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Il Bellerofonte is an 18th-century Italian opera in three acts by the Czech composer Josef Mysliveček. It conforms to the serious type (opera seria) that was typically set in the distant past. The libretto, based on the Greek legend of Bellerophon, was written by Giuseppe Bonecchi. The work was dedicated to King Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies and was first performed at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples on 20 January 1767, the birthday of his father, King Charles III of Spain. The cast featured two stellar singers of the time, Caterina Gabrielli and Anton Raaff, in the leading roles. The opera was only the composer's second one, and the first that permitted him the opportunity to write music for first-rate vocal artists. The production was highly successful, indeed responsible for a meteoric rise in his reputation as an operatic composer. From the time of the premiere of Bellerofonte until his death in 1781, Mysliveček succeeded in having more new opere serie brought into production than any other composer in Europe. During the same time span, he also had more new operas staged at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples than any other composer.
The subject, chosen by the management of the Teatro San Carlo, was unusual among Mysliveček's operas. Historical settings, rather than mythological ones, were customary for serious operas in Italy of the 1760s, unless elements from the French tragédie lyrique were included to create a Franco-Italian fusion. In this case, the inclusion of choruses and programmatic musical effects mark it as moderately influenced by French operatic traditions aside from the choice of mythological subject matter.
As in many 18th-century productions at the Teatro San Carlo, the first performance of Il Bellerofonte included separate ballets, none of the music for which was composed by Mysliveček or used in subsequent performances of the opera. The premiere production included a ballet at the end of Act I, Un bassà turco (A Turkish Pasha), and one at the end of Act II, Pantomimo tra Pulcinella, Arlecchino e Coviello (Pantomime between Pulcinella, Harlequin and Coviello). The opera was also preceded by a festive dance while a cantata was sung in honor of King Ferdinand I (also composed by Mysliveček). The ballets were choreographed by their leading dancer, Gennaro Magri. The opera was revived in Siena in spring of 1767 and Prague in carnival of 1768. A notation on a copy of the score in Paris indicates that it was revived at the San Carlo in 1769, however no librettos survive to confirm this.
Il Bellerofonte features many arias with elaborate vocal virtuosity of the type favored by Italian audiences of the 1760s. The ones most widely admired were "Splende così talora" from Act I, scene 2; "Giusti Dei" from Act I, scene 3; "Ch’io mai capace" from Act II, scene 5; and "Palesar vorrei col pianto" from Act II, scene 11. These arias were copied in aria collections throughout Italy, but they were even more widely disseminated in Bohemia in the collections of sacred institutions that substituted Latin texts for the original Italian. In this form, arias from Il Bellerofonte continued to circulate in central Europe well into the 19th century.
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Benvenuto Cellini is an opera in two acts with music by Hector Berlioz and libretto by Léon de Wailly and Henri Auguste Barbier. It was the first of Berlioz's operas. The story is loosely based on the memoirs of the Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini. The opera is technically very challenging and rarely performed, and is not part of the standard operatic repertoire. However, the overture to the opera features in symphony orchestra programs, as well as the concert overture Le carnaval romain that Berlioz composed from material in the opera. Ora Frishberg Saloman has discussed in detail the opera's characterisation of the historical figure of Cellini.
Occasional performances took place after Berlioz's death: in Hanover in 1879, Vienna in 1911, and as part of the inaugural season at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées for six performances from 31 March 1913 conducted by Felix Weingartner. Following Les Troyens in 1935, the Glasgow Grand Opera Society mounted the opera alongside a production of Béatrice et Bénédict in 1936, conducted by Erik Chisholm.
The Carl Rosa Opera Company, a British touring company, brought it into its repertoire in 1956, giving two performances to packed houses at London's Sadler's Wells Theatre in 1957. The title role was sung by tenor Charles Craig, then at the start of a notable international career. The Royal Opera House in London staged the work on December 15, 1966, followed by its Italian premiere in Naples in 1967.
The first United States production was by the Opera Company of Boston in 1975, under the direction of Sarah Caldwell and with Jon Vickers in the title role. The first performance of the work at the Metropolitan Opera took place on December 4, 2003, with James Levine conducting and stage, Andrei Şerban directing, and Marcello Giordani singing the title role.
In 2007 Benvenuto Cellini was staged at Salzburg Festival conducted by Valery Gergiev. A new production directed by Terry Gilliam has been scheduled by the English National Opera for Spring 2014.
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Bertha is an opera in one act, with music by Ned Rorem to an English libretto by Kenneth Koch, an original work parodying Shakespeare's histories. Rorem wrote the work originally at the request of the Metropolitan Opera (Met) Studio in the 1960s, intended as an opera for children. However, the Met studio rejected the work. The work was premiered at Alice Tully Hall in New York City on November 25, 1973 with Beverly Wolff in the title role.
Bertha is still sporadically performed. It received a performance by The Golden Fleece in New York City in 1981. In the UK, the New World Opera Company produced the work in London in February 2001.
The opera's setting is the royal residence in Oslo, Norway, in the medieval era.
The garrison of the slightly deranged Queen Bertha of Oslo is encased by barbarians. She leads an attack, in a ring of white eagles, and the attackers are repelled. A teacher questions her as to whether her own subjects are barbarians, for which Bertha orders the teacher executed.
After the country is at peace, Bertha then declares war on Scotland. The Counselor objects to these endless wars, and Bertha dismisses the Council. Two young lovers meet in Bertha's garden, but they are shot dead there, as the queen disapproves of lovers' trysts.
As Bertha ages, her madness increases and she keeps wanting new adventures. Bertha gives Norway to the barbarians so that she can reconquer the nation. She does this, but collapses dead on her regained throne. The people praise her as a great queen.
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Betrothal in a Monastery (original Russian title Обручение в монастыре), Op. 86 is an opera by Sergei Prokofiev, his sixth with an opus number. The libretto, in Russian, was by the composer and Mira Mendelson (his companion in later life), after Richard Brinsley Sheridan's ballad opera libretto for Thomas Linley the younger's The Duenna.
Prokofiev began the work in 1940, and it was in rehearsal that year, but World War II halted production of the opera. The first performance did not occur until 3 November 1946 at the Kirov Theatre with Boris Khaikin conducting.
Commentators have noted that, given the context of its creation in the 1940s in the Soviet Union, this opera lacks any particular political or social comment, except perhaps for a scene involving drunken monks.
In recent years, the opera has been performed in 1989 at the Wexford Festival, in 2006 at the Glyndebourne Festival and at the Palau de les Arts in Valencia, Spain in 2008.
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Billy Budd, Op. 50, is an opera by Benjamin Britten to a libretto by the English novelist E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier, based on the short novel Billy Budd by Herman Melville. It was first performed at the Royal Opera House, London, on 1 December 1951 in four acts, but it was later revised as a two-act opera with a prologue and an epilogue.
The author E. M. Forster had an interest in the novella, which he discussed in his Clark lectures at Cambridge University. Meeting Britten before the Second World War, he developed a friendship with the composer. In 1948, they discussed whether Forster would write a libretto for Britten, and by that November, Britten seems to have mentioned Billy Budd as a possible work to be adapted. Forster agreed to this project, and worked with Eric Crozier, a regular Britten collaborator, to write the opera's libretto.
While Britten was composing the music, the Italian composer Giorgio Federico Ghedini premiered his one-act operatic setting of Billy Budd at the 1949 Venice International Festival. This disturbed Britten, but Ghedini's opera gained little notice.
Britten originally intended the title role for Geraint Evans, who prepared it but then withdrew because it lay too high for his voice. Britten chose Theodor Uppman to replace him, and Evans sang a different role, that of Mr Flint. When Britten conducted the premiere, the work received 17 curtain calls. Uppman was acclaimed as a new star.
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Bitter Sweet is an operetta in three acts written by Noël Coward. The story, set in 19th century and early 20th century England and Austria-Hungary, centres on a young woman's elopement with her music teacher. Her half-century story of suffering for love focuses on irony instead of sentiment. Of the songs in the show, the best known by far is "I'll See You Again". Another popular song is "If Love Were All".
The piece was first produced in 1929 at Her Majesty's Theatre in London, running for a very successful 967 performances. There was a brief Broadway production the same year. Short on memorable Cowardian dialogue, Bitter Sweet nonetheless contains some of Coward's best music, and several recordings of the score are available on CD. The piece has been popular with amateur operatic societies, but there have been few major professional revivals. The operetta was filmed twice, in 1933 in black-and-white (in Britain, with Anna Neagle and Fernand Gravet in the leading roles) and in 1940 in Technicolor by MGM, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. In both cases, the score was heavily cut. Coward disliked the much-rewritten 1940 film and vowed that no more of his plays would be filmed in Hollywood.
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Blue Monday (Opera à la Afro-American) was the original name of a one-act "jazz opera" by George Gershwin, renamed 135th Street during a later production. The English libretto was written by Buddy DeSylva. Though a short piece, with a running time of between twenty and thirty minutes, Blue Monday is often considered the blueprint to many of Gershwin's later works, and is often considered to be the "first piece of symphonic jazz" in that it was the first significant attempt to fuse forms of classical music such as opera with American popular music, with the opera largely influenced by Jazz and the African-American culture of Harlem.
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Bluebeard's Castle (Hungarian: A kékszakállú herceg vára; literally: The Castle of the Blue-Bearded Duke) is a one-act opera by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. The libretto was written by Béla Balázs, a poet and friend of the composer. It is in Hungarian, based on the French literary tale "La Barbe bleue" by Charles Perrault. The opera lasts only a little over an hour and there are only two singing characters onstage: Bluebeard (Kékszakállú), and his new wife Judith (Judit); the two have just eloped and Judith is coming home to Bluebeard's castle for the first time.
Bluebeard's Castle was composed in 1911 (with modifications made in 1912 and a new ending added in 1917) and first performed on 24 May 1918 in Budapest. Universal published the vocal (1921) and full score (1925). The Boosey & Hawkes' full score includes only the German and English singing translations while the Dover edition reproduces the Universal Edition Hungarian/German vocal score (with page numbers beginning at 1 instead of 5). A revision of the UE vocal score in 1963 added a new German translation by Wilhelm Ziegler, but seems not to have corrected any errata. Universal Edition and Bartók Records has published a new edition of the work in 2005 with new English translation by Peter Bartók, accompanied by extensive errata list.
Balázs originally conceived the libretto for his roommate Zoltán Kodály in 1908, and wrote it during the following two years. It was first published serially in 1910 with a joint dedication to Kodály and Bartók, and in 1912 appeared with the prologue in the collection "Mysteries". Bartók was motivated to complete the opera in 1911 by the closing date of the Ferenc Erkel Prize competition, for which it was duly entered. A second competition, organised by the music publishers Rózsavölgyi and with a closing date in 1912, encouraged Bartók to make some modifications to the work in order to submit it to the Rózsavölgyi competition.
Little is known about the Ferenc Erkel Prize other than that Bluebeard's Castle did not win. The Rózsavölgyi judges, after reviewing the composition, decided that the work (with only two characters and a single location) was not dramatic enough to be considered in the category for which it was entered: theatrical music. It is thought that the panel of judges who were to look at the musical (rather than the theatrical) aspects of the competition entries never saw Bartók's entry.
In 1913 Balázs produced a spoken performance at which Bartók played some piano pieces on a separate part of the program. A 1915 letter to Bartók's young wife, Márta, (to whom he dedicated the opera) ends: Now I know that I will never hear it in this life. You asked me to play it for you—I am afraid I would not be able to get through it. Still I'll try so that we may mourn it together.
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La bohème is an opera in four acts, composed by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, based on Scènes de la vie de bohème by Henri Murger. The world premiere performance of La bohème was in Turin on 1 February 1896 at the Teatro Regio, conducted by the young Arturo Toscanini. Since then, La bohème has become part of the standard Italian opera repertory and is one of the most frequently performed operas worldwide. In 1946, fifty years after the opera's premiere, Toscanini conducted a performance of it on radio with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. This performance was eventually released on records and on Compact Disc. It is the only recording of a Puccini opera by its original conductor.
The discography of La bohème is a long one with many distinguished recordings, including the 1972 Decca recording conducted by Herbert von Karajan with Luciano Pavarotti as Rodolfo and Mirella Freni as Mimi (made before Pavarotti became an international superstar of opera), and the 1973 RCA Victor conducted by Sir Georg Solti with Montserrat Caballé as Mimì and Plácido Domingo as Rodolfo which won the 1974 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording. The earliest commercially released full-length recording was probably that recorded in February 1917 and released on the Italian label La Voce del Padrone. Carlo Sabajno conducted the La Scala Orchestra and Chorus with Gemma Bosini and Remo Andreini as Mimì and Rodolfo. One of the most recent is the 2008 Deutsche Grammophon release conducted by Bertrand de Billy with Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón as Mimì and Rodolfo.
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