‘The Elixir of Love’ Donizetti’s prolific output owed a great deal to the speed with which he was able to compose. He could compose operas at the rate of three or four a year. However, even this rate of production was overtaken by the mere fortnight it took him to write the music for L’elisir d’amore. This pastoral comedy was ...
1873–1921 Italian tenor Caruso’s first great success was in L’elisir d’amore at La Scala in 1901, followed by his Covent Garden (1902) and Metropolitan Opera (1903) debuts in Rigoletto. He sang regularly at the Metropolitan thereafter, mainly in Verdi and Puccini, and also sang the French repertory including Faust, Manon and Samson et Dalila. He is considered ...
1788–1865, Italian Felice Romani was greatly admired by around 100 Italian composers who sought to enlist his instinct for operatic drama and his ability to write elegant verse. Among them were Rossini, for whom Romani wrote Il turco in Italia (‘A Turk in Italy’, 1814) and Verdi, whom he provided with the libretto for Un giorno di regno ...
(Ga-a-ta’-no Don-it-set’-te) 1797–1848 Italian composer Between the death of Bellini (1835) and the emergence of Verdi, Donizetti was the dominant figure in Italian opera. He studied with Mayr and Padre Mattei. After composing numerous apprentice operas and various sacred, orchestral and instrumental works, he had his first real success with Zoraida di Granata (‘Zoraida of Granada’, 1822), which gave ...
1797–1848, Italian Gaetano Donizetti, who was born in Bergamo, wrote seven operas, some of them while still a student in Bologna, and several of them unproduced, before he scored his first success with Zoraide di Grenata (‘Zoraide of Granada’, 1822), which was performed in Rome. Zoraide attracted the attention of impresario Domenico Barbaia, who ...
The city of St Petersburg was founded in 1703 by Peter the Great as his ‘window on the West’ – part of his plan to connect backward Russia to the modern world. A court theatre was included as part of Peter’s modernizing policy, but plays were being performed there for more than 30 years before the first opera was staged. ...
The history of musical instruments has always been very closely linked to the history of music itself. New musical styles often come about because new instruments become available, or improvements to existing ones are made. Improvements to the design of the piano in the 1770s, for instance, led to its adoption by composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ...
Fiddles, generically, are bowed lutes. The term ‘fiddle’ denotes a stringed instrument with a neck, bearing strings that are sounded by the use of friction rather than plucking or striking. Playing the Fiddle In almost all fiddles the world over, friction is provided by a bow strung with rosined horsehair. The hair is tensioned by the springiness ...
The oboe was developed in the mid-seventeenth century and the credit is usually given to Jean Hotteterre (c. 1605–90/2), a shawm player at the court of Louis XIV. Its immediate predecessor was the shawm and the oboe took over the French name for smaller shawms, hautbois or ‘loud woodwind instrument’. The distribution of the finger holes and the bore was ...
Of the woodwind instruments, the oboe has experienced perhaps the most organic development. There is no single, revolutionary moment at which the oboe became a modern instrument, and it retains strong links with the past both in sound and design. Shawm The modern oboe is a direct descendant of the shawm and the hautboy. The shawm was a ...
Developed to accompany the violin, the viola is tuned a fifth below it (losing the violin’s top E string, it acquires instead a bottom C string) and plays alto to the violin’s soprano. The viola was made as a slightly bigger violin, to be played in the same way. It has been argued that if the makers had ...
Bagpipe Somewhere, perhaps in Mesopotamia, about 7,000 years ago, a shepherd may well have looked at a goat skin and some hollow bones and had an idea for a new musical instrument: the bagpipe. In the early Christian era, the instrument spread from the Middle East eastward into India and westward to Europe. By the seventeenth ...
‘The Coronation of Poppea’ L’incoronazione di Poppea, composed in 1642, has been called Monteverdi’s greatest opera. It was one of the first operas to be based on history rather than mythology. The action takes place in Rome in ad 65. The eponymous heroine is the mistress and, later, wife of the Emperor Nero. The libretto was by ...
Premiered: 1647, Paris Libretto by Francesco Buti Prologue The figure of Vittoria (Victory) and French soldiers sing of their victories and the power of their kingdom. Act I Euridice and her father, Endimione, consult a soothsayer regarding her forthcoming wedding to Orfeo. The omens are bad. Orfeo and Euridice celebrate their love for each other, while Aristeo ...
‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ When the Emperor Franz I and his retinue attended the premiere of Orfeo ed Euridice at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 5 October 1762, they were doubtless expecting a lightweight pastoral entertainment. The occasion – the emperor’s name day – and the opera’s billing as an azione teatrale (literally ‘theatrical action’) promised as much. What they got ...
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