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Geneviève de Brabant is an opéra bouffe, or operetta, by Jacques Offenbach, first performed in Paris in 1859. The plot is based on the medieval legend of Genevieve of Brabant.
For the 1867 version a comic duet for bass and baritone in the character of two gendarmes was added to Act 2: "Couplets des deux hommes d'armes". In English-speaking countries it is widely known as the "Gendarmes' Duet" or the "bold gendarmes", from H. B. Farnie's English adaptation. As well as being a popular performance-piece, it formed the basis for the U.S. "Marines' Hymn".
The two-act French libretto was written by Louis-Adolphe Jaime and Etienne Tréfeu, and the opera was first staged at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens, Paris on 19 November 1859. A new three-act version (in which the Gendarmes' Duet first appeared), revised by Hector-Jonathan Crémieux, was first given at the Théâtre des Menus-Plaisirs, Paris, on 26 December 1867. An expanded five-act version was devised for a production at the Théâtre de la Gaîté on 25 February 1875. A Paris revival in 1908 at the Théâtre des Variétés with Geneviève Vix in the title role ran for 58 nights.
Geneviève de Brabant was first performed in Vienna (Die schöne Magellone) and Berlin in 1861 and Brussels and Madrid in 1869.
The New York premiere was on 22 October 1868, and Farnie's version was first seen in London at the Philharmonic Theatre in Islington, produced by and starring Emily Soldene as Drogan, with Selina Dolaro in the title role, on 11 November 1871. The production ran for a year and a half, and revivals took place over the following decade with Soldene repeating her Drogan.
Industry:Drama
Genoveva (Op. 81) is an opera in four acts by Robert Schumann in the genre of German Romanticism with a libretto by Robert Reinick and the composer. The only opera Schumann ever wrote, it received its first performance on 25 June 1850 at the Stadttheater in Leipzig, with the composer conducting. It received only three performances during the premiere, and the negative criticism it received in the press played a decisive role in Schumann's decision to not write a second opera.
Genoveva is based on the story of Genevieve of Brabant, a medieval legend set in the 8th century that is reputedly based on the 13th century life of Marie of Brabant, wife of Louis II, Duke of Bavaria. The story gained in popularity during the first half of the 17th century, primarily in Germany through various theatrical settings. Two of the settings from this period, Ludwig Tieck's play Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva (Life and Death of Saint Genoveva) and Friedrich Hebbel's play Genoveva, served as the basis for the opera's libretto.
The plot of the opera has several similarities with Wagner's Lohengrin, which was composed during the same period as Schuman was writing Genoveva.
Genoveva has never won a large popular audience, but it continues to be revived at regular intervals throughout the world and has been recorded several times.
Industry:Drama
The Ghosts of Versailles is an opera in two acts, with music by John Corigliano to an English libretto by William M. Hoffman. The Metropolitan Opera had commissioned the work from Corigliano in 1980 in celebration of its 100th anniversary, with the premiere scheduled for 1983. Corigliano and Hoffman took as the starting point for the opera the play La Mère coupable (The Guilty Mother) by Pierre Beaumarchais. They took seven years to complete the opera, past the initial deadline. The opera received its premiere on December 19, 1991, at the Metropolitan Opera, with the production directed by Colin Graham. The premiere run of seven performances was sold out. The original cast included Teresa Stratas, Håkan Hagegård, Renée Fleming, Graham Clark, Gino Quilico, and Marilyn Horne. The Metropolitan Opera revived the opera in the 1994/1995 season.
Corigliano considers this work a "grand opera buffa" because it incorporates both elements of the Grand Opera style (large chorus numbers, special effects) and the silliness of the opera buffa style. Commentators have noted how the opera satirises and parodies accepted operatic conventions.
Lyric Opera of Chicago staged the opera in the 1995/1996 season in the first performances outside of the Metropolitan Opera, in a lightly revised version that cut some expensive aspects of the Met's production, including an onstage orchestra.
In 2008, on Corigliano's recommendation, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis (OTSL) and Wexford Festival Opera in Ireland engaged composer John David Earnest to rework the score for chamber orchestra — in order to make it suitable for performances in small houses. The World and European première performances of this version took place the following year with co-productions at OTSL and Wexford Festival Opera respectively.
The opera was supposed to be revived at the Metropolitan Opera in 2010. General Manager Peter Gelb had already invited Kristin Chenoweth to play the part of Samira. However, the production was canceled in 2008 because the weakened US economy at the times required the cutting of costs instead of launching an expensive production like this.
Industry:Drama
Gianni Schicchi (Italian pronunciation: , JAN-nee SKEEK-kee) is a comic opera in one act by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Giovacchino Forzano, composed in 1917–18. The libretto is based on an incident mentioned in Dante's Divine Comedy. The work is the third and final part of Puccini's Il trittico (The Triptych)—three one-act operas with contrasting themes, originally written to be presented together. Although it continues to be performed with one or both of the other trittico operas, Gianni Schicchi is now more frequently staged either alone or with short operas by other composers. The aria "O mio babbino caro" is one of Puccini's best known, and one of the most popular arias in opera.
Puccini had long considered writing a set of one-act operas which would be performed together in a single evening, but faced with a lack of suitable subjects and opposition from his publisher, he repeatedly put the project aside. However, by 1916 Puccini had completed the one-act tragedy Il tabarro and, after considering various ideas, he began work the following year on the solemn, religious, all-female opera Suor Angelica. Gianni Schicchi, a comedy, completes the triptych with a further contrast of mood. The score combines elements of Puccini's modern style of harmonic dissonance with lyrical passages reminiscent of Rossini, and it has been praised for its inventiveness and imagination.
When Il trittico premiered at New York's Metropolitan Opera in December 1918, Gianni Schicchi became an immediate hit, whereas the other two operas were received with less enthusiasm. This pattern was broadly repeated at the Rome and London premieres and led to commercial pressures to abandon the less successful elements. Although on artistic grounds Puccini opposed performing the three operas except as the original triptych, by 1920 he had given his reluctant consent to separate performances. Gianni Schicchi has subsequently become the most-performed part of Il trittico and has been widely recorded.
Industry:Drama
Gilgameš is an opera in three acts by Rudolf Brucci. The libretto by Arsenije Arsa Milošević is based on the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. It premiered on November 2, 1986 Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad.
Industry:Drama
La Gioconda is an opera in four acts by Amilcare Ponchielli set to an Italian libretto by Arrigo Boito, based on Angelo, tyran de Padoue, a play in prose by Victor Hugo, dating from 1835. (This is the same source as Gaetano Rossi had used for his libretto for Mercadante's Il giuramento in 1837).
First performed in 1876, La Gioconda was a major success for Ponchielli, as well as the most successful new Italian opera between Verdi's Aida (1871) and Otello (1887). It is also a famous example of the Italian genre of Grande opera, the equivalent of French Grand-Opéra.
Ponchielli revised the work several times; the version that is played today was first given in 1880. There are several complete recordings of the opera, and it is regularly performed, especially in Italy. It is one of only a few operas that features a principal role for each of the six major voice types.
Industry:Drama
Un giorno di regno, ossia il finto Stanislao (A One-Day Reign, or The Pretend Stanislaus, but often translated into English as King for a Day) is an operatic melodramma giocoso in two acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto written in 1818 for the Bohemian composer Adalbert Gyrowetz by Felice Romani, based on the play Le faux Stanislas written by the Frenchman Alexandre Vincent Pineu-Duval in 1808. Un giorno was given its premiere performance at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan on 5 September 1840.
After the success of his first opera, Oberto in 1839, Verdi received a commission from La Scala impresario Merelli to write three more operas. Un giorno was first of the three, but he wrote the piece during a period when first his children and then his wife died and its failure in 1840 caused the young composer to almost abandon opera. It was not until he was enticed to write the music for the existing libretto of what became Nabucco that Verdi restarted his career.
Industry:Drama
Giovanna d'Arco (Joan of Arc) is an operatic dramma lirico with a prologue and three acts by Giuseppe Verdi set to an Italian libretto by Temistocle Solera, who had prepared the libretti for both Nabucco and I Lombardi. It is Verdi's seventh opera.
The work partly reflects the story of Joan of Arc and appears to be loosely based on the play Die Jungfrau von Orleans by Friedrich von Schiller. After writing the music over the autumn and winter of 1844/45, Verdi's opera had its first performance at Teatro alla Scala in Milan on 15 February 1845.
Some scholars speculate on the reasons for Verdi's having chosen this subject. For example, Gabriele Baldini notes "the weighty presence of her father, first as violent enemy, later as tender comforter" (which re-introduces the father-daughter relationship first visible in Oberto) helps to explain the use of Schiller's "altered version" of history, many of the features of which bear no relationship to historical fact.
By the early 19th century, the story of Joan of Arc had appeared as an opera many times, including those of Nicola Vaccai (1827) and Giovanni Pacini (1830), both of which were strongly reminiscent of Schiller. Therefore Budden's telling comment that "invention was not Solera's strong suit" is meaningful in light of what happened next.
After hearing from Verdi's publisher, Giovanni Ricordi, that he would like an assurance that no French copyright might exist (given that he'd heard about a French play on the same subject), Solera, in his response to the publisher, denied any assertion that Schiller's play was the source, and he claimed that the work was "an entirely original Italian drama ... I have not allowed myself to be imposed upon by the authority either of Schiller or Shakespeare ...My play is original".
But musicologist Julian Budden, when (for instance) he refers to Joan dying on the field of battle rather than being burnt at the stake, makes it clear that some aspects of the libretto are "merely Schiller diluted". He is also somewhat critical of the overall flow of the libretto when compared to the play, complaining that "characters are reduced to a minimum" and "for poetry and humanity we are given theatrical sensationalism".
Industry:Drama
Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Julius Caesar in Egypt, HWV 17), commonly known simply as Giulio Cesare, is an Italian opera (dramma per musica) in three acts composed for the Royal Academy of Music by George Frideric Handel in 1724. The libretto was written by Nicola Francesco Haym who used an earlier libretto by Giacomo Francesco Bussani, which had been set to music by Antonio Sartorio (1676).
It was first performed at the King's Theatre in Haymarket, London on 20 February 1724. The opera was an immediate success. Handel revived it (with changes) in 1725, 1730, and 1732; it was also performed in Paris, Hamburg, and Brunswick. Like Handel's other works in the opera seria genre, Giulio Cesare fell into obscurity in the 19th century.
The roles of Cesare and Cleopatra, sung by the castrato Senesino and famous soprano Francesca Cuzzoni respectively, and which encompass eight arias and two recitatives accompagnati each, make full use of the vocal capabilities of the singers. Cornelia and Sesto are more static characters because they are completely taken by their primary emotions, she with pain because of her husband's death and constantly constrained to defend herself from the advances of Achilla and Tolomeo, and he consumed by vengeance for his father's death.
Cleopatra, on the other hand, is a multifaceted character: she uses at first her womanly wiles to seduce Cesare and gain the throne of Egypt, and then becomes totally engaged in the love affair with Cesare. She has great arias of immense dramatic intensity Se pietà di me non senti (II, 8) and Piangerò la sorte mia (III, 3). Her sensual character is described magnificently in the aria V'adoro, pupille, in which Cleopatra, in the guise of Lidia, appears to Cesare surrounded by the Muses of Parnassus (II, 2). This number calls for two orchestras: one is an ensemble scene with strings with sordino, oboe, tiorba, harp, bassoons and viola da gamba concertante.
Curio and Nireno do not get any arias in the original version, only singing recitatives, though they take part in the first and final choruses. However, Handel composed an aria for Nireno for a later revival in 1730.
In the 20th century, the opera was revived (in heavily altered form – reorchestrated and revamped with the male castrato roles transposed down for a baritone, tenor or bass) in Göttingen in 1922 by the Handel enthusiast Oskar Hagen. Hans Knappertsbusch and Karl Böhm both conducted it in Munich in 1923, and its first American performance took place at the Smith College of Music in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1927. The first British revival of a Handel opera was the staging of Giulio Cesare at the Scala Theatre in London in 1930, by the London Festival Opera Company, singing in English. The young Herbert von Karajan conducted a production in Ulm in 1933. It has subsequently proven to be by far the most popular of Handel's operas, with more than two hundred productions in many countries.
In modern productions, the title role, written for a castrato, is sung by a contralto, mezzo-soprano, or, more frequently in recent years, a countertenor. The roles of Tolomeo and Nireno are normally sung by countertenors. The role of Sesto, written for a soprano, is now usually sung by a mezzo-soprano.
The work is considered by many to be Handel's finest Italian opera, possibly even the best in the history of opera seria. It is admired for its superb vocal writing, its dramatic impact, and its deft orchestral arrangements.
Giulio Cesare is now regularly performed.
Industry:Drama
Gloriana is an opera in three acts by Benjamin Britten to an English libretto by William Plomer, based on Lytton Strachey's 1928 Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History.
The first performance was presented at the Royal Opera House, London, in 1953 during the celebrations of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
Gloriana was the name given by the 16th-century poet Edmund Spenser to his character representing Queen Elizabeth I in his poem The Faerie Queene. It became the popular name given to Elizabeth I. It is recorded that the troops at Tilbury hailed her with cries of "Gloriana, Gloriana, Gloriana", after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
The opera depicts the relationship between Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex, and was composed for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953. Several in the audience of its gala opening were disappointed by the opera, which presents the first Elizabeth as a sympathetic, but flawed, character motivated largely by vanity and desire. The premiere was one of Britten's few critical failures, and the opera was not included in the series of complete Decca recordings conducted by the composer.
A set of Courtly Dances from the opera is often performed separately as a concert piece.
Industry:Drama
