Although endeavours to formulate a native style of English opera were all doomed to long-term failure, John Gay’s spoof The Beggar’s Opera was tremendously successful. Gay chose existing popular tunes, but Johann Christoph Pepusch provided the musical substance of the arrangements. Like Handel, Pepusch was an immigrant composer from Germany who had worked for James Brydges, the ...
The late Baroque era (1700–50) was a time of major political change throughout Europe, involving a shift in the balance of power between sovereign states. Across the continent it was a period of almost continuous warfare, the effects of which were later felt in other parts of the world as a result of conflicting ambitions among the various trading ...
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, opera was established in some form in most major European centres. The basic types of serious and comic opera in both Italian and French traditions shared similarities, although the content and style of an operatic entertainment could vary according to whether it was intended to flatter a private patron, resound with ...
Composed: 1928 Premiered: 1928, Berlin Book by Bertolt Brecht, from a translation by Elisabeth Hauptmann after John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera Prologue The Ballad Singer sings the ‘Ballad of Mack the Knife’. Act I Peachum controls the begging business in London. His wife’s description of their daughter Polly’s lover, ‘the Captain’, fits the notorious gang leader Macheath (Mack ...
Composed: 1958–64 Premiered: 1965, Cologne Libretto by the composer after Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz’s play Act I Marie Wesener, the daughter of a Lille merchant, and Stolzius, a draper in Armentières, are in love, but his mother disapproves. Marie rejects the advances of Desportes, a nobleman. The officers at Armentières discuss seduction. Desportes sends ...
‘Saint Alexius’ Premiered: 1632, Rome Libretto by Giulio Rospigliosi Prologue The figure of Roma (Rome), surrounded by a chorus of slaves, dedicates the performance to the Prince of Polonia (Poland). Act I Eufemiano, a Roman senator and Alessio’s father, encounters Adrasto, a knight returning from war. While pleased to see Adrasto, Eufemiano mourns the disappearance ...
Rossini’s two-act version of the Cinderella story, his twentieth opera and last Italian comic opera, received its first performance at the Teatro Valle in Rome on 25 January 1817. This was followed by performances in London (1820), Vienna (1822) and New York (1826). The Teatro Valle, which had commissioned Rossini to write the opera for the carnival in ...
Based on a series of eight Hogarth paintings, this opera was first performed on 11 September 1951 at Il Teatro La Fenice in Venice. In The Rake’s Progress, Stravinsky’s neo-classical style maintains a clear delineation of musical numbers separated by recitatives (accompanied by harpsichord), and as such it has often been considered a stylistic companion to the works of ...
1913–76 English composer The finest English composer of his generation, Britten reacted against the folksong-derived pastoralism of his elder compatriots, finding inspiration in Purcell and influences as various as Mahler and Stravinsky. The international success of his opera Peter Grimes (1945) brought financial security, but he continued to appear as a pianist, accompanying his partner and outstanding ...
1913–76, English Lord Edward Benjamin Britten was one of England’s most important composers. Britten was a musical ambassador who, working with a close-knit group of collaborators, helped develop a thriving and vital British opera scene. Indeed, Peter Grimes (1945) heralded a new era for British music and for the post-war performing arts in general. A Musical Start ...
1898–1956, German A poet and playwright, Brecht was best known for his departure from the conventions of theatrical illusion to create ‘epic theatre’ as a tool for social commentary. At its least nuanced and most dogmatic, this amounted to a didactic forum for his communist cause. Eugen Bertolt Friedrich Brecht was born and raised in Bavaria, where ...
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 ...
1685–1732, English A friend and collaborator of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), John Gay invented the genre of ballad opera with The Beggar’s Opera. It premiered on 29 January 1728 at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and performed 62 times in its first season. The popular perception that The Beggar’s Opera was an attack on Italian opera is untrue. It ...
(Koort Vil) 1900–50 German/American composer Weill was influenced by his teacher Busoni, by Stravinsky and by the ideal of Zeitoper (opera on contemporary subjects and themes). In his early, successful stage pieces, including Der Protagonist (‘The Protagonist’, 1926) and Royal Palace (1927), he soon moved towards a style, related to jazz and cabaret, that made him ...
1900–50, German A precocious compositional talent, Weill’s early operatic works Der Protagonist (‘The Protagonist’, 1926) and Der Zar lässt sich photographieren (‘The Tsar has his Photograph Taken’, 1928) strengthened his resolve to invent a style of music theatre that used the finest playwrights and dancers. In 1927, he collaborated with writer Bertolt Brecht on Mahagonny Songspiel, and ...
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