Composed: 1949 Premiered: 1950, Philadelphia Libretto by the composer Act I John Sorel has been shot by the secret police at a political meeting. His wife Magda and his mother hide him in their apartment. A secret police agent threatens Magda. John decides to escape abroad. Magda will need a visa to join him. If the window is broken they ...
(Jan Kär’-lo Me-nôt’-te) 1911–2007 Italian-American composer The best of Menotti’s stage works combine something of the melodic appeal of Puccini and his successors with a dramatic punch that is Menotti’s own, but owes something to the American musical. His macabre The Medium (1946) and the chilling The Consul (1950), about refugees attempting to escape an unnamed country, have both ...
1911–2007, Italian One of the most important opera composers during the 1950s, Menotti had already written two operas by the time he entered the Milan Conservatory aged 13, and he would go on to write 23 more. He later moved to America and studied at the Curtis Institute, where he met his lifelong companion and inspiration, ...
(Kär’-lo Ja-zoo-al’-do) c. 1561–1613 Italian composer Gesualdo may be more famous than he deserves to be. Everyone loves a good story and Gesualdo, who brutally murdered his wife and her lover, provides one of the most colourful and scandalous in all music history. A nobleman of minor rank, he found, strangely, that his marital history did not ...
Spanish guitar legend Carlos Montoya (1903–93) helped propel the flamenco style of music from accompaniment for gypsy folk dances and songs to a serious and internationally popular form of guitar music. Montoya was born into a gypsy family in Spain. He studied guitar with his mother and a local barber, eventually learning from professionals and becoming an expert on the ...
American guitarist Joe Satriani is widely credited with pioneering the rock-instrumental style in the 1980s, opening up the genre for guitarists like Steve Vai, Eric Johnson and Yngwie Malmsteen. His talent for creating highly evolved music, using a pop-song structure with tuneful melodies before applying his own virtuoso skills, has made him one of the most successful ...
Multitalented guitarist Carlos Santana was born the son of a mariachi musician in the Mexican town of Autlan de Navarro in 1947. The family moved to Tijuana when he was nine, and Carlos, who first played violin before changing to guitar, became interested in rock’n’roll and blues. At 13, he was earning money playing in cantinas and ...
Django Reinhardt (1910–53) overcame physical disabilities to create a unique playing style and one of the most highly influential sounds in jazz. He was born in Belgium to gypsy parents. At the age of eight his mother’s tribe settled near Paris. The French Gypsies, or Manouches, were medieval in their beliefs, and distrustful of modern science. But Django ...
(Kar-loos Go’-mas) 1836–96 Brazilian composer Gomes was the son of a bandmaster, and after studies at the Imperial Conservatory of Music in Rio de Janeiro, he settled in Italy. His comedies Se sa minga and Nella Luna (1867–68) were successful, but international recognition really arrived with the composition of Il Guarany (La Scala, 1870), whose exotic score includes ...
(Composer, piano, guitar, 1927–94) Jobim was the best known of the Brazilian composers who made an impact on jazz. His international reputation blossomed due to his songs in the film Black Orpheus (1959) and with João Gilberto he sparked a bossa nova craze, boosted by Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd’s Jazz Samba (1962). He led his own ...
1598–1659, Italian Venetian-born librettist Gian Francesco Busenello had a particular talent for the commercial operas that became fashionable in Italy in the first half of the seventeenth century. Busenello possessed a certain cynical realism about life that served him and his composers well when it came to insights into human behaviour. Busenello was never judgemental in his treatment of his ...
1707–93, Italian By profession a lawyer in Pisa, Carlo Goldoni became resident poet at several Venetian opera houses. There he devised and specialized in the opera buffa libretto and wrote over 100, using pseudonyms for some of them. Goldoni left Venice for Paris in 1762 and for some years became well known and much admired for his work ...
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 ...
1924–2014, Italian Known as ‘the tenor of all tenors’, Bergonzi had a lyrical voice that was both refined and intense. Vocal lessons were interrupted when he was interred in a prisoner-of-war camp, but resumed upon his release and in 1947 he began to make a series of debuts as a baritone. Retraining his voice, he emerged four years ...
Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (‘The Book of the Courtier’) was published in 1528 and became the most influential book of manners of its time. It was still being reprinted well into the eighteenth century and was translated into many languages. The Courtier presents a series of evening conversations purported to have taken place at the court of Urbino, ...
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