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Die Hochzeit (The Wedding) (WWV 31) is an unfinished opera by Richard Wagner which predates his completed works in the genre. Wagner completed the libretto, then started composing the music in the second half of 1832 when he was just nineteen. He abandoned the project after his sister Rosalie, who was the main supporter and the spokesman of the family, expressed her disgust at the story. Wagner destroyed the libretto.
Today, only three pieces survive from the opera.
What is still known of the story is that it concerns the events surrounding the intended marriage of a young woman, Ada, to Arindal. This is a political marriage, not one of love. On the eve of the wedding, Ada's lover, Cadolt, comes to see her. She rejects his advances, preferring to defend her honour but, in the process, pushes him over the balcony to his death. Ada still loves Cadolt and collapses and dies at the funeral next to his body.
Industry:Drama
Hugh the Drover (or Love in the Stocks) is an opera in two acts by Ralph Vaughan Williams to an original English libretto by Harold Child. According to Michael Kennedy, the composer took first inspiration for the opera from this question to Bruce Richmond, editor of The Times Literary Supplement, around 1909–1910:
"I want to set a prize fight to music. Can you find someone to make a libretto for me?"
Vaughan Williams worked on the opera for a number of years, before and after World War I. The work did not receive its first performance until 4 July 1924 at the Royal College of Music, London, in performances described as "private dress rehearsals". The "professional premiere" was at His Majesty's Theatre on 14 July 1924. The opera's first performance in the United States took place on 21 February 1928 under the auspices of the Washington National Opera, a semi-professional company not related to its present namesake. Tudor Davies created the role of Hugh in both these productions.
The opera was performed by the professional Canadian Opera Company in Toronto in November 1929, at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto, with a live radio broadcast from the Royal York Hotel on 13 November 1929. In the broadcast, hockey broadcaster Foster Hewitt provided narrative for the fight sequence. These Toronto performances were conducted by Sir Ernest MacMillan, music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from 1931 to 1955, and featured American tenor Allan Jones in the title role of Hugh. Jones would soon become a Hollywood star. Vaughan Williams continued to revise the libretto and the opera over the remainder of his life. The final version was performed in 1956 and published in 1959.
The opera has set numbers with recitative. It has been described a modern example of a ballad opera. Contemporary comment noted the use of humour and the role of the chorus in the work, in the context of developing English opera.
Industry:Drama
Les Huguenots is a French opera by Giacomo Meyerbeer, one of the most popular and spectacular examples of the style of grand opera. The opera is in five acts and premiered in Paris in 1836. The libretto was written by Eugène Scribe and Émile Deschamps.
Les Huguenots was some five years in creation. Meyerbeer prepared carefully for this opera after the sensational success of Robert le diable, recognising the need to continue to present lavish staging, a highly (melo)dramatic storyline, impressive orchestration and virtuoso parts for the soloists - the essential elements of the new genre of Grand Opera. Coming from a wealthy family, Meyerbeer could afford to take his time, dictate his own terms, and to be a perfectionist. The very detailed contract which Meyerbeer arranged with Louis-Désiré Véron, director of the Opéra, for Les Huguenots (and which was drawn up for him by the lawyer Adolphe Crémieux) is a testament to this. While Meyerbeer was writing the opera, another opera with a similar setting and theme (Le pré aux clercs by Ferdinand Hérold) was also produced in Paris (1832). Like Meyerbeer's, Hérold's work was extremely popular in its time, although it is now forgotten.
Industry:Drama
Idomeneo, re di Creta ossia Ilia e Idamante is an Italian language opera seria by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The libretto was adapted by Giambattista Varesco from a French text by Antoine Danchet, which had been set to music by André Campra as Idoménée in 1712. Mozart and Varesco were commissioned in 1780 by Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria for a court carnival. He probably chose the subject, though it might have been Mozart.
The libretto clearly draws inspiration from Metastasio in its overall layout, the type of character development, and the highly poetic language used in the various numbers and the secco and stromentato recitatives. The style of the choruses, marches, and ballets is very French, and the shipwreck scene towards the end of act I is almost identical to the structure and dramatic working-out of a similar scene in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride. The sacrifice and oracle scenes are similar to Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide and Alceste.
Kurt Kramer has suggested that Varesco was familiar with Calzabigi and therefore the work of Gluck, especially the latter's Alceste; much of what we see in Varesco's most dramatic passages is the latest French style, mediated by Calzabigi. It is thanks to Mozart, though, that this mixture of French styles (apart from a few choruses) moves away from Gluck and France and returns to its more Italian (opera seria) roots; the singers were all trained in the classical Italian style, after all, and the recitatives are all classically Italian.
Industry:Drama
Il Guarany (The Guarany) is an opera ballo composed by Antônio Carlos Gomes, based on the novel O Guarani by José de Alencar. Its libretto, in Italian rather than Gomes' native Portuguese, was written by Antonio Scalvini and Carlo D'Ormeville. The work is notable as the first Brazilian opera to gain acclaim outside Brazil. Maria Alice Volpe has analysed the historical subtext of the Indianismo movement behind Il Guarany.
The world premiere took place at La Scala, Milan on 19 March 1870. The opera received additional European productions. The first Brazilian performance was in Rio de Janeiro on 2 December 1870, at the Theatro Lyrico Fluminense. More recently, in 1996, Il Guarany was mounted by the Washington National Opera with Plácido Domingo in the role of Peri.
The duet Sento una forza indomita for tenor and soprano had a vogue: it was in the recorded repertoire of Francesco Marconi with Bice Mililotti, 1908, and of Enrico Caruso with Emmy Destinn, 1914.
Industry:Drama
L'incoronazione di Poppea (SV 308, The Coronation of Poppaea) is an Italian opera by Claudio Monteverdi, with a libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello, first performed at the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice during the 1643 carnival season. One of the first operas to use historical events and people, it describes how Poppaea, mistress of the Roman emperor Nero, is able to achieve her ambition and be crowned empress. The opera was revived in Naples in 1651, but was then neglected until the rediscovery of the score in 1888, after which it became the subject of scholarly attention in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since the 1960s, the opera has been performed and recorded many times.
The original manuscript of the score does not exist; two surviving copies from the 1650s show significant divergences from each other, and each differs to some extent from the libretto. How much of the music is actually Monteverdi's, and how much the product of others, is a matter of dispute. None of the existing versions of the libretto, printed or manuscript, can be definitively tied to the first performance at the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo, the precise date of which is unknown. Details of the original cast are few and largely speculative, and there is no record of the opera's initial public reception. Despite these uncertainties, the work is generally accepted as part of the Monteverdi operatic canon, his last and perhaps his greatest work.
In a departure from traditional literary morality, it is the adulterous liaison of Poppea and Nerone which triumphs, although this victory is demonstrated by history to have been transitory and hollow. Moreover, in Busenello's version of the story all the major characters are morally compromised. Written when the genre of opera was only a few decades old, the music for L'incoronazione di Poppea has been praised for its originality, its melody, and for its reflection of the human attributes of its characters. The work helped to redefine the boundaries of theatrical music, and established Monteverdi as the leading musical dramatist of his time.
Industry:Drama
Iolanta, Op. 69, is a lyric opera in one act by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, his last. The libretto was written by the composer's brother Modest Tchaikovsky, and is based on the Danish play Kong Renés Datter (King René’s Daughter) by Henrik Hertz, a romanticised account of the life of Yolande de Bar. In the original Danish play, the spelling of the princess's name was "Iolanthe", which was a cause of confusion with the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta of that name. The play was translated by Fyodor Miller and adapted by Vladimir Zotov. The opera received its premiere on 18 December 1892 in St. Petersburg.
The world premiere took place on 18 December (6 December O.S.) 1892 at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. It was conducted by Eduard Nápravník and sets were designed by Mikhail Bocharov.
The premiere of the opera shared a double bill with the composer's last ballet, The Nutcracker.
Its first performance outside Russia was in Hamburg on 3 January 1893, with Gustav Mahler conducting. Mahler also conducted the Vienna premiere on 22 March 1900. In New York City it has been produced in 1997 and 2011 by Dicapo Opera.
There are only a few recordings of the opera, although Robert's aria has been recorded and performed in concerts frequently. A 1963 performance was filmed in Riga and released overseas in 1974. A 1997 two-act version of Iolanta is performed regularly at the Bolshoi Theatre (13 nights during the 2006 season).
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Iphigénie en Tauride is an opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck in four acts. It was his fifth opera for the French stage. The libretto was written by Nicolas-François Guillard.
With Iphigénie, Gluck took his operatic reform to its logical conclusion. The recitatives are shorter and they are récitatif accompagné (i.e. the strings and perhaps other instruments are playing, not just continuo accompaniment). The normal dance movements that one finds in the French tragédie en musique are almost entirely absent. The drama is ultimately based on the play Iphigenia in Tauris by the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides which deals with stories concerning the family of Agamemnon in the aftermath of the Trojan War.
Iphigénie en Tauride was first performed on 18 May 1779 by the Paris Opéra at the second Salle du Palais-Royal and was a great success. Some think that the head of the Paris Opéra, Devismes, had attempted to stoke up the rivalry between Gluck and Niccolò Piccinni, an Italian composer also resident in the French capital, by asking them both to set an opera on the subject of Iphigenia in Tauris. In the event, Piccinni's Iphigénie en Tauride was not premiered until January 1781 and did not enjoy the popularity that Gluck's work did.
Industry:Drama
Iris is an opera in three acts by Pietro Mascagni to an original Italian libretto by Luigi Illica. It premiered on 22 November 1898 at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. The story is set in Japan during legendary times.
In common with all of Mascagni's full-length operas, Iris is now rarely performed, even in Italy, although along with L'Amico Fritz it remains one of the composer's more performed operas. Two of the opera's most memorable numbers are the tenor's serenade ("Apri la tua finestra") and the Hymn to the Sun ("Inno al Sole").
The so-called "aria della piovra" ("Octopus aria"), "Un dì, ero piccina", where Iris describes a screen she had seen in a Buddhist temple when she was a child, depicting an octopus coiling with its tentacles around a young woman, may have been inspired by the print "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife" (1814) by the Japanese artist Hokusai.
Industry:Drama
L'île de Tulipatan (The Island of Tulipatan) is an opéra bouffe (a form of operetta), in one act by Jacques Offenbach to an original French libretto by Henri Chivot and Alfred Duru.
It was first performed at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens, Paris, on 30 September 1868. It was revived by the Compagnie Les Brigands at the Théâtre de l'Athénée as part of a double-bill with Croquefer in December 2012.
Octogène Romboïdal is the great steward of the supreme ruler of Tulipatan - Cacatois XXII. Romboïdal blames his wife Théodorine for their daughter Hermosa’s continual boyish behaviour. Hermosa enters firing off a rifle, and her father reproaches her for her neglect of needlework and the piano, but the tomboy is defended by her mother. Romboïdal mentions how gentle and gracious the prince Alexis son of Cacatois son is; Hermosa finds him charming and very pretty.
Next Cacatois and his suite enter to visit Romboïdal, followed by Alexis and his pages, the boy grieving the loss of his pet hummingbird, for which he is mocked by his father. As soon as the parents have left, Hermosa and Alexis burst into joyful song of their affections and Hermosa instructs the boy in how to declare love to her, but they are surprised by the return of Théodorine and Romboïdal just as Alexis says he will only marry Hermosa. Alexis demands that Romboïdal go with him to Cacatois to ask his consent.
Now Théodorine confesses to her daughter that she is a son – an interminable war at her birth made her mother fearful for her doing military service and therefore registered Hermosa as a girl. She worries how she is going to break the news to her husband whom she has fooled for 18 years.
Romboïdal returns, sends his wife on an errand then tells his daughter that the duke Cacatois was so determined to have a male heir after three daughters that his wife and Romboïdal telegraphed the ruler at war to say that he now had a son - and for 18 years Cacatois thinks he has a boy. Hermosa goes off, dancing, to the surprise of Romboïdal, who is more astonished when Alexis, who had over-heard some of this conversation, comes on in a dress.
Hermosa now re-enters dressed as a dashing guards officer. After a barcarolle Cacatois demands that Romboïdal and Théodorine consent for the daughter to wed his son Alexis. The confused couple eventually reveal their deception to their ruler, as the marriage procession enters. Cacatois simply declares that he will re-marry and try again for a son.
Industry:Drama
