• 1245
• Articles
• 26 Lug 2012

Mary Garden was born in Aberdeen/Scotland and moved to America at the age of 6. She took first singing lessons in Chicago and studied afterwards with Trabadelo and Lucien Fugère in Paris. Sibyl Sanderson introduced her to Albert Carré, director of the Opéra-Comique, where she made her debut in the title role of Charpentier’s Louise […]

• 4436
• Articles
• 26 Lug 2012

“Pellèas et Mélisande” All operas face a fundamental challenge to blend the abstraction of music with the tangible specificity of texts, sets, costumes, actors and other theatrical elements. Great operas manage to unify these disparate elements into a moving and credible human experience that transcends their respective realms. Dissatisfied with the musical and dramatic conventions […]

• 4699
• Articles
• 26 Lug 2012

Claude Debussy’s “Trois chansons de Bilitis”, as with many of his works, evade traditional tonal-harmony analysis. Unlike the composers of earlier years, Debussy’s works utilize scales containing modal mixture, strings of parallel fifths, and several other previously unorthodox techniques. The three songs, “La flûte de Pan”, “La chevelure”, and “Le tombeau des Naïades” all contain […]

• 2167
• Articles
• 26 Lug 2012

It may come as a surprise to some (it did to me) that Claire Croiza, universally acknowledged as one of the high priestesses of French art song, dedicated the first half of her career to opera. It is difficult to imagine what this suave, perfectly modulated and intimate voice might have sounded like as La […]

• 1449
• Articles
• 26 Lug 2012

“Montezuma” is an opera seria in three acts by the German composer Carl Heinrich Graun. The libretto was written in French by Graun’s patron, Frederick the Great, the King of Prussia, and turned into an Italian libretto by Giampetro Tagliazucchi. The work’s plot concerns Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico and the defeat of the Aztec […]

• 6784
• Articles
• 26 Lug 2012

More than the music (Giovanni Battista Bononcini had a popular appeal, but wasn’t a real great composer. Contrariwise his father, Giovanni Maria and his brother, Alessandro Maria Bononcini were both really important baroque composers), I love the soft performance of “Per la Gloria d’adorarvi” by Dame Joan Sutherland. “Griselda” is a “dramma per musica” in […]

• 1814
• Articles
• 19 Lug 2012

“La Calisto” is an opera by Francesco Cavalli with a libretto by Giovanni Faustini. The libretto was published in 1651 by Giuliani and Batti. The opera received its first performance on 28 November 1651 at the Teatro Sant’Apollinare, Venice. At the time, the Sant’Apollinare was equipped with complex stage machinery, which the theatre intended to […]

• 1265
• Articles
• 17 Lug 2012

This live version of “Alcina” (“Tornami a vagheggiar”) by Dame Joan Sutherland, Venice, La Fenice Theater, 1960, is amazing! “Alcina” (or “Alcyna”) is an opera seria by George Frideric Handel. Handel used the libretto of “L’isola di Alcina”, an opera that was set in 1728 in Rome by Riccardo Broschi, which he acquired the year […]

• 2500
• Articles
• 16 Lug 2012

Francesco Cavalli (14 February 1602 – 14 January 1676) was an Italian composer of the early Baroque period. His real name was Pietro Francesco Caletti-Bruni, but he is better known by that of Cavalli, the name of his patron Federico Cavalli, a Venetian nobleman. Cavalli was born at Crema, Lombardy. He became a singer at […]

• 1302
• Articles
• 16 Lug 2012

“La Calisto” is an opera by Francesco Cavalli with a libretto by Giovanni Faustini. The libretto was published in 1651 by Giuliani and Batti. The opera received its first performance on 28 November 1651 at the Teatro Sant’Apollinare, Venice. At the time, the Sant’Apollinare was equipped with complex stage machinery, which the theatre intended to […]