that Hélène accompanies him to Cythera. As they sail away he throws off his disguise. It is Pâris, who announces that they are off to Troy. Personalities | Jacques Offenbach | High Romantic | Opera ...
Luciana Serra (Olympia), Ileana Cotrubas (Antonia), Agnes Baltsa (Giulietta), Claire Powell (Muse/Nicklausse), Phyllis Cannan (Voice), Plácido Domingo (Hoffmann), Robert Tear (Spalanzani), Robert Lloyd (Lindorf), Geraint Evans (Coppelius) Personalities | Jacques Offenbach | High Romantic | Opera ...
on him not looking back. As they leave, Jupiter throws a thunderbolt and Orphée turns. Eurydice chooses to become a bacchante. Only Opinion Publique is unhappy. Personalities | Jacques Offenbach | High Romantic | Opera ...
1819–80, French Jacques Offenbach had an acute sense of theatre and an incisive understanding of how to cater for French tastes. He was 14 when his father sent him to Paris, where Jews were freer than they were in Germany. Offenbach became a cellist, performing in fashionable salons, and finally, in 1855, became famous. He ...
(Zhak Of’-fen-bakh) 1819–80 French composer Offenbach’s tuneful, witty and often outrageous satires on Greek mythology and the Second Empire enthralled the French public, including the Emperor Louis-Napoleon. After only one year at the Paris Conservatoire, he joined the Opéra-Comique orchestra, studying with Halévy, and toured as a virtuoso cellist. After conducting at the Théâtre Français, he ...
culminating with The Gondoliers (1889). Produced by the impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte at the Savoy theatre, Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Savoy operas’ swept through audiences like a whirlwind, rivalling Offenbach in Paris and Johann Strauss in Vienna. The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Patience (1881), Iolanthe (1882), The Mikado (1885) and many others ran for extended seasons on both sides of ...
and composer E.T.A. Hoffmann’s wide-ranging talents were the source of great inspiration throughout the nineteenth century, and composers who drew on his stories include Schumann (Kreisleriana) and Offenbach (Les contes d’Hoffmann). He was also an astute and perceptive critic, and his review in 1810 of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is justly famous. As a composer he has been ...
from Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (‘The Sandman’, 1816). Der Sandmann, together with two other Hoffmann stories, with the German author himself as the central character, were used by Offenbach for his last opera, Les contes d’Hoffmann. Hoffmann also featured as a character in three twentieth-century operas. Introduction | High Romantic | Opera Personalities | Victor Hugo | High ...
(Frants fun Zoo-pa’) 1819–95 Austrian composer Suppé’s full name was Francesco Ezechiele Ermenegildo Cavaliere Suppé-Demelli. He came from Dalmatia, but received his musical education with Ignaz Xaver Seyfried (a pupil of Haydn) in Vienna, in whose famous theatres (an der Wien, Carl and Leopoldstadt) he conducted operetta. He composed over 150 operettas, including Boccaccio (1879), highly popular in ...
and was influenced by the major opera composers of the day, including Rossini, Meyerbeer and Donizetti, and later by his friendships with Charles Gounod (1818–93) and Jacques Offenbach (1819–80). His early operas are in the French lyric style, but his most successful works, Alessandro Stradella (1844) and Martha (1847), combine a German text with Italianate melodic ...
1838–75, French Out of 30 projected operas, Bizet only completed six but would no doubt have left more had his life not been cut short at the age of 36. Born in Paris into a musical family, he was prodigiously gifted and started lessons at the Conservatoire before he was 10. He was taught composition by Fromental Halévy ...
future composer of Faust. At the age of 19, Bizet wrote a one-act operetta, Le Docteur Miracle, which won joint first prize in a competition organized by Offenbach, who produced it at his own theatre, the Bouffes-Parisiens. At the end of his studies at the Conservatory, Bizet won the Prix de Rome, a scholarship ...
1831–97, French Henri Meilhac, the French dramatist and librettist, wrote most of his texts for operas in collaboration with other writers. Meilhac’s most renowned partnership, which began after a chance meeting outside a Paris theatre in 1860, was with Ludovic Halévy. They produced libretti for Bizet, Léo Delibes (1836–91) and most famously for Offenbach. Meilhac ...
as a novelist and playwright. Halévy worked as a civil servant until 1865, when he retired to write full time. By then he had already become friendly with Jacques Offenbach and in 1858, together with Hector Crémieux (1828–92), he wrote the libretto for Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers. Another even more fruitful partnership, with Meilhac, began in 1860. ...
Introduction | High Romantic | Opera Major Operas | Boris Godunov by Modest Mussorgsky | High Romantic Major Operas | Khovanshchina by Modest Mussorgsky | High Romantic Personalities | Jacques Offenbach | High Romantic | Opera ...
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