1926–2010 Australian soprano Sutherland studied in Sydney and sang in public there before travelling to London for further study at the Royal College of Music. She joined the Covent Garden company in 1952 and sang many roles, including Jenifer in the premiere of Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage. Her performance as Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor under Serafin in 1959 launched her ...
1926–2010, Australian Dubbed ‘La Stupenda’ in Milan, this great coloratura soprano was capable of flawless trills and vocal pyrotechnics that were best suited to the bel canto repertoire, especially Bellini and Donizetti heroines. Sutherland’s musical engagements began at a young age in Sydney and culminated in her winning Australia’s foremost voice competition. Thereafter she studied at London’s Royal ...
(Guitar, vocals, b. 1941) Of Mexican and Irish extraction, Baez was the surprise hit of 1959’s Newport Folk Festival. With her pure soprano and deft way with an acoustic six-string, she was thus well-placed to become one of North America’s leading folk music ambassadors via ongoing international tours and albums that appealed initially to an intellectual fringe. ...
‘One Of Us’, 1995 ‘One Of Us’ was a popular radio-friendly hit that Osbourne followed with a few minor singles, though she has never replicated its popularity. Questioning what would happen if God were ‘one of us’, it earned Osbourne a mid-1990s supporting slot for Bob Dylan, while Prince would later take to covering the song in concert. It ...
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 ...
‘The Sleepwalker’ Vincenzo Bellini’s two-act opera La sonnambula, which had a pastoral background, was first produced at the Teatro Carcano in Milan on 6 March 1831. The story derived from a comédie-vaudeville of 1819 and a ballet-pantomime of 1827, both part-written by the French dramatist Eugène Scribe. The title role, Amina, was created by Giuditta Pasta ...
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 ...
1895–1936, Spanish This Spanish contralto made her debut just before her 16th birthday at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The following year she sang Octavian in the Rome premiere of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. She soon became associated with Rossini’s heroines, Angelina, Rosina and Isabella, all of which she sang with irresistible charm and charisma. ...
b. 1934, American One of the great mezzo-sopranos of the twentieth century, Horne studied with William Venard and dubbed the voice of Dorothy Dandridge in the 1954 film Carmen Jones. She was admired by Stravinsky, who invited her to perform in the 1956 Vienna Festival; she remained in Europe for three seasons at the Gelsenkirchen Opera. She returned ...
1878–1968 Italian conductor Serafin was principal conductor at La Scala, Milan, 1909–14 and 1917–18, and conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, 1924–34. After World War II he returned to La Scala, where he conducted the Italian premiere of Britten’s Peter Grimes. At Covent Garden in 1959 he conducted Joan Sutherland in her triumphant performance ...
Since Puccini’s death in 1924, opera houses have made little room for living composers. While the core repertory has remained more or less fixed, the need for novelty has necessitated the rediscovery of works long forgotten. This in turn has required singers able to cope with different technical and aesthetic problems; indeed, it is usually the prominence of ...
Following the social and political upheaval of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Europe enjoyed a short period of relative stability with Napoleon’s exile, the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France and the establishment of the Vienna Peace Settlement in 1815. However, in the early 1820s a number of minor revolts broke out in Naples and ...
Composed in 1944–45 and first performed on 7 June 1945, Peter Grimes reopened London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre following the Second World War – at the request of managing director, soprano Joan Cross. This opera, and its success, provided the momentum that the post-war arts environment needed. From the moment Britten read ‘The Borough’ he began making plans ...
(An’-to-nyen Dvôr’zhak) 1841–1904 Czech composer Dvořák was the pre-eminent composer of the Czech national revival. Arguably his achievement was less fundamental than Smetana’s, but he developed a strong international profile and for millions his style epitomizes ‘Czechness’ in music. The Czech influence in his work is hard to demonstrate and he almost never quoted folksong, but the appeal of his ...
(Är-tür’ Ô-ne-gâr’) 1892–1955 Swiss composer Honegger studied in Paris, and was soon bracketed with five French contemporaries as ‘Les Six’, but his idiom was tougher and less Gallic than theirs. He made his name with a powerful, neo-Handelian scenic cantata Le roi David (‘King David’; first performed at an outdoor festival in Switzerland, 1921). He wrote orchestral works ...
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