b. 1963 French-Italian tenor Born in Paris to a Sicilian family, Alagna began his career in the city’s cabarets. After winning the Pavarotti International Voice Competition in 1988, he began his professional career with Glyndebourne Touring Opera as Alfredo in La traviata, a role he repeated at La Scala in 1990. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut (1996) ...
(Ro-bâr’-to Gâr’-härd) 1896–1970 Catalan composer Like Falla, Gerhard was a pupil of the great apostle of Spanish national music, Pedrell, but Gerhard also studied with Schoenberg. Much of his music reflects this duality, which was sharpened by his exile from Spain after the Civil War (1936–39), when he lived in England. His opera The Duenna (1947), his ...
‘The Triptych’ In constructing an operatic triple-bill, Puccini followed no precedent. He had nursed the idea for some time, to the despair of Giulio Ricordi, who felt it would be a box-office disaster. With the publisher’s death in 1912, Puccini soon felt able to work on the project. His librettist for La rondine, Giuseppe Adami, ...
1892–1990 English soprano Turner’s early career was spent with the Carl Rosa company, with which she appeared at Covent Garden in 1920. As Madam Butterfly she was spotted by Toscanini’s assistant at La Scala; her subsequent Italian career included her first Turandot, at Brescia in 1926. At Covent Garden, 1928–39 and 1947–48, she sang not only Turandot ...
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, ...
Baritones Baritones, it is said, sing and act, while tenors merely sing. That may tell us more about the roles they take than about the singers themselves, but certainly the finest baritones excel in both skills, none more than Tito Gobbi, whose most noted roles were Falstaff in Verdi’s eponymous opera, and Scarpia in ...
From the 1950s, several composers began to discover the compositional possibilities in the technology of radio stations and specialized studios. Important centres were: Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, New York, founded in 1951 by Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening; Studio für Elektronische Musik, Cologne, established by Herbert Eimert in 1951; Studio di Fonologia, Milan, established ...
‘The Barber of Seville’ Rossini’s opera was given its first performance, in Rome, on 20 February 1816, but not under the name by which it is now known. The reason was that Rossini’s Il barbiere was faced with a rival – an opera on the same subject by Giovanni Paisiello, that had first been produced in St Petersburg ...
Verdi was an enthusiastic admirer of Shakespeare and Macbeth was the first opera based on his work. It premiered at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence on 14 March 1847, with Verdi himself conducting. Performances followed throughout Europe, including Madrid (1848), Vienna (1849), and New York (1858). For the premiere in Paris, at the Théâtre Lyrique on 21 ...
1797–1848, Italian Gaetano Donizetti, who was born in Bergamo, wrote seven operas, some of them while still a student in Bologna, and several of them unproduced, before he scored his first success with Zoraide di Grenata (‘Zoraide of Granada’, 1822), which was performed in Rome. Zoraide attracted the attention of impresario Domenico Barbaia, who ...
(Jörd’ji Le-get’-e) 1923–2006 Hungarian composer Because of the disruption of World War II and the subsequent Communist regime in Hungary, Ligeti did not become aware of Western European musical modernism until he was over 30. Until then he wrote in the folk-song-based, Bartók-influenced style that was officially approved in his country. He left Hungary during the 1956 uprising, ...
(Ya-ko-po Pa’-re) 1561–1633 Italian composer Peri was a Florentine who held a post as musician at the Medici court. He was probably a member of Bardi’s famous circle of Camerata in Florence, but by 1592 was enjoying the patronage of the amateur composer Corsi. One of the poets of Corsi’s household was Rinuccini, whose pastoral poem Dafne was partly set ...
(Man’-wel da Fa’-ya) 1876–1946 Spanish composer Falla first trained as a pianist and had written five zarzuelas (Spanish light operas) before studying composition with Felipe Pedrell (1841–1922), who influenced him profoundly with his insistence that Spanish composers should write ‘Spanish music with a view of Europe’. Falla then moved to Paris, where Ravel and Debussy influenced the exquisite orchestral colour ...
1801–52, Italian Salvadore Cammarano wrote several plays before producing his first libretto in 1834. This so impressed the management at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples that Cammarano was appointed house poet in 1835. That same year, he wrote the libretto for Lucia di Lammermoor, composed by his friend Gaetano Donizetti. Cammarano and Donizetti worked on many more ...
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