(Frants fun Zoo-pa’) 1819–95 Austrian composer Suppé’s full name was Francesco Ezechiele Ermenegildo Cavaliere Suppé-Demelli. He came from Dalmatia, but received his musical education with Ignaz Xaver Seyfried (a pupil of Haydn) in Vienna, in whose famous theatres (an der Wien, Carl and Leopoldstadt) he conducted operetta. He composed over 150 operettas, including Boccaccio (1879), highly popular in ...
The trombone developed the idea of the Renaissance slide trumpet. While the trumpet abandoned the slide in favour first of crooks and later of valves, the trombone pursued the slide method and perfected it. The trombone is shaped like a giant paper-clip. While the left hand holds the instrument close to the mouth, the right hand grasps a crossbar; ...
The classical period saw the rise of the ‘Harmonie’, a small wind band of up to a dozen instruments. Usually this consisted of a mixture of brass and reeds, such as horns, clarinets, oboes and bassoons: Beethoven’s octet op. 103 (1792) is written for two of each of these (the 1796 op. 71 sextet leaves out the oboes). ...
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 ...
Rossini’s two-act version of the Cinderella story, his twentieth opera and last Italian comic opera, received its first performance at the Teatro Valle in Rome on 25 January 1817. This was followed by performances in London (1820), Vienna (1822) and New York (1826). The Teatro Valle, which had commissioned Rossini to write the opera for the carnival in ...
Composed: 1889–96 Premiered: 1900, Paris Libretto by the composer or Saint-Pol-Roux Act I From the balcony of her parents’ house in Montmartre, Louise can see Julien, a poet. He has written two letters to her father, asking to marry her, although she says she loves her parents too much to elope. Her mother drags her away ...
Wagner had first encountered the early thirteenth-century romance Parzivâl by Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1170–c. 1220) in 1845 and frequently returned to the subject in the course of the decades that followed, completing the libretto in 1877 and the music in 1882. By now his views had changed, and the text and its imagery are permeated by the Aryan ...
1842–1900 English composer Sullivan was a Chapel Royal chorister, the first-ever Mendelssohn scholar and a student of William Sterndale Bennett. He was already a composer of distinction when, in 1867, he collaborated with the playwright W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) in Cox and Box (1866). Their Trial by Jury (1875) set the seal on a historic partnership that spawned ...
b. 1934 English composer Birtwistle, member as a student of the Manchester New Music Group, says his juvenilia are pastiche Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958). Study with Richard Hall opened his ears to Stravinsky, Webern and Varèse, altering his musical style radically. In many ways his music is utterly individual; Birtwistle has said that he was driven to ...
b. 1934, English Uniquely gifted amongst contemporary English composers, Birtwistle first made a splash on the opera scene with the acclaimed Punch and Judy (1968). Centring around the murderous activities of Punch, the work distinguished itself through a lack of straightforward narrative, repeating the story several times from numerous different perspectives. Musically evoking the traditions of the ...
(Me-shel’ Re’-share de La-län-de) 1657–1726 French composer During the mid-1660s Lalande, along with Marais, was a member of the choir at St Germain-l’Auxerrois in Paris and later, as an organist, he was the mentor of Couperin. In 1683 he was appointed one of four sous-maîtres of the Chapelle Royale, gradually acquiring all the other major musical positions ...
1762–96 English composer Born in London of Italian and English parentage, Storace studied in Naples and first worked in Florence. He was back in London in the 1780s and spent time in Vienna, where his sister Nancy was a singer (she was the first Susanna in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro); he was a friend of Mozart’s. Back in London ...
The guitarist in Genesis from 1970–77, Steve Hackett developed a technical skill and tone control that was a vital factor in shaping the band’s music. He also helped to steer the post-Peter Gabriel Genesis towards a new style before leaving to pursue a solo career. An undemonstrative performer, Hackett has been a major influence on guitarists looking beyond the ...
1867–1948, Italian Having successfully avoided the career of fencing master intended for him by his father, Giordano studied at the Naples Conservatory and entered a one-act opera, Marina, in the Sonzogno competition in 1889. This was the year in which Mascagni blew away the competition with Cavalleria rusticana and Giordano came a respectable sixth. Even so, ...
(Fi’-then-ti Mar’-ti-ni So-le) 1754–1806 Spanish composer Martín y Soler had moved to Naples by 1777, when his Ifigenia in Aulide was staged there. By the early 1780s, his operas were being given in north Italy and he moved to Venice; from this time on he wrote only comic operas. Three years later he was in Vienna, where he had ...
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