Premiered: 1705, Hamburg Libretto by Barthold Feind Act I King Tiridates of Armenia and his queen, Ormoena, have been captured and brought to Rome, where Nero falls in love with the beautiful Ormoena. Before he can marry her, however, Nero must first rid himself of his own virtuous wife, Octavia. Act II Nero orders ...
1674–1739, German Reinhard Keiser was born in Teuchern, Germany. When his mentor, Johann Sigismud Kusser (1660–1727) relocated to Hamburg in around 1693, Keiser succeeded him as Kappellmeister in Brunswick. There, Keiser produced Kusser’s first opera, Basilius (1694), and wrote several operas of his own, but after only three years he followed his mentor to ...
(Rin’-härt Ki’-zer) 1674–1739 German composer Keiser studied at St Thomas’s School, Leipzig. His first operas were performed at the Brunswick court during the early 1690s. In 1695 he moved to Hamburg, where he became director of the Gänsemarkt theatre in 1702. He wrote over 60 operas, mainly for Hamburg, but periods of absence did not further his cause. ...
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 ...
(Guitar, 1910–53) One of the reasons that Django Reinhardt dominated conversations about the guitar so completely in the 1930s was his fortunate timing. He arrived on the world jazz scene through the Quintet of the Hot Club of France in 1934 – a year after the death of Eddie Lang and five years before the arrival of Charlie Christian. Belgian ...
1678–1721, German In 1705, Barthold Feind – whose real name was Aristobulos Eutropius or Aristobulos Wahrmund – was practising law in his home city, Hamburg, when he wrote his first libretto for Reinhard Keiser (1674–1739), Octavia. Keiser needed a replacement at this time, after the death of Christian Heinrich Postel, who had been his librettist ...
(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 ...
1685–1759 English composer George Frideric Handel is one of the best known of all Baroque composers. His gift for melody, his instinctive sense of drama and vivid scene-painting, and the extraordinary range of human emotions explored in his vocal compositions make his music instantly accessible. Works such as Messiah (1741), Water Music (1717) and Music for the Royal Fireworks ...
c. 1612–85, Spanish Most works by Juan Hidalgo, who was born in Madrid, were intended for church performance. However, Hidalgo was greatly attracted to Italian opera. While it would not have been acceptable for him to use the opera style in church music, he did introduce it into several of his secular songs and other vocal ...
In the late Baroque era, opera was the most widely cultivated musical form. It had its own social and economic subculture and engaged many of the finest composers. By the early eighteenth century, most of the principal cities in Europe had imported opera from Italy and modified it to suit the local audiences’ taste. In France, opera remained ...
The Singspiel was a German form of opera in which songs and other music alternated with dialogue. Although the Singspiel originated in the seventeenth century, the term was not generally used until the eighteenth. Croesus (1711) by Reinhard Keiser (1674–1739) was an early example of Singspiel. Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, other forms of opera – the ...
1681–1764, German Born into a wealthy family, Mattheson received a gentleman’s education in languages and the arts, and studied law before becoming immersed in Hamburg’s operatic scene. He made his debut as a soprano in 1696, but his voice broke soon after and he sang tenor roles until 1705. He took part in more than 60 new ...
(Yo’-han Pakh’-el-bel) 1653–1706 German composer Pachelbel held the position of court organist at Eisenach (where he taught J. S. Bach’s eldest brother Johann Christoph) before taking up the same post at Erfurt. It was here that he published his first organ music, Musicalischen Sterbens-Gedancken (‘Musical Meditation on Death’, 1683). In 1690 he moved to Stuttgart and then Gotha before becoming organist ...
(Loo-e’ An-dre’-sen) b. 1939 Dutch composer Born into a distinguished family of Dutch musicians, Andriessen made a name for himself as part of an activist group of young composers who demonstrated at concerts of the Concertgebouw and together created a two-hour musical ‘morality’, Reconstructie, on the life of Che Guevara. Following his encounter with American minimalism, works such ...
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