, however, she calls for divine protection and rejects Faust. As she dies Méphistophélès claims her soul, but celestial voices announce that she is saved. Personalities | Charles Gounod | High Romantic | Opera ...
1818–93, French Charles Gounod almost became a priest, and his first works comprised church music. However, the mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot (1821–1910), a member of the Garcia operatic family, perceived Gounod’s potential and persuaded him compose opera. Eventually, he wrote 12 of them. Gounod composed Sapho (1851) for Viardot, but it did not make a distinctive ...
(Sharl Goo-no) 1818–93 French composer Gounod is best known as the composer of one of the most popular French lyric operas, Faust. His teachers at the Paris Conservatoire were the opera composers Jacques-François-Fromental Halévy (1799–1862) and Jean François Le Sueur (1760–1837) and in 1839 he won the coveted Prix de Rome. Alongside much sacred music, such as the florid ...
1843–1919, Italian The Italian soprano Adelina Patti was among the greatest of all prima donnas. As such, she enjoyed special privileges. One was exemption from rehearsals. Another was top pay for her time, amounting to $5,000 (£2,725) a performance after 1882. Patti made her singing debut at age seven, and first appeared on stage at ...
1811–96, French The French composer Ambroise Thomas was a staunch anti-Wagnerian, regarding this and other ‘modern’ influences as dangerous to French music. Thomas’s music, which included nine stage works written between 1837 and 1843, was firmly in the French musical tradition. Of these works, the most successful was La double échelle (‘The Double Ladder’, 1837). Thomas ...
La double échelle (‘The Double Ladder’, 1837). His first successes, Le Caïd (‘The Cadi’, 1849) and Songe d’une nuit d’été (‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, 1850), show the influence of Gounod and Rossini. Yet Mignon (1866), based on Goethe’s novel, introduced into French opera a radical new dramatic intensity, with expansive melodies and colourful orchestration to convey the heroine’s ...
b. 1965 Romanian soprano She studied in Bucharest and made her operatic debut as Mimì in (La bohème) at the Romanian National Opera in 1990, reprising the role at Covent Garden in 1991 and the Metropolitan Opera (her house debut) in 1993. In addition to Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini, she has had notable success in French-language opera, ...
(Ar-i’-go Bo-e’-to) 1842–1918 Italian composer and librettist Boito furnished the librettos for two of Verdi’s greatest Shakespearean masterpieces, Otello (1884–86) and Falstaff (1893). The premiere of his own operatic masterpiece Mefistofele, at La Scala, Milan (1868), was greeted with whistles due to the work’s extreme length (over five hours) and Germanic influences. As a result Boito for a while ...
Paris Conservatory aged 13. At 17, in 1852, Saint-Saëns wrote his prizewinning Ode à Sainte-Cécile (‘Ode to Saint Cecilia’) and at 18, he produced his first symphony. Gounod, Rossini, Liszt and Berlioz were all mightily impressed with Saint-Saëns, as was Wagner, who called him ‘the greatest musical mind of our time’. Saint-Saëns, in ...
1820–89, Italian Enrico Tamberlik, the Italian tenor, made his debut in Naples in 1841, as Enrico Danieli, singing Tebaldo in I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Bellini’s Romeo and Juliet opera. Afterwards, while at the Teatro San Carlo, Naples, he took the surname Tamberlik and retained it for engagements in London, St ...
the Paris Conservatoire (1828–30) and was influenced by the major opera composers of the day, including Rossini, Meyerbeer and Donizetti, and later by his friendships with Charles Gounod (1818–93) and Jacques Offenbach (1819–80). His early operas are in the French lyric style, but his most successful works, Alessandro Stradella (1844) and Martha (1847), combine a German ...
revived during the composer’s lifetime but has since entered the repertoire. The director of the Théâtre Lyrique continued to champion Bizet by commissioning a setting of a libretto dropped by Gounod, Ivan IV (1862–65), a work unperformed until 1946. His next exploration of the exotic followed the French fashion for the novels of Walter Scott, in this case The ...
Early Years Bizet was born in Paris on 25 October 1838. At the age of 10 he was accepted into the Paris Conservatoire of Music. There he was influenced by Gounod, the future composer of Faust. At the age of 19, Bizet wrote a one-act operetta, Le Docteur Miracle, which won joint first prize in a competition ...
(Zhak Fran-swa’ Fro-mon-tal A-la-ve’) 1799–1862 French composer Halévy was born in France and entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of nine. From 1811 he studied with the composer Cherubini, who was a great influence on him. Halévy won the Prix de Rome in 1819 and taught at the Paris Conservatoire from 1827 (where his pupils included Bizet and Gounod). A ...
the year he published La voix et le chant (‘The Voice and Singing’), his treatise on the art of performing opera. Introduction | High Romantic | Opera Personalities | Charles Gounod | High Romantic | Opera Houses & Companies | Opéra-Comique | Early Romantic | Opera Houses & Companies | Paris Opéra | High Romantic | Opera ...
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