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• Personalities
• Classical Era
• Opera

1714–95, Italian Calzabigi was best known for three libretti for Gluck – Orfeo ed Euridice, Alceste and Paride ed Elena, the last taking its eponymous characters, Paris and Helen, from the ancient Greek story of the Trojan War. In these libretti, Calzabigi moved away from the artificiality and limited conventions of opera seria, preferring ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

most passionate, the most energetic, the most theatrical music ever heard in Europe’. Composed: 1767 (revised 1776) Premiered: 1767, Vienna (revised version 1776) Libretto by Raniero de’ Calzabigi (French version by François Louis Gand Leblanc Roullet) Act I A herald tells the grieving crowd gathered in the square next to the palace of Admetus, King of Thessaly ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

‘The Danaids’ Composed: 1784 Premiered: 1784, Paris Libretto by François Louis Gand Leblanc Roullet, after Raniero de’ Calzabigi The opera is based on a Greek myth. Under the guise of an act of reconciliation, the daughters of Danaus (the Danaids) have been betrothed to the sons of Danaus’s brother and enemy, Aegyptus, who is now dead. ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

startling originality that integrated chorus, soloists and ballet in dramatic complexes, abandoned the strict da capo aria, and broke down the clear-cut division between recitative and aria. Calzabigi, the librettist, was a disciple of the French Enlightenment, and a passionate opponent of the artifices and excesses of Italian opera. He took the archetypal story of ...

• Personalities
• Classical Era
• Opera

interpreting German-language roles in such operas as Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, in which she sang in Vienna in 1781. Introduction | Classical Era | Opera Personalities | Raniero de’ Calzabigi | Classical Era | Opera ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Classical Era
• Composer

in manner, within the usual style of Italian serious opera. But now, in collaboration with two other artists strongly influenced by Enlightenment ideals, the poet Raniero de’ Calzabigi and the choreographer Gasparo Angiolini, he experimented with new styles. First, they produced together a ballet based on the Don Juan story, given in 1761 – a ...

• Personalities
• Classical Era
• Opera

1714–87, German Famous above all as the composer of Orfeo ed Euridice, Christoph Willibald von Gluck was, more than anyone, responsible for purging opera of what he dubbed the ‘abuses’ of opera seria in favour of ‘beautiful simplicity’, emotional directness and dramatic truth. From Bohemia to Vienna Born in the small town of Erasbach in the Upper ...

• Opera
• Classical Era

, its plots overly restrictive and its structure excessively regulated. In his prologue to Alceste (1767), which he may have written with the help of his librettist, Raniero de’ Calzabigi (1714–95), Gluck poured particular scorn on the prominence of arias and the chances they gave singers to show off: ‘I do not wish to arrest an actor in the greatest ...

• Stage & Scene
• Classical Era
• Opera

his three Italian ‘reform’ operas – Orfeo, Alceste and Paride ed Elena – that broke most boldly with tradition. In the famous preface to Alceste, probably co-written with Calzabigi, the composer resolved to divest music of ‘all those abuses, introduced by the misguided vanity of singers or the excessive complaisance of composers that have so long disfigured ...