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Apollo et Hyacinthus is an opera, K. 38, written in 1767 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was 11 years old at the time. It is Mozart's first true opera (when one considers that Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebotes is simply a sacred drama). It is in three acts. As is suggested by the name, the opera is based upon Greek mythology as told by Roman poet Ovid in his masterwork Metamorphoses. Interpreting this work, Rufinus Widl wrote the libretto in Latin.
The opera was first performed on 13 May 1767 at the Great Hall, Salzburg University. The myth follows that Hyacinth died accidentally from being struck on the head by a discus thrown by Apollo. However, another myth tells that it was the wind god Zephyrus who was actually responsible for the Hyacinth's death because Zephyrus, out of jealousy, blew the discus off course in order to injure and kill Hyacinth. When he died, Apollo made the hyacinth flower spring out from his spilled blood.
The librettist and priest, Rufinus Widl, modified Ovid's story (in which Apollo, Zephyrus, and Hyacinth clearly constituted a homosexual love triangle) to make it conform to the ethic, by changing the sexually desired character from Ovid's Hyacinth to Melia, his sister.
Industry:Drama
Ariadne auf Naxos (Ariadne on Naxos), Op. 60, is an opera by Richard Strauss with a German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Bringing together slapstick comedy and consummately beautiful music, the opera's theme is the competition between high and low art for the public's attention. Music critic and author Matt Dobkin wrote that, while Ariadne auf Naxos is "not as well loved as Der Rosenkavalier or as important as Salome, it is nevertheless staged all the time, thanks in large part to sopranos' attraction to the vocal and dramatic grandeur of the title role and to the compelling spitfire Zerbinetta character."
The opera was originally conceived as a thirty-minute divertissement to be performed at the end of Hofmannsthal's adaptation of Molière's play Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. Besides the opera, Strauss provided incidental music to be performed during the play. In the end, the opera occupied ninety minutes, and the performance of play plus opera occupied over six hours. It was first performed at the Hoftheater, Stuttgart, on 25 October 1912. The director was Max Reinhardt. The combination of the play and opera proved to be unsatisfactory to the audience: those who had come to hear the opera resented having to wait until the play finished.
After these initial performances, it became apparent that the work as it stood was impractical: it required a company of actors as well as an opera company, and was thus very expensive to mount, and its length was likely to be a problem for audiences. So in 1913 Hofmannsthal proposed to Strauss that the play should be replaced by a prologue which would explain why the opera combines a serious classical story with a comedy performed by a commedia dell'arte group. He also moved the action from Paris to Vienna. Strauss was initially reluctant, but he composed the prologue (and modified some aspects of the opera) in 1916, and this revised version was first performed at the Vienna State Opera on 4 October of that year. This is the version that is normally staged today, although the original play-plus-opera is occasionally performed (for example, at the 1997 Edinburgh International Festival and at the 2012 Salzburg Festival).
After its premiere in Vienna, the second version was first performed in Berlin on 1 November 1916, followed by Zürich on 28 January 1917 (in a production by the Mannheim Opera). It was first presented in Budapest on 19 April 1919 (in a Hungarian translation by Z. Harsányi), and in German in Graz on 12 March 1920, Amsterdam in January 1924, and London at the Royal Opera House on 27 May 1924 with Lotte Lehmann as Ariadne, Maria Ivogün as Zerbinetta (in her debut with the company), Elisabeth Schumann as the Composer, Karl Fischer-Niemann as Bacchus, and Carl Alwin conducting. Despite the stellar cast, the production was not successful, with one of the lowest box office returns of the season, and was repeated only once.
It was first performed in Italy in Turin at the Teatro di Turino (it) on 7 December 1925 (in an Italian translation by O. Schanzer); in Sweden in Stockholm on 27 November 1926 (in Swedish); in Brussels on 17 March 1930 (in a French translation by P. Spaak); in Helsinki on 12 May 1931 (in a Finnish translation by A. af Enehjelm); in Rome at the Teatro Reale on 28 March 1935 (in German); Antwerp on 28 September 1935 (in Flemish); and in Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 10 September 1937 (in German).
The United States premiere of the opera was given in German by the Philadelphia Civic Opera Company at the Academy of Music on 1 November 1928. Conducted by Alexander Smallens, the cast included Alma Peterson as the Primadonna/Ariadne, Charlotte Boykin as Zerbinetta, Irene Williams as the Composer, and Judson House as the Tenor/Bacchus. It was presented by the Juilliard School in New York City in English in a translation by A. Kalisch on 5 December 1934 with a cast of students including Josephine Antoine as Zerbinetta, Mack Harrell as Truffaldino, and Risë Stevens as Dryad. The opera was performed for the first time in Canada by the New York City Opera on tour at the Montreal Festivals in 1946.
Industry:Drama
Ariodante (HWV 33) is an opera seria in three acts by Handel. The anonymous Italian libretto was based on a work by Antonio Salvi, which in turn was adapted from Canti 5 and 6 of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Each act contains opportunities for dance, originally composed for dancer Marie Sallé and her company.
The opera was first performed in the Covent Garden Theatre, London, on 8 January 1735. Ariodante opened Handel's first season at Covent Garden and successfully competed against the rival Opera of the Nobility, supported by the Prince of Wales. Handel had the tacit and financial support of the King and Queen and, more vocally, of the Princess Royal. The opera received 11 performances during its premiere season at Covent Garden.
Like Handel's other works in the opera seria genre, Ariodante, despite its initial success, fell into oblivion for more than two hundred years. An edition of the score was published in the early 1960s, from the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe. In the 1970s, the work began to be revived, and has come to be considered one of Handel's finest operas. On March 29, 1971 the Handel Society of New York performed the American premiere of the work in a concert version with mezzo-soprano Sophia Steffan in the title role and Judith Raskin as Ginevra.
Charles Cudworth has discussed the influence of French dance music in the opera. Winton Dean has noted that act 2 of the opera, in its original version, is the only act in a Handel opera which ends with accompanied recitative.
Industry:Drama
Arizona Lady is an operetta in two acts by Hungarian composer Emmerich Kálmán. The libretto was written by Alfred Grünwald and Gustav Beer. It premiered, as a broadcast in Munich on 1 January 1954, and on stage in Bern, at the Stadttheater, on 14 February 1954. Left unfinished at the time of Emmerich Kalman's death, it had been completed by his son, Charles Kalman. It was given its American premiere, in a new English translation by Gerald Frantzen and Hersh Glagov, by Chicago Folks Operetta in July 2010, at Stage 773 in Chicago, Illinois.
The plot, set in the 1920s, concerns a Hungarian woman, Lona Farrell, whose father had emigrated to the US to search for gold. She now runs the Sunshine Ranch in Arizona. As the show begins, she fires her foreman, Jim Slaughter, for having tried to kiss her, and hires a stranger, Roy Dexter from Colorado, despite the concerns of Sheriff Harry Sullivan, who suspects that "Roy Dexter" may actually be the notorious outlaw, Burt Morton. But there is one condition on Roy's employment; he must never even mention the word "love" to Lona; she's had enough of that. Despite that, the sexual tension between Lona and Roy is manifest from the beginning.
Industry:Drama
L'arlesiana is an opera in three acts by Francesco Cilea to an Italian libretto by Leopoldo Marenco. It was originally written in four acts, and was first performed on 27 November 1897 at the Teatro Lirico di Milano in Milan. It was revised as a three-act opera in 1898, and a prelude was added in 1937.
The opera is based on the play L'Arlésienne (1872) by Alphonse Daudet, which was itself inspired by a short story from his collection Letters From My Windmill (Lettres de mon moulin) and is best known for the incidental music composed by Georges Bizet.
Three famous arias from this opera are the Lamento di Federico: È la solita storia del pastore written for a tenor, Come due tizzi accesi for a baritone, and for a mezzo-soprano, Esser madre è un inferno. Additionally in 2011, the aria "Una mattina" from the 4-act version was added to the present score by the publisher.
In 2011, the Italian tenor Giuseppe Filianoti discovered among the composer's papers in the Museo Francesco Cilea in the Casa del Cultura in Palmi a manuscript of an aria, "Una mattina", whose lyrics he recognized as having been part of the first libretto in the original four act version of L'Arlesiana.
The aria had been cut from the work after the premiere at the insistence of the publisher, Casa Sonzogno, and was subsequently forgotten. Filianoti brought this aria to the attention of Casa Sonzogno and urged them to reinstate it. They commissioned the Italian composer Mario Guido Scappucci to re-orchestrate the aria, and it was performed for the first time since the opera's premiere in concerts and recordings with the Philharmonisches Orchester Freiburg in July, 2012.
The original act 1 aria was included in its first staged performance with the Wexford Festival Opera in October, 2012.
Industry:Drama
Armide is an opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck, set to a libretto by Philippe Quinault. Gluck's fifth production for the Parisian stage and the composer's own favourite among his works, it was first performed on 23 September 1777 by the Académie Royale de Musique in the second Salle du Palais-Royal in Paris.
Gluck set the same libretto Philippe Quinault had written for Lully in 1686, based on Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered). Gluck seemed at ease in facing French traditions head-on when he composed Armide. Lully and Quinault were the very founders of serious opera in France and Armide was generally recognized as their masterpiece, so it was a bold move on Gluck's part to write new music to Quinault's words. A similar attempt to write a new opera to the libretto of Thésée by Jean Joseph de Mondonville in 1765 had ended in disaster, with audiences demanding it be replaced by Lully's original. By utilizing Armide, Gluck challenged the long-standing and apparently inviolable ideals of French practice, and in the process he revealed these values capable of renewal through "modern" compositional sensitivities. Critical response and resultant polemic resulted in one of those grand imbroglios common to French intellectual life. Gluck struck a nerve in French sensitivities, and whereas Armide was not one of his more popular works, it remained a critical touchstone in the French operatic tradition and was warmly praised by Berlioz in his Memoirs. Gluck also set a minor fashion for resetting Lully/Quinault operas: Gluck's rival Piccinni followed his example with Roland in 1778 and Atys in 1780; in the same year, Philidor produced a new Persée; and Gossec offered his version of Thésée in 1782. Gluck himself is said to have been working on an opera based on Roland, but he abandoned it when he heard Piccinni had taken on the same libretto.
The first modern revival of Armide was presented at the Théâtre National de l’Opéra (now named the Opéra National de Paris) in 1905 with Lucienne Bréval in the title role. Other cast members included Alice Verlet, Agustarello Affré, Dinh Gilly, and Geneviève Vix.
Industry:Drama
Armide is an opera by Jean-Baptiste Lully. The libretto was written by Philippe Quinault, based on Torquato Tasso's La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered).
Critics in the 18th century regarded Armide as Lully's masterpiece. Unlike most of his operas, Armide concentrates on the sustained psychological development of a character — not Renaud, who spends most of the opera under Armide's spell, but Armide, who repeatedly tries without success to choose vengeance over love.
The work is in the form of a tragédie en musique, a genre invented by Lully and Quinault.
Lully's Armide was first performed on 15 February 1686 by the Paris Opera at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, with scenery by Bérain, in the presence of the Grand Dauphin. To Lully's great distress, however, the king would not attend the première or any of the following performances. The opera was revived by the Paris Opera in 1703, 1713–14, 1724, 1746–47, 1761, and 1764.
Industry:Drama
Aroldo is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, based on and adapted from their earlier 1850 collaboration, Stiffelio. The first performance was given in the Teatro Nuovo Comunale in Rimini on 16 August 1857.
Stiffelio had provoked the censorship board because of “the immoral and rough” storylines of a Protestant minister deceived by his wife and also because making the characters German did not please an Italian audience, although, as Budden notes, the opera "enjoyed a limited circulation (in Italy), but with the title changed to Guglielmo Wellingrode, the main protagonist now a German minister of state". Verdi had rejected an 1852 request to write a new last act for the Wellingrode version, but, by Spring 1856, in collaboration with his original librettist, Piave, he decided to rewrite the story line and make a small amount of musical changes and additions. However, as it turned out, the work was to be more complex than that.
Drawing inspiration from novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton (Harold: the Last of the Saxon Kings - for the location of the opera to England and Scotland (in the last act) in the Middle Ages and for the names of its characters, the principal being Aroldo, re-cast as a recently-returned Crusader.) Kimbell notes that "hints" came from the work of Walter Scott whose novel of 1825, The Bethrothed would "already have been familiar to Italian audiences through Giovanni Pacini's 1829 opera, Il Contestabile di Chester". Also, the novelist's The Lady of the Lake was the inspiration for the hermit Briano.
The rewriting was delayed until after March 1857 by the preparation for Paris of Le trouvère, the French version of Il trovatore, and his work with Piave on Simon Boccanegra. However, as work resumed on Aroldo with Piave, the premiere was planned for August 1857 in Rimini. When Verdi and Strepponi arrived there on 23 July, they found both Piave and Angelo Mariani (with whom he had become friends over the previous years and who had been chosen to conduct the new opera) working together. While Phillips-Matz notes that there was "hysteria" at Verdi's presence, there was also opposition to Aroldo combined with an influx of people from other cities anxious to see the new opera. With Mariani, rehearsals began well; the conductor reported: "Verdi is very very happy and so am I".
By the time of the premiere, considerable changes had been made to the three-act Stiffelio, the prime one being an added fourth act with new material, described by conductor Mariani to Ricordi as "a stupendous affair; you'll find in it a storm, a pastoral chorus, and an Angelus Dei treated in canon and beautifully wrought". Lina became Mina; Stiffelio, as discussed, was now Aroldo; Stankar morphed into Egberto; Jorg, the bass role, emerged as Briano.
Industry:Drama
Artamene was an opera in three acts by Tomaso Albinoni set to a libretto by Bartolomeo Vitturi. Composed in 1740, it premiered in Venice at the Teatro Sant'Angelo in the 1741 carnival season. It was Albinoni's last opera. The music is lost.
Industry:Drama
Les arts florissants (H. 487) is a short chamber opera (also described by the composer as idylle en musique) in five scenes by Marc-Antoine Charpentier.
It was written in 1685 for the group of musicians employed by Marie de Lorraine, Duchess of Guise, at her residence in Paris. The reason behind the creation of this work, as well as its place of performance, remain a matter for speculation. The French libretto, written by an unknown author, is allegorical in nature and draws on aspects of mythological and natural symbolism familiar to 17th-century audiences to add depth to a superficially simple plot.
The story of the opera concerns the eponymous Arts, shown flourishing under the beneficent and peaceful reign of Louis XIV, as they and a group of Warriors become drawn into a dispute between the central characters of La paix (Peace) and La discorde (Discord). After a brief struggle in which Discord and his Furies gain the upper hand, Peace appeals to Jupiter to intervene on her behalf. Discord and his followers are chased back into Hell by a hail of thunderbolts, and Peace holds sway once more.
The opera is scored for seven solo voices, five-part chorus, two flutes (or recorders), two treble viols and basso continuo.
The manuscript score also calls for two choruses in the form of a Troupe de Guerriers (Troop of Warriors) and a Chœur de Furies chantantes (Chorus of singing Furies), to be sung by all available singers, and a troupe of Furies dansantes, si l'on veut (Dancing Furies, "if desired"). The instrumentalists are included in the original character list under the entry Suite de la Musique, and the overture is labelled pour les symphonistes de la Suite de la Musique ("for the orchestral players in Music's following").
Industry:Drama
