1915–2006 German soprano Schwarzkopf made her debut at the Städtische Oper in 1938 as a flower maiden in Parsifal. She joined the Vienna State Opera, with which she appeared on the company’s visit to Covent Garden in 1947. She then joined the resident company at Covent Garden, singing many German and Italian roles. She made her Salzburg and La ...
1915–2006, German The great soprano Olga Maria Elisabeth Friederike Schwarzkopf was perhaps one of the greatest Mozart singers of the twentieth century. Trained as a mezzo before becoming a coloratura soprano and joining Berlin’s Deutsche Oper in 1938, she was signed to an EMI recording contract by producer Walter Legge in 1946. Legge, who subsequently became her husband ...
(E-les-a-bet’ Klod Zha-ka’ de la Gâr) 1665–1729 French composer and harpsichordist Jacquet de la Guerre was a child prodigy. The daughter of an organ builder, she was described by the Mercure Galant in 1678 as la merveille de notre siècle (‘the marvel of our century’). After performing for Louis XIV, she was taken to live at Versailles, where her ...
1888–1952, German Soprano Schumann made her debut in the Neues Stadt-Theater in Hamburg in 1909 and stayed there until 1919. Richard Strauss persuaded her to join the Vienna Staatsoper where she remained until 1938. She made her Covent Garden debut in 1924 as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier. From 1938 she took up residence in New York where she had already ...
1911–86, German Possessing a pure, ringing voice that could sing anything from Mozart to Wagner, this German soprano carved out a special place for herself in the operatic world. After starting out as an actress, she married violinist Detlev Grümmer, who became concert master at Aachen opera house, under Herbert von Karajan. The maestro heard ...
Composed in 1787 and triumphantly premiered in Prague on 29 October that year, Don Giovanni reworks the old legend of the serial seducer, drawing on the Spanish play by Tirso de Molina (1630) and Molière’s Don Juan (1665). The opera revolves around the tensions of class and sex that were so central to Figaro. Ensembles and propulsive ‘chain’ finales ...
1861–1936, Austro-American Schumann-Heink’s voice was renowned for its richness and wide range. Studies with Marietta von Leclair led to her concert debut in 1876 and her operatic debut in Dresden two years later, in Il trovatore. For many years she sang at Hamburg and Bayreuth, while also appearing at London’s Covent Garden in Wagnerian roles. Schumann-Heink made her ...
b. 1935 German tenor Schreier made his debut as the First Prisoner in Fidelio (Dresden, 1961), before joining the Berlin State Opera. On the death of Fritz Wunderlich in 1966, he became the best-known exponent of Mozart’s Belmonte, Don Ottavio, Ferrando and Tamino (The Magic Flute), the part with which he made his Metropolitan Opera debut in ...
b. 1959 American soprano She completed her formal study at the Juilliard School and in Europe on a Fulbright scholarship with Arleen Augér and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1991 as the Countess (Mozart’s Figaro), which, along with the Marschallin (Strauss’s Rosenkavalier) has become one of her best-known roles. She created the role of Blanche DuBois ...
The advent of recordings certainly made opera accessible to many more people than ever before, and Enrico Caruso (1873–1921) was single-handedly responsible for the proliferation of his art via this medium. By the end of his life, he had made over 250 recordings. When the film world finally developed talkies, opera once again stepped to the fore, ...
Baritones Baritones, it is said, sing and act, while tenors merely sing. That may tell us more about the roles they take than about the singers themselves, but certainly the finest baritones excel in both skills, none more than Tito Gobbi, whose most noted roles were Falstaff in Verdi’s eponymous opera, and Scarpia in ...
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 ...
Verdi’s five-act opera Don Carlos was taken from a drama written in 1787 by the German playwright Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805). Written for the Paris Opéra, Don Carlos was first performed there on 11 March 1867. Schiller’s play was translated and the libretto written by Joseph Méry, who unfortunately died before it was completed, and Camille du Locle ...
Composed: 1959–61 Premiered: 1961, Schwetzingen Libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman Act I Hilda Mack recalls how her husband set out to climb the Hammerhorn 40 years ago. Dr Reischmann and Carolina, physician and secretary to the poet Gregor Mittenhofer, agree that no one thanks ‘the Servants of the Servant of the Muse’. Reischmann’s son Toni ...
The full title of this opera in three acts is Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg (‘Tannhäuser and the Song Contest on the Wartburg’). Wagner, who took nearly three years to write the opera, conducted the first performance at the Dresden Hofoper on 19 October 1845. This was the first of two Wagner operas in which a song contest ...
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