Composed: 1863–66; rev. 1869–70 Premiered: 1870, Prague Libretto by Karel Sabina Act I While the villagers enjoy themselves at the fair, Mařenka tells her lover Jeník that she is to be married off against her will to the son of a farmer named Mícha, to whom her own father, Krusina, owes money. She knows little of ...
1824–84, Czech In 1866, the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana won a national competition with his first of eight operas, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia. In this work, written for the National Theatre in Prague where he was conductor, he revealed his skill in writing orchestral music, his strong dramatic sense and his understanding of the cadences ...
(Be’-der-zhikh Sma’-ta-na) 1824–84 Czech Composer Smetana was the founding father of the Czech national musical revival. Born to middle-class parents on 2 March 1824, he showed considerable talent as a pianist by the time he was six. He went to study in Prague in 1839, subsequently making a living as a teacher and player. In 1848 he opened a music ...
1841–1904, Czech While Dvořák is best known for his contribution to the symphonic repertoire, opera was a vital part of his musical make-up and he produced 10 stage works during his life. His musical education was traditional: at the Prague Organ School he studied harmony, counterpoint, fugue and chorales. On graduating, he joined the Provisional Theatre ...
(Zhan Se-bal-yoos) 1865–1957 Finnish composer When Jean (Johan) Sibelius, Finland’s greatest composer, was born on 8 December 1865 at Hämeenlinna, his homeland had been ruled by Russia since Napoleon snatched it from Sweden. As a child he composed and played the violin, but he was 14 before taking up the instrument seriously. He enrolled in 1886 at the ...
1836–65, German After making his debut at Karlsruhe in 1854, playing small roles, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld attracted Wagner’s attention, who considered his dramatically powerful voice ideal for tenor roles in his operas. Schnorr von Carolsfeld created a sensation as Lohengrin and another as Tannhäuser. When Tristan und Isolde premiered in Munich on 10 June 1865, ...
(Sta’-ne-slwaf Mon-yoosh’-ko) 1819–72 Polish composer Moniuszko was the foremost composer of operas in nineteenth-century Poland, and his national importance is equivalent to that of Bedřich Smetana(1824–84) in the Czech lands and Glinka in Russia. He studied in Minsk (1830–37) and Berlin (1837–40) and began to write stage works in the mid-1840s. His opera Halka was staged in Warsaw in 1858 to ...
On the face of it, the French Revolution failed when the House of Bourbon returned to rule France after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The face of it, however, was deceptive. The forces of liberalism unleashed by the Revolution had simply made a strategic withdrawal. In France, liberals, socialists and republicans remained opposed to extreme ...
The 1860s saw a number of major reorganizations in European politics. Italy became a united country under the king of (former) Piedmont-Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel II, in 1861 and its new national government tried to retain the kingdom’s liberal ideals, such as removing instances of operatic and intellectual censorship. However, Italy’s liberalism was not aspired to by other ...
b. 1933 English mezzo-soprano Baker studied in London, and made her debut in Smetana’s The Secret in Oxford in 1956. She sang Handel roles early in her career, and made a particular impression as Purcell’s Dido, a role she recorded several times. At Covent Garden, where she first appeared as Hermia in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream ...
(An’-to-nyen Dvôr’zhak) 1841–1904 Czech composer Dvořák was the pre-eminent composer of the Czech national revival. Arguably his achievement was less fundamental than Smetana’s, but he developed a strong international profile and for millions his style epitomizes ‘Czechness’ in music. The Czech influence in his work is hard to demonstrate and he almost never quoted folksong, but the appeal of his ...
1850–1900, Czech Although little known today, during his lifetime Fibich was fêted as the successor to Smetana and certainly commanded operatic attention equal to Dvořák. He studied initially with his mother in Prague, then in Leipzig, Paris and Mannheim. His early adult life was far from easy, with the death of his wife less than a ...
No discussion of this period in opera’s history would be complete without looking at Gustav Mahler (1860–1911). Although he is known primarily for his expansive, neurotically tinged symphonies and orchestral song cycles, he contributed hugely to the development of opera through his work as a conductor. Mahler was born in 1860 and he began his conducting career at Bad ...
That music has a double history – a social and a stylistic one – is amply proven by its development in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its progress was marked, though not entirely determined, by the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. There were perceptible changes of emphasis, not only in concert and operatic life from ...
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