with the relic. The wound can only be healed by a fool who grows wise through compassion. Suddenly, a swan is shot down by an arrow. A youth, Parsifal, is brought in; he appears to know nothing. Kundry fills in the little she knows concerning his name and his dead parents. As Amfortas is borne back to the ...
Attempts were made in the nineteenth century to turn the bassoon into a metal instrument: Charles and Adolphe Sax experimented with brass bassoons and the latter patented such an instrument, with 24 keys, in 1851. There were rival arrangements of keys (which implied different ways of fingering) available in the nineteenth century. There continue to be French and German ...
orchestral colour. Louis-Hector Berlioz (1803–69) was the first composer to specify sticks covered in sponge, wood and leather to achieve different timbres. Richard Wagner (1813–83) used muffled drums in Parsifal (1882). In the Symphonie fantasique (1830), Berlioz used four timpanists playing overlapping rolls to achieve thunder effects. Twentieth-Century Compositions In the twentieth century, increasing demands were made on the ...
Wagner’s Ring cycle is made up of four works – Das Rheingold (‘The Rhinegold’, 1851–54), Die Walküre (‘The Valkyrie’, 1851–56), Siegfried (1851–57; 1864–71) and Götterdämmerung (‘Twilight of the Gods’, 1848–52; 1869–74). Although there have been other, even more ambitious projects in the history of opera – Rutland Boughton’s cycle of choral dramas based on the Arthurian legends and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s ...
Franz Liszt, the great Hungarian composer whose daughter Cosima married Wagner in 1870, conducted the first performance of the three-act opera Lohengrin at the Court Theatre, Weimar on 28 August 1850. Wagner provided a blueprint for productions of Lohengrin, just as he did for Tannhäuser, and emphasized the duty of the stage manager not to leave ...
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 ...
soprano of her time. After her first Brünnhilde at Bayreuth in 1876, she also created the role of Kundry, the wild woman and temptress in Wagner’s last opera Parsifal (1882). Introduction | High Romantic | Opera Personalities | Henri Meilhac | High Romantic | Opera Houses & Companies | The Birth of the Metropolitan Opera | Turn of the ...
b. 1924, German An outstanding mezzo-soprano recitalist and concert singer, Ludwig was the daughter of two singers: tenor Anton Ludwig, and contralto Eugenie Besalla-Ludwig, who sang under Herbert von Karajan. Forced into early retirement, Eugenie became her daughter’s voice coach. Making her debut at 18 as Prince Orlovsky in Frankfurt, Ludwig remained there until 1952 ...
music of Wagner and believed that imitation of his music was the way forward. Debussy begged to differ. He greatly admired Tristan und Isolde (1857–59) for its adventurous harmony and Parsifal (1882) for its luminous orchestral effects, but he ultimately thought that Wagner was ‘a sunset mistaken for a sunrise’, although Pelléas et Mélisande uses Wagner’s celebrated leitmotif technique to ...
(Eng’-el-bârt Hoom’-per-dink) 1854–1921 German composer Humperdinck studied in Cologne with Ferdinand Hiller and joined Wagner’s circle in Bayreuth. He assisted in the publication of Parsifal and was music tutor to Wagner’s son Siegfried, who later praised Hänsel und Gretel (1893) as ‘the most important opera since Parsifal’. Based on a tale by the brothers Grimm, the opera was composed while ...
1854–1921, German Humperdinck showed an aptitude for vocal composition from an early age and, despite the concerns of his family, entered the Cologne Conservatory in 1872. He was a high achiever, winning multiple prizes for his Schumann-influenced compositions. Wagner soon came to dominate the young composer’s artistic thoughts and, following a short visit to him, ...
(Âr-nest’ Sho-sôn’) 1855–99 French composer After qualifying in law, Chausson studied with Massenet and Franck at the Paris Conservatoire and absorbed Wagnerian style, attending the Bayreuth premiere of Parsifal on his honeymoon. All three influences pervade his highly polished oeuvre in all genres. Best known are his masterly Symphony in B flat (1889), his sparkling concerto for piano, violin ...
major Italian tenor roles – such as Verdi’s Don Carlo, Alfredo (La traviata), Cavaradossi (Puccini’s Tosca) and Pinkerton (Madama Butterfly) – but also Wagner’s Lohengrin (Bayreuth, 2010) and Parsifal (Metropolitan Opera, 2013). Introduction | Contemporary | Classical Personalities | Simon Keenlyside | Contemporary | Classical ...
king and composer, persuading Wagner to build his own theatre at Bayreuth in Upper Franconia. It was here, on 26 July 1882, that his final work, Parsifal, was first staged. He died in Venice on 13 February 1883 and was buried at a private ceremony in Bayreuth five days later. Operas 1832 Die Hochzeit (incomplete) 1833–34 ...
Wagner to embrace some more immediately attractive, if essentially pessimistic, themes about the nature of art and the community that supports it. Similarly, in the scenario of Parsifal, drafted only two months after the premiere of Tristan, he explored the more readily acceptable, though still highly fraught, subject of a divine moral code as ...
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