1878–1946, Italian Adami worked as a playwright and journalist as well as a librettist. He found most success with lighter plays such as Una capanna e il tuo cuore (1913) and also wrote a number of ballet scenarios. His is best known operatically for his collaborations with Puccini. The publisher Giulio Ricordi brought the two together, and their first ...
felt it would be a box-office disaster. With the publisher’s death in 1912, Puccini soon felt able to work on the project. His librettist for La rondine, Giuseppe Adami, provided Puccini with the text for the first one-acter, Il tabarro. As usual, though, Puccini did not make life easy and Adami did not stay the ...
Puccini spent the last five years of his life working on Turandot. He patched up his differences with Adami who, together with Renato Simoni, got to work on creating a libretto from Carlo Gozzi’s fairy-tale. Through the usual prevarications, doubts and rows, Puccini slowly worked on the score. At the beginning of 1924, he began to ...
La fanciulla del West (‘The Girl of the Golden West’), partly because his mother was American. He worked too slowly for Puccini and Guelfo Civinini provided the third act. Giuseppe Adami, who made an Italian translation of the German text of La rondine, ended by providing a complete libretto. Adami also wrote the libretto for Il tabarro, the ...
Opera Houses & Companies | King Ludwig & the Festspielhaus | High Romantic | Opera Techniques | Puccini & Wagner | Turn of the Century | Opera Personalities | Giuseppe Adami | Turn of the Century | Opera ...
1685–1759 English composer George Frideric Handel is one of the best known of all Baroque composers. His gift for melody, his instinctive sense of drama and vivid scene-painting, and the extraordinary range of human emotions explored in his vocal compositions make his music instantly accessible. Works such as Messiah (1741), Water Music (1717) and Music for the Royal Fireworks ...
1685–1759, German Handel composed 42 operas between 1704 and 1740, but most of these were neglected and seldom performed after his lifetime. In the twentieth century, Handel’s music dramas and in particular his operas underwent a renaissance that has established him as the definitive theatre composer of the late Baroque period. Handel was a maverick composer who pursued ...
1626–90, Italian Giovanni Legrenzi composed his first operas at Ferrara, where he became maestro di cappella at the Accademia dello Spirito Santo in 1656. He began with Nino il giusto (‘Nino the Just’, 1662) and in the next three years produced Achille in Sciro (1663) and Zenobia e Radamisto (1665). Subsequently, Legrenzi led a nomadic life, travelling ...
fl. 1700–34, Italian The soprano Durastanti’s first known appearance was at Venice in 1700. By 1707 she was employed by the Marquis Ruspoli in Rome, where she first met Handel, who composed several superb cantatas for her. Durastanti worked in Venice from 1709 until 1712, where she sang in nine operas by Lotti and the title role ...
1678–1729, Italian Haym was the skilful literary adaptor who prepared several of Handel’s best opera libretti, including Radamisto, Giulio Cesare in Egitto, Tamerlano and Rodelinda. Rather than writing new texts for Handel, Haym’s talent was reorganizing old Italian texts so that they were adequately dramatic and balanced while also reducing the amount of simple recitative for ...
1664–1725, Italian Stampiglia was one of the 14 founding members of the Accadamia dell’Arcadia (The Arcadian Academy). Although a Roman by birth, for many years Stampiglia was associated with operas in Naples, and did not always conform to Arcadian ideals despite being part of their circle. Stampiglia’s libretti are often ironic comedies in which conventional heroism is regarded ...
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