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• Major Operas
• Modern Era
• Opera

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 ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

‘The Abduction from the Seraglio’ Premiered on 16 July 1782, Die Entführung aus dem Serail quickly became his most popular work and sealed the composer’s operatic reputation in German-speaking lands. The Viennese expected plenty of laughs from a Singspiel. Mozart obliged with his first great comic creation: the ‘foolish, coarse and spiteful’ (Mozart’s words) harem overseer Osmin, a larger-than-life ...

• Major Operas
• High Romantic
• Opera

‘The Bat’ Composed: 1874 Premiered: 1874, Vienna Libretto by Carl Haffner and Richard Genée after Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy’s Le réveillon Prologue Falke wants revenge for a practical joke when Eisenstein left him sleeping, dressed as a bat, outside the Vienna law courts. Act I Eisenstein’s wife, Rosalinde, recognizes the voice serenading her as her ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

‘The Woman Without a Shadow’ Like Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten had a tempestuous genesis. The idea itself stemmed from the period immediately after the premiere of Der Rosenkavalier, but Hofmannsthal’s continual flood of ideas compounded by Strauss’s curmudgeonliness ensured the project stalled regularly. The start of the First World War did nothing to help, and ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

‘The Merry Widow’ Composed: 1905 Premiered: 1905, Vienna Libretto by Victor Léon and Leo Stein, after Henri Meilhac’s L’attaché d’ambassade Act I Baron Zeta, the Pontevedrin ambassador in Paris, must ensure that only a Pontevedrin marries Hanna Glawari, a rich, glamorous widow. All the French guests swoon over her at an embassy reception. Zeta thinks ...

• Major Operas
• High Romantic
• Opera

‘The Mastersingers of Nuremberg’ Die Meistersinger has often been described as a comedy. This, though, is not ‘comedy’ as found in the operas of Rossini or in Verdi’s Falstaff: what ‘comedy’ means in this context is the bitter ‘human comedy’. The premiere of Die Meistersinger took place in Munich on 21 June 1868. Wagner based his opera on the real-life ...

• Major Operas
• Modern Era
• Opera

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 ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

‘The Magic Flute’ The librettist of Die Zauberflöte, Emanuel Schikaneder, Mozart’s old friend and fellow freemason, drew on an eclectic variety of sources, including a French novel, Sethos, Paul Wranitzky’s magic opera Oberon (1789) and the oriental fairy tale Lulu. In the bird catcher Papageno, Schikaneder created for himself a character that could exploit ...

• Major Operas
• High Romantic
• Opera

Act I A storm rages. Siegmund enters a forest cottage and collapses. Sieglinde offers him refreshment. She persuades him to stay and meet her husband Hunding, who arrives and is suspicious. Siegmund reveals that his mother and sister were abducted and that he and his father were separated. Earlier that day he fought to rescue a girl from a forced ...

• Classical
• Classical Era

The very name, ‘Classical Era’, speaks for itself: it proclaims a period that is regarded as ‘Standard, first-class, of allowed excellence’, with manifestations that are ‘simple, harmonious, proportioned, finished’, to quote a dictionary definition. The period from 1750 to roughly 1820 is widely recognized as one of exceptional achievement in music – it is the ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

The most successful librettist of the modern era was W. H. Auden, who provided texts for Britten’s first opera, Paul Bunyan and, in collaboration with Chester Kallman, for operas by Stravinsky (The Rake’s Progress), Henze (Elegy for Young Lovers, 1961; The Bassarids, 1966), and for less acclaimed works by John Gardner (1917–2011) and Nicolas Nabokov ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Classical Era

When, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, French critics came into contact with Italian opera, many felt that the musical freedom of the Italians offered something that French opera, so closely tied to theatrical declamatory traditions, made impossible. The Abbé Raguenet, enamoured of Italian singing and the supporting instrumental skills, mocked French opera ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Classical Era

Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and Stress’), a name taken from a play of the time, began as a literary movement that flourished in Germany and Austria in the second half of the eighteenth century. Easier to recognize than to define, its manifestations included the ‘horrid’ world of the Gothic novel and, in the visual arts, the paintings ...

• Houses & Companies
• Classical Era
• Opera

Opposing tastes in opera have often provoked minor wars. One of them was the guerre des bouffons, which took place in Paris between 1752 and 1754 and ranged the supporters of French serious opera against the advocates of Italian opera buffa. On the French side were King Louis, his influential mistress Madame de Pompadour, his court and the ...

• Houses & Companies
• High Romantic
• Opera

King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845–86), a homosexual and a strange, obsessive character, came from a royal family, the Wittelsbachs, which had a strong streak of madness in it. Ludwig virtually fell in love with Wagner and his music, calling the composer his ‘one true friend whom I shall love until death.... If only, ...