June 2010, it was presented by the Theater St Gallen in Switzerland, with Paolo Gavanelli appearing in some performances.
Other presentations, in concert form, have appeared: in 1999 in the Victoria Hall, Geneva, in June / July; in 2003 in Carnegie Hall, New York on 31 January; and in 2012 in Toblach, South Tyrol in Northern Italy under Gustav Kuhn, conducting the Orchestra Haydn di Bolzano e Trento.
In London in June 2013, the Chelsea Opera Group presented a concert version of the opera, with Majella Cullagh in the title role.
Industry:Drama
Amadis or Amadis de Gaule (Amadis of Gaul) is a tragédie en musique in a prologue and five acts by Jean-Baptiste Lully to a libretto by Philippe Quinault based on Nicolas Herberay des Essarts' adaptation of Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo's Amadis de Gaula. It was premiered by the Paris Opera at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal sometime from January 15 to 18, 1684. There was a later production at Versailles without scenery or machines in 1685.
Amadis was the first tragédie en musique to be based on chivalric rather than mythological themes; Lully's last three completed operas followed in this course. Louis XIV of France chose the theme. In the dance troupe the principal male dancers were Pierre Beauchamp, Louis-Guillaume Pécour and Lestang, and the principal female dancers were La Fontaine, Carré and Pesan. There were eight revivals of the opera in Paris between 1687 and 1771. Between 1687 and 1729 it was produced in Amsterdam, The Hague, Marseille, Rouen, Brussels, Lunéville, Lyon, and Dijon. Today the most famous aria from Amadis is Amadis' much anthologized monologue from act two, "Bois épais". At the beginning of the same act Arcabonne sings "Amour, que veux-tu de moy?", as once did ‘every cook in France’, according to Le Cerf de la Viéville (Comparaison, 1704–6)
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Amadis is an opera in three acts with prologue by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Jules Claretie based on the Spanish knight-errantry romance Amadis de Gaula, originally of Portuguese origin, by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo.
It was first performed at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo on April 1, 1922, nearly ten years after Massenet's death. Massenet had started to compose the piece in 1895 but shelved it and completed it clandestinely in the last years of his life. Amadis is one of three operas by Massenet to have been premiered posthumously; the others are Panurge (1913) and Cléopâtre (1914).
Amadis has gained no lasting popularity but was revived (and recorded on the Koch Swann label) during the Massenet Festival in Saint-Étienne, France in 1988.
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