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Kaiserin Josephine is an operetta in 8 scenes by Hungarian composer Emmerich Kalman. The German libretto was by Paul Knepler and Géza Herczeg. It premiered in Zurich, at the Stadt Theater, on 18 January 1936.
Industry:Drama
Cromwell Everson (28 September 1925 – 11 June 1991) was primarily known as a composer during his lifetime. He was brought up as an Afrikaner by his mother, Maria De Wit and father, Robert Everson. He continued this tradition and all his children were brought up as Afrikaners.
Everson wrote the first Afrikaans opera, and most of his other vocal works were in Afrikaans. His works consist of five sonatas, a trio, an opera, a set of inventions, four song-cycles, a piano suite, miscellaneous movements for the piano and guitar and an incomplete symphony and string quartet.
During Everson's career in Worcester, Western Cape he also gave music lessons to the famous musician David Kramer.
For his Afrikaans opera Everson received in 2007 a posthumous acknowledgement from the ATKV (Afrikaans Language- and Cultural society).
Industry:Drama
Káťa Kabanová is an opera in three acts, with music by Leoš Janáček to a libretto by Vincenc Červinka, based on The Storm, a play by Alexander Ostrovsky. The opera was also largely inspired by Janáček's love for Kamila Stösslová. This is often considered his first "mature" opera, despite the fact that he was 67 when it was premiered. Káťa Kabanová is a clear response to Janáček's feelings for Kamila, and the work is dedicated to her. The first performance was at the National Theatre (Národní divadlo v Brně) in Brno on 23 November 1921.
The opera has had a complex publication history. František Neumann, the conductor of the opera's first performance, made changes that were incorporated into the 1922 Universal Edition, the first publication of the score. The conductor Václav Talich later produced a "re-orchestrated" version of the score. In 1992, Sir Charles Mackerras published a critical edition of the opera.
Industry:Drama
Khovanshchina is an opera (subtitled a 'national music drama') in five acts by Modest Mussorgsky. The work was written between 1872 and 1880 in St. Petersburg, Russia. The composer wrote the libretto based on historical sources. The opera was unfinished and unperformed when the composer died in 1881.
Like Mussorgsky's earlier Boris Godunov, Khovanshchina deals with an episode in Russian history, first brought to the composer's attention by his friend Vladimir Stasov. It concerns the rebellion of Prince Ivan Khovansky, the Old Believers, and the Streltsy against Peter the Great, who was attempting to institute Westernizing reforms to Russia. Peter succeeded, the rebellion was crushed and (in the opera, at least) Khovansky's followers committed mass suicide.
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov completed, revised, and scored Khovanshchina in 1881–1882. Because of his extensive cuts and "recomposition", Dmitri Shostakovich revised the opera in 1959 based on Mussorgsky's vocal score, and it is the Shostakovich version that is usually performed. In 1913 Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel made their own arrangement at Sergei Diaghilev's request. When Feodor Chaliapin refused to sing the part of Dosifei in any other orchestration than Rimsky-Korsakov's, Diaghilev's company employed a mixture of orchestrations which did not prove successful. The Stravinsky-Ravel orchestration was forgotten, except for Stravinsky's finale, which is still used.
Although the setting of the opera is the Moscow Uprising of 1682, its main themes are the struggle between progressive and reactionary political factions during the minority of Tsar Peter the Great and the passing of old Muscovy before Peter's westernizing reforms. It received its first performance in the Rimsky-Korsakov edition in 1886.
Industry:Drama
King Roger (Król Roger, op. 46) is a Polish opera in 3 acts, with music by Karol Szymanowski and the libretto by the composer himself and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, the composer's cousin. The opera received its world premiere on 19 June 1926 in Warsaw, Poland, with the cast including the composer's sister, the soprano Stanisława Korwin-Szymanowska, as Roxana.
The opera originated from Szymanowski's enthusiasm for Mediterranean culture as a melting pot of different peoples and religions. He spent much time travelling in that area in 1911 and in 1914, and shared his love of the region with Iwaszkiewicz. In the summer of 1918 at Odessa, Ukraine, Szymanowski and Iwaszkiewicz conceived the project, and composed the opera over the period of 1918 to 1924. Szymanowski's lost novel Efebos dealt with mystical themes similar to those that inspired this work.
Jim Samson has placed King Roger in a musico-psychological analysis of Szymanowski's compositional struggles. Alistair Wightman has briefly discussed Szymanowski's stylised treatment of Arabic musical idioms in the score. Stephen Downes has analysed in detail the themes of "duality" and "transformation" expressed in the music of the opera.
Industry:Drama
The Knot Garden is the third opera by composer Michael Tippett for which he wrote the original English libretto. The work had its first performance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on 2 December 1970 conducted by Sir Colin Davis and produced by Sir Peter Hall. There is a recording with the original cast.
The first American performance was in 1974 at Northwestern University, and the first German performance in 1987 at the Musiktheater im Revier in Gelsenkirchen. In 1984 Tippett created a reduced orchestration for a revival with the London Sinfonietta at the Wilde Theatre. The reduced version has been revived six times, with productions in Britain, America, Australia, and Austria. There was a revival at the Royal Opera House in 1988, directed by Nicholas Hytner and, in 2005, Scottish Opera produced the opera for the Tippett centenary.
Industry:Drama
Krútňava is an opera in six scenes by Eugen Suchoň written in the 1940s to a libretto by the composer and Štefan Hoza, based on a novella, Za vyšným mlynom (Beyond the Upper Mill) by Milo Urban. The opera was premiered at the Slovak National Theatre, Bratislava, on 10 December 1949.
Suchoň was invited in 1940 to write an opera for the Slovak National Theatre. In 1941 he read Urban's novella Beyond the Upper Mill, a story of love and murder set in the Slovak countryside in the years after World War I, which immediately inspired him. Urban himself however refused to collaborate on the libretto, writing in 1958 that the dramatization risked losing some of the ambiguities he had deliberately created in the book (e.g. the paternity of the heroine's baby).
Suchoň's original conception was to write the opera using two different styles - a quasi-impressionist style to accompany the thoughts of the characters, and a more realistic, nationalist style to accompany external events. Traces of this dualism remain in the score, although Suchoň realised his original ideas were impractical.
Although the premiere was successful, the governing Slovak Communist Party insisted that the original ending be changed to make it more 'optimistic'. Other serious changes were forced on the composer, involving dismantling the very important 'framework' to the opera which posited the story as the result of a wager between the Poet and his Double (spoken roles), and, inevitably, the toning down of any references to Christianity. At first Suchoň refused to make any alterations; the opera was withdrawn from the repertoire. Pressure from his musical colleagues, who realised the importance of the work, induced him to change his mind, and this 'revised version' was performed in Czechoslovakia and abroad in the 1950s, the original ending only being restored in 1963. Complete reconstruction of the original, including the participation of the Poet and his Double, had to await the composer's centenary in 2008, when Suchoň's work as originally conceived was performed in Banska Bystrica.
Industry:Drama
La Conquista is an opera in two acts by Lorenzo Ferrero to a trilingual libretto by the composer and Frances Karttunen, based on a concept by Alessandro Baricco. It depicts the major episodes of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521 and the subsequent destruction of the Aztec civilization. The libretto is a blend of historical and literary sources drawn from transcriptions of indigenous and European literature, both kept, with some exceptions, in their original languages. The texts are taken from The Truthful History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the Book XII of the Florentine Codex, the works of Juan Boscán Almogáver, Bernardino de Sahagún, Lope de Vega, Heinrich Heine, and from Aztec prayers, songs and poems as collected in Cantares Mexicanos and Romances de los señores de Nueva España.
The musical language owes very little to ethnic influences, but the use of the Nahuatl language, characterized by the presence of distinct short and long vowels, imposes a specific rhythm to the vocal part.
Industry:Drama
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is an opera in four acts by Dmitri Shostakovich, his Op.29. The libretto was written by Alexander Preis and the composer, and is based on the novel Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District by Nikolai Leskov. The opera is sometimes referred to informally as Lady Macbeth when there is no confusion with Verdi's Macbeth. It was first performed on 24 January 1934 at the Leningrad Maly Operny. Shostakovich dedicated the opera to his first wife, the physicist Nina Varzar.
The work incorporates elements of expressionism and verismo. It tells the story of a lonely woman in 19th century Russia, who falls in love with one of her husband's workers and is driven to murder.
Despite great early success, on both popular and official levels, Lady Macbeth was the vehicle for a general denunciation of Shostakovich's music by the Communist Party in early 1936. After being condemned by an anonymous article (sometimes attributed to Joseph Stalin) in Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, it was banned in the Soviet Union for almost thirty years. Many people thus know the opera primarily for its role in the history of censorship.
The composer later revised the opera, now renamed Katerina Izmailova, his Op. 114. It features two new entr’actes, a major revision to Act 1 Scene 3, and some smaller changes elsewhere. The revised version was first performed on 26 December 1962 in Moscow at the Stanislavsky-Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theatre. Since Shostakovich's death the original version is more often performed.
Industry:Drama
Lakmé is an opera in three acts by Léo Delibes to a French libretto by Edmond Gondinet and Philippe Gille. The score, written in 1881–1882, was first performed on 14 April 1883 by the Opéra Comique at the Salle Favart in Paris. Set in British India in the mid-19th century, Lakmé is based on Theodore Pavie's novel (including "les babouches du Brahamane") and novel Le Mariage de Loti by Pierre Loti.
The opera includes the popular Flower Duet (Sous le dôme épais) for sopranos performed in act 1 by Lakmé, the daughter of a Brahmin priest, and her servant Mallika. The opera's most famous aria is the Bell Song (L'Air des clochettes) in Act 2.
Like other French operas of the period, Lakmé captures the ambience of the Orient seen through Western eyes, which was periodically in vogue during the latter part of the nineteenth century and in line with other operatic works such as Bizet's The Pearl Fishers and Massenet's Le roi de Lahore. The subject of the opera was suggested by Gondinet as a vehicle for the American soprano Marie van Zandt.
Industry:Drama
