Maurice Delage (13 November 1879 – 21 September 1961) was a French composer and pianist.
Delage was born and died in Paris. A student of Ravel and member of Les Apaches, he was influenced by travels to India and the East. Ravel’s “La vallée des cloches” from Miroirs was dedicated to Delage.
Delage’s best known piece is “Quatre poèmes hindous” (1912–1913). His “Ragamalika” (1912–1922), based on the classical music of India, is also significant in that it calls for prepared piano; the score specifies that a piece of cardboard be placed under the strings of the B-flat in the second line of the bass clef to dampen the sound, imitating the sound of an Indian drum.

Exoticism And Orientalism In Classical Music.

There is a long tradition of classical composers writing music evoking the exotic non-western world , and many operas and other works attempt to depict the exotic and the oriental.
For example , the great French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau , a close contemporary of Bach and Handel, wrote an opera called “Les Indes Galantes”, which takes place in both Asia and South America , and in which he made an 18th century attempt to portray exoticism in music . In Mozart’s day, there was considerable interest in Turkish culture , as the Ottoman army had been defeated some time in the past from conquering the Austro-Hungarian empire.
The so-called Janissary music, or Turkish marching bands with exotic percussion instruments captured the imagination of Austrians, and Mozart wrote the famous opera “The Abduction From the Seraglio, ” set to a libretto in German, which takes place in Turkey . In the opera, a Turkish Pasha has captured a young Spanish noblewoman and her maid, and wants to make her part of his Harem . But her betrothed, whom she loves, has come to Turkey to try to rescue her . Everything ends happily when the Pasha magnanimously allows the two to be united and to leave Turkey.
There is the comical character of the Pasha’s grumpy and bombastic servant who guards the Harem and wants the servant girl for himself . Mozart uses percussion in the opera to imitate the exotic Janissary music . It’s a delightful comic opera with spoken dialogue in between the musical numbers.
Giuseppe Verdi’s famous opera “Aida”, which takes place in ancient Egypt, was comissioned by the Khedive of Egypt to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in the early 1870s , and was actually premiered at the opera house in Cairo . Verdi used exotic scales to evoke ancient Egypt in parts of the opera, even though we have no real idea of what ancient Egyptian music was like . But the music certainly sounds convincing.
Likewise, great 19th century Russian composers such as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov , Alexander Borodin and others wrote music inspired by the orient and the exotic, non-russian parts of the Russian empire . Rimsky’s famous orchestral suite “Scheherezade”, is a vivid and colorful evocation of the Arabian Nights , Borodin’s “Polovetzian Dances” from his opera “Prince Igor” evokes the world of the Turko-Tatar warriors of the ancient Russian steppes.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, the great French composer Claude Debussy (1962 -1918) was became fascinated with the orient when he heard the exotic music of the Indonesian Gamelan in Paris and other Asian musics at Parisian expositians . Some of his piano works are inspired by these Asian influences , and a number of people from China have actually stated that Debussy is their favorite Western composer because his music reminds them so much of Chinese music ! There are similar exotic influences in some of the music of his younger contemporary Maurice Ravel (1875 -1937 ), famous for his Bolero.
The less well-known but wonderful French composer Albert Roussel, who was their contemporary , actually spent time travelling in India and what is now Cambodia and Vietnam , and this inspired some fascinating works, such as the exotic opera “Padmavati”, which deals with the Moghul invasion of India in the middle ages , and the “Evocations” for orchestra, which evokes the great temples of Indochina, such as Angkor Wat, which he visited.
!9th century French composers such as Leo Delibes and Georges Bizet of Carmen fame wrote operas such as “Lakne”, the story of the daughter of a Brahman priest in India and her doomed love affair with a handsome young English soldier, and Bizet wrote ” The Pearl Fishers, which takes place on what in now called Sri Lanka, formerly known as Ceylon . These operas, though entertaining, are ot really very authentic at all, unlike Roussel’s Padmavati , the product of an actual visit to India.
More recently, a number of American composers have studied the exotic Gamelan music of Indonesia , such as Lou Harrison (1917 -2003 ), who was very interested in Asian music, and the Canadian composer Colin McPhee wrote an orchestral piece called “Tabuh-Tabuhan “, inspired by Indonesian music, which he studied there . Philip Glass, the most famous minimalist composer, has also written operas inspired by exotic subjects, such as “Satyagraha, ” based on the life of Mahatma Gandhi, and “Akhenaten”, which takes place in ancient Egypt.
And contemporary Asian composers such as Chinese-born, New Yorked based Tan Dun (1957-) and Japan’s Toru Takemitsu and others written music which is a kind of fusion between east and west.
Yes, exotic elements have been a fruitful source of inspiration for many Western composers , and there’s much more to explore than the music of the composers mentioned here.

Janet Baker and Melos Ensemble

“Orientalism” is a book published in 1978 by Edward Said that has been highly influential and controversial in postcolonial studies and other fields. In the book, Said effectively redefined the term “Orientalism” to mean a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the Middle East. This body of scholarship is marked by a “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture.” He argued that a long tradition of romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for European and American colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the US and British orientalists’ ideas of Arabic culture.
So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.
(Edward Said, The Nation).
Said summarised his work in these terms:
“My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness….As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge.”
Said also wrote:
“My whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence — in which I do not for a moment believe — but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting.”
Principally a study of 19th-century literary discourse and strongly influenced by the work of thinkers like Chomsky, Foucault and Gramsci, Said’s work also engages contemporary realities and has clear political implications as well. Orientalism is often classed with postmodernist and postcolonial works that share various degrees of skepticism about representation itself (although a few months before he died, Said said he considers the book to be in the tradition of “humanistic critique” and the Enlightenment).
A central idea of Orientalism is that Western knowledge about the East is not generated from facts or reality, but from preconceived archetypes that envision all “Eastern” societies as fundamentally similar to one another, and fundamentally dissimilar to “Western” societies. This discourse establishes “the East” as antithetical to “the West”. Such Eastern knowledge is constructed with literary texts and historical records that often are of limited understanding of the facts of life in the Middle East.
Following the ideas of Michel Foucault, Said emphasized the relationship between power and knowledge in scholarly and popular thinking, in particular regarding European views of the Islamic Arab world. Said argued that Orient and Occident worked as oppositional terms, so that the “Orient” was constructed as a negative inversion of Western culture. The work of another thinker, Antonio Gramsci, was also important in shaping Edward Said’s analysis in this area. In particular, Said can be seen to have been influenced by Gramsci’s notion of hegemony in understanding the pervasiveness of Orientalist constructs and representations in Western scholarship and reporting, and their relation to the exercise of power over the “Orient”.
Although Edward Said limited his discussion to academic study of Middle Eastern, African and Asian history and culture, he asserted that “Orientalism is, and does not merely represent, a significant dimension of modern political and intellectual culture.” Said’s discussion of academic Orientalism is almost entirely limited to late 19th and early 20th century scholarship. Most academic Area Studies departments had already abandoned an imperialist or colonialist paradigm of scholarship. He names the work of Bernard Lewis as an example of the continued existence of this paradigm, but acknowledges that it was already somewhat of an exception by the time of his writing (1977). The idea of an “Orient” is a crucial aspect of attempts to define “the West”. Thus, histories of the Greco–Persian Wars may contrast the monarchical government of the Persian Empire with the democratic tradition of Athens, as a way to make a more general comparison between the Greeks and the Persians, and between “the West” and “the East”, or “Europe” and “Asia”, but make no mention of the other Greek city states, most of which were not ruled democratically.
Taking a comparative and historical literary review of European, mainly British and French, scholars and writers looking at, thinking about, talking about, and writing about the peoples of the Middle East, Said sought to lay bare the relations of power between the colonizer and the colonized in those texts. Said’s writings have had far-reaching implications beyond area studies in Middle East, to studies of imperialist Western attitudes to India, China and elsewhere. It was one of the foundational texts of postcolonial studies. Said later developed and modified his ideas in his book Culture and Imperialism (1993).
Many scholars now use Said’s work to attempt to overturn long-held, often taken-for-granted Western ideological biases regarding non-Westerners in scholarly thought. Some post-colonial scholars would even say that the West’s idea of itself was constructed largely by saying what others were not. If “Europe” evolved out of “Christendom” as the “not-Byzantium”, early modern Europe in the late 16th century (see Battle of Lepanto, 1571) defined itself as the “not-Turkey.”
Said puts forward several definitions of “Orientalism” in the introduction to Orientalism. Some of these have been more widely quoted and influential than others:[citation needed]
“A way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience.”
“a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’.”
“A Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”
“…particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient.”
“A distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts.”
In his preface to the 2003 edition of Orientalism, Said also warned against the “falsely unifying rubrics that invent collective identities,” citing such terms as “America”, “The West”, and “Islam”, which were leading to what he felt was a manufactured “clash of civilisations.”

“Lakmé” is an opera in three acts by Léo Delibes to a French libretto by Edmond Gondinet and Philippe Gille. Delibes wrote the score during 1881–82 with its first performance on 14 April 1883 at the Opéra Comique in Paris. Set in British India in the mid 19th century, “Lakmé” is based on the 1880 novel Rarahu ou Le Mariage de Loti by Pierre Loti. The opera includes the famous and popular “Flower Duet” (“Sous le dôme épais”) for sopranos performed in Act 1 by the lead character Lakmé, the daughter of a Brahmin priest, and her servant Mallika. Another famous aria from the opera is the “Bell Song” (“L’Air des clochettes”) in the second Act.
Like other French operas of the period, “Lakmé” captures the ambiance of “the Orient” that was in vogue during the latter part of the nineteenth century in line with other operatic works such as Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers” and Massenet’s “Le roi de Lahore”. The subject of the opera was suggested by Gondinet as a vehicle for the American soprano Marie van Zandt.

Nella breve (un cinquantennio, più o meno: da Visconti in poi) storia della regia lirica i décoratori si sprecano [e sfiniscono a furia di ninnoli camp (un altro indizio? iniziali FZ)], i provocatori si spintonano [e tediano con trovate incomprensibili e chiarissime sciatterie (pessimo ultimo Walter Pagliaro, responsabile di una nefanda FAVORITE vista a Bologna e – si spera – in pochi altri siti)] e i registi scarseggiano. Fra questi ultimi, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle rimane uno dei più rappresentati(vi) (scomparso ormai da quindici anni, i suoi allestimenti continuano a essere riproposti in molte occasioni) e l’unico ad avere realizzato una reale (e sottovalutata) mediazione fra teatro e cinema (attraverso lo schermo televisivo, prima destinazione di gran parte dei suoi lavori).
Il regista ha saputo creare non opere filmate ma veri film, oggetti audiovisivi in grado di superare i confini della testimonianza discografica accessoriata di scene e costumi. Artista completo (anche scenografo e costumista), di lussuosa e misurata eleganza, Ponnelle colloca la musica sopra ogni altra cosa: i movimenti di macchina e quelli dei cantanti-attori raramente rispettano la lettera dei libretti operistici (spesso rielaborati nel profondo, non solo nella definizione spazio-temporale) ma trovano infallibilmente la propria giustificazione nelle partiture. I lavori migliori di Ponnelle sono trasparenti e solidissimi meccanismi in cui apparenti errori tecnici (lo scollamento ghezziano di movimenti labiali ed emissioni vocali, in alcuni passi de LE NOZZE DI FIGARO e COSÌ FAN TUTTE) sono riconducibili a precise esigenze espressive (rispettivamente il ritratto dei sentimenti ineffabili e l’invisibile denuncia degli inganni occultati).
Ponnelle è insuperato e insuperabile nel campo dell’opera del ‘700 e del primo ‘800, soprattutto in ambito comico. La musica classica (che, alla lettera, è quella di Rossini e Mozart, per citare gli autori affrontati dal regista) possiede “una concezione artistica e […] una prassi musicale divinamente equilibrate nei loro fattori”[1] e al tempo stesso la capacità di ribaltare di segno(/senso) tale perfetta grazia, ri/costruendo lucidamente gli abissi dell’animo umano. Alle prese con partiture dai toni fortemente drammatici (RIGOLETTO, MADAMA BUTTERFLY), Ponnelle scivola talvolta in una maniera di segno stridulo: esaminando al microscopio filmico i crudeli e millimetrici cristalli del dramma giocoso mozartiano e rossiniano, sa sondare i superbi ingranaggi testuali con un limpido distacco la cui apparente freddezza è indice non di banale cinismo ma di profondo, religioso (cfr. PROVA D’ORCHESTRA) rispetto per una drammaturgia ostinatamente “aliena”, d’insopprimibile fascino.

Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (19 February 1932 – 11 August 1988) was a noted French opera director.
Ponnelle was born in Paris. He studied philosophy, art, and history there and, in 1952, began his career in Germany as a theatre designer for Hans Werner Henze’s opera Boulevard Solitude. He was greatly influenced by the work of art director Georges Wakhévitch who also designed sets and costumes for the theatre, the ballet, and the opera.
In 1962, Ponnelle directed his first production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in Düsseldorf. His production of that opera at the Bayreuth Festival in 1981 was widely praised as one of the most aesthetically beautiful in its history.
His work throughout the world included stage productions at the Metropolitan Opera and the San Francisco Opera; productions for television (a Madama Butterfly in 1974 notable for performances by Mirella Freni and the young Placido Domingo); and filmed versions of operas such as the well-known Karl Böhm-conducted The Marriage of Figaro. His 1969 production of Mozart’s then neglected La Clemenza di Tito for Cologne helped re-establish this work in the repertory. Ponnelle also was a frequent guest at the Salzburg Festival.[1]
Often, his productions were controversial. His 1986 Aida at Covent Garden, in which he replaced the usual ballet dancers with young boys, was soundly booed and never revived, though his earlier Don Pasquale at the same theatre had been a triumph ,[2] as were his interpretations of well-known works. [3][4]
He died in Munich, Germany in 1988 of a pulmonary embolism following a tragic fall into the orchestra pit during rehearsals for a production of Carmen with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under Zubin Mehta. His son is the orchestra conductor Pierre-Dominique Ponnelle and his nephew is the French guitarist and producer Jean Pierre Danel.

The Uses of Enchantment: A Program Essay for Handel’s Alcina at New York City Opera
by Marion Lignana Rosenberg

Now little known in the English-speaking world, Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) was arguably the greatest poet of his age, and his 46-canto epic Orlando furioso (Mad Roland, 1532) was the most celebrated literary work of its era. At a time when books were still new and costly commodities and only a tiny percentage of Europe’s population was literate, Orlando furioso was publishing’s first international sensation—the Harry Potter of its day! By one estimate, at least 113 editions of Ariosto’s poem appeared between 1540 and 1580. It inspired countless sequels and even exerted a retroactive influence on classical letters, with Italian translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses published in the meter and format of Ariosto’s masterpiece. For many of Ariosto’s contemporaries, Orlando furioso surpassed even the epics of antiquity; centuries later, Voltaire would declare it the equal of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Don Quixote combined.
At three times the length of Dante’s Commedia, Orlando furioso is difficult to summarize. Broadly speaking, its two main narrative threads concern the love-inspired madness of Orlando, Charlemagne’s greatest warrior; and the courtship and marriage of two of Alcina’s protagonists: Bradamante and Ruggiero, the mythical forbears of the Este dynasty, Ariosto’s patrons at court of Ferrara. Chivalric literature, both popular and learned, had been all the rage in Europe for centuries, and Ariosto’s poem picks up where Orlando innamorato by Matteo Maria Boiardo, an earlier Ferrarese court poet, leaves off: with Angelica, the pagan temptress beloved of Orlando, scurrying into the forest pursued (we read twice) by a “cavaliere (‘knight’; literally, ‘horseman’) traveling on foot.”
“A horseman traveling on foot”: from the very first lines of the narrative, things are amiss in the world of Orlando furioso. Though Ariosto’s verses sparkle with humor and grace, the breathless plunge of Angelica and her suitor into the woods inevitably recalls Dante’s “dark forest” of perdition. Ariosto borrows a phrase from Dante’s Inferno V (the canto of the doomed lovers Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta)—“here, there, up and down”—to depict his characters’ pell-mell quests for the objects of their desire. While the narrative, at first glance, seems a genial jumble—Ariosto’s teasing practice of dropping one plot line and turning to another just when things are heating up was dubbed cantus interruptus by critic Daniel Javitch—Orlando furioso is in fact no less carefully structured or cosmic in scope tn haDante’s Commedia.
Orlando furioso’s vast canvas ranges from the icy, wind-whipped shores of northern Europe to the scorched deserts of Ethiopia, and from the maws of hell to the daffy landscape of the moon. Its characters happen upon magic castles and wondrous realms that prove to be traps; they wield, and are frequently undone by, enchanted arms. The British knight Astolfo (one of the many characters liberated in Alcina’s final scene) traverses the globe astride the half-horse, half-gryphon hippogryph (which Orlando furioso’s narrator, with mock sincerity, deems “not feigned, but natural”). At the poem’s center (Cantos XXIII-XXIV), Orlando descends into bestial madness amidst a whirlwind of allusions to virtually the entire European literary canon, including ancient and vernacular lyric poetry, drama, pastoral, and the Bible.
Early modern thinkers invoked the idea of concordia discors or “discordant harmony” to describe the universe, a notion that finds its counterpart in Orlando furioso’s kaleidoscopic play of perspectives. One maiden’s excessive chastity earns her eternal damnation, while randy characters (including Ruggiero) find their way to the straight and narrow, sometimes in spite of themselves. The hippogryph and magic weapons slip away from those who would grasp them too tightly, but the harquebus (a real, early firearm) returns from the depths of the sea, where Orlando scornfully consigns it—as readers of Ariosto’s war-torn times knew all too well. Orlando furioso’s breadth of vision has always appealed to history’s most expansive minds. Galileo likened the poem to “a regal gallery… full of everything that is admirable and perfect,” while Verdi pointed to Ariosto, along with Shakespeare, as an ideal of variety in literature.
Ariosto’s masterwork has inspired countless visual artists, including Dosso Dossi, Tiepolo, Ingres, and Doré. Cervantes, Ronsard, and Spenser owe much to Ariosto, as does Milton (despite his professed disinclination to “dissect/With long and tedious havoc fabl’d Knights/In Battles feign’d”). Among the keenest readers of Orlando furioso are Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, whose final meditations—on such themes as “lightness,” “quickness,” “exactitude,” “visibility,” and “multiplicity”—might serve as a summa the poem’s most striking qualities. Orlando furioso is probably second only to Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, c. 1581) by Torquato Tasso, another Ferrarese court poet, in terms of the number of operas it has inspired. In addition to Alcina, these include Handel’s Orlando and Ariodante, Vivaldi’s Orlando furioso, and Haydn’s Orlando paladino.
In crafting Alcina, Handel and his unknown librettist seized upon many of the novelties and paradoxes in Ariosto’s poem. With its cross-dressed characters and “emasculated” leading men (castrati), opera of Handel’s day upended conventional notions of gender, just as Ariosto had done in depicting the Este progenitors, Bradamante and Ruggiero. In epic poetry, female characters (Dido, Circe) generally hinder men’s efforts to fulfill their dynastic responsibilities. Bradamante, though, dons arms and takes an active role in leading the wayward Ruggiero to the altar, in contrast to both traditional seductresses and to such characters as Vergil’s silent, blushing Lavinia and Homer’s wily Penelope. In Alcina, as in Orlando furioso, Bradamante’s masculine dress leads to some piquant complications, as she draws the amorous interest of another woman—here, the sorceress Morgan
As for Alcina, she is perhaps Handel’s most stunning, fully drawn heroine, even more multi-layered than her namesake in Orlando furioso. In typically Ariostesque manner, Alcina becomes the victim of her own illusions. At opera’s end, she speaks the truth to Ruggiero and Bradamante—he is destined to die young, and she will bemoan his fate—but, mistress of deceit that Alcina is, no one believes her. Worse still, the crafty sorceress falls sincerely in love with the knight she has enchanted, and not even her own magic can save her. In her Act III aria “Mi restano le lagrime,” she wishes in vain to be turned into stone like her victims, but in the end is left alone with her pain. After Ruggiero destroys Alcina’s magic, the sorceress’s newly liberated victims celebrate their “blessed peace,” grateful for the restoration of their “human will.” In many ways, though, Alcina has proved to be the most deeply, vulnerably human character of all, no less subject to emotional frailties than the mere mortals she has sought to enthrall.
The final canto of Orlando furioso opens with the long-deferred nuptials of Bradamante and Ruggiero, but closes on an unsettling note, with a final duel even darker than its model in Vergil’s Aeneid. To this grim ending Ariosto appends an ambiguous motto: Pro bono malum, which can mean either “Evil for the sake of good” or “Evil in exchange for good.”’ Handel, too, concludes Alcina with a question mark. Does anyone really believe that the ferità or “savagery” of Alcina’s victims has been the result of her witchery alone? Deprived of Alcina—her passion, her beauty, her rage—is the world richer or poorer for its disenchantment?
Centuries ago, Ariosto and Handel probed the mysteries of the human heart—a realm like Alcina’s s enchanted isle, destined to slip away, forever eluding our grasp.

‎”Alcina” (HWV 34) is an opera seria by George Frideric Händel. Händel 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 after, during his travels in Italy. The plot was originally taken from – but partly altered for better conformity – Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (like those of the Handel operas “Orlando” and “Ariodante”), an epic poem set in the time of Charlemagne’s wars against Islam. The opera contains several musical sequences with opportunity for dance: these were composed for dancer Marie Sallé.
“Alcina” was composed for Handel’s first season at the Covent Garden Theatre, London. It premiered on April 16, 1735. Like the composer’s other works in the opera seria genre, it fell into obscurity; after a revival in Brunswick in 1738 it was not performed again until a production in Leipzig in 1928.
The Australian soprano Joan Sutherland sang the role in a production by Franco Zeffirelli in which she made her debut at La Fenice in February 1960 and at the Dallas Opera in November of that year. She performed in the same production at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1962. It was performed at Ledlanet, Scotland, in 1969. A major production was that of Robert Carsen, staged originally for the Opera de Paris in 1999 and repeated at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, which featured Renée Fleming in the title role.

The first production of Lohengrin was in Weimar, Germany on 28 August 1850 at the Staatskapelle Weimar under the direction of Franz Liszt, a close friend and early supporter of Wagner. Liszt chose the date in honour of Weimar’s most famous citizen, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was born on 28 August 1749. It was an immediate popular success.
The opera’s first performance abroad was in Riga on 5 February 1855. The Austrian premiere took place at the Burgtheater on 19 August 1859 with Róza Csillag as Ortrud. The work was produced in Munich for the first time at the National Theatre on 16 June 1867 with Heinrich Vogl in the title role and Mathilde Mallinger as Elsa. Mallinger sang Elsa again for the work’s premiere at the Berlin State Opera’s on 6 April 1869. The Belgian premiere of the opera was given at La Monnaie on 22 March 1870 with Étienne Troy as Friedrich of Telramund and Feliciano Pons as Heinrich der Vogler.
The United States premiere of Lohengrin took place at the Stadt Theater at the Bowery in New York City on 3 April 1871. Conducted by Adolf Neuendorff, the cast included Theodor Habelmann as Lohengrin, Luise Garay-Lichtmay as Elsa, Marie Frederici as Ortrud, Adolf Franosch as Heinrich and Edward Vierling as Telramund. The first performance in Italy took place seven months later at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna on 1 November 1871 in an Italian translation by operatic baritone Salvatore Marchesi. It was notably the first performance of any Wagner opera in Italy. Angelo Mariani conducted the performance, which starred Italo Campanini as Lohengrin, Bianca Blume as Elsa, Maria Löwe Destin as Ortrud, Pietro Silenzi as Telramund, and Giuseppe Galvani as Heinrich der Vogler. The performance on 9 November was attended by Giuseppe Verdi, who annotated a copy of the vocal score with his impressions and opinions of Wagner (this was almost certainly his first exposure to Wagner’s music).
Lohengrin’s Russian premiere took place at the Mariinsky Theatre on 16 October 1868. La Scala produced the opera for the first time on 30 March 1873, with Campanini as Lohengrin, Gabrielle Krauss as Elsa, Philippine von Edelsberg as Ortrud, Victor Maurel as Friedrich, and Gian Pietro Milesi as Heinrich.
The United Kingdom premiere of Lohengrin took place at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden on 8 May 1875 using the Italian translation by Marchesi. Auguste Vianesi conducted the performance, which featured Ernesto Nicolini as Lohengrin, Emma Albani as Elsa, Anna D’Angeri as Ortruda, Maurel as Friedrich, and Wladyslaw Seideman as Heinrich. The opera’s first performance in Australia took place at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Melbourne on 18 August 1877. The Metropolitan Opera mounted the opera for the first time on 7 November 1883 during the company’s inaugural season. Sung in Italian, Campanini portrayed the title role with Christina Nilsson as Elsa, Emmy Fursch-Madi as Ortrud, Giuseppe Kaschmann as Telramund, Franco Novara as Heinrich, and Auguste Vianesi conducting.
Lohengrin was first publicly performed in France at the Eden-Théâtre in Paris on 30 April 1887 in a French translation by Charles-Louis-Etienne Nuitter. Conducted by Charles Lamoureux, the performance starred Ernest van Dyck as the title hero, Fidès Devriès as Elsa, Marthe Duvivier as Ortrud, Emil Blauwaert as Telramund, and Félix-Adolphe Couturier as Heinrich. There was however an 1881 French performance given as a Benefit, in the Cercle de la Méditerranée Salon at Nice, organized by Sophie Cruvelli, in which she took the role of Elsa. The opera received its Canadian premiere at the opera house in Vancouver on 9 February 1891 with Emma Juch as Elsa. The Palais Garnier staged the work for the first time the following 16 September with van Dyck as Lohengrin, Rose Caron as Elsa, Caroline Fiérens-Peters as Ortrude, Maurice Renaud as Telramund, and Charles Douaillier as Heinrich.
The first Chicago performance of the opera took place at the Auditorium Building of Roosevelt University on 9 November 1891. Performed in Italian, the production starred Jean de Reszke as the title hero, Emma Eames as Elsa, and Edouard de Reszke as Heinrich.

Nicolai Gedda (born 11 July 1925) is a Swedish operatic tenor. Having made some two hundred recordings, Gedda is said to be the most widely recorded tenor in history. Gedda’s singing is best known for his beauty of tone, vocal control, and musical perception.
Nicolai Harry Gustav Gedda means was born in Stockholm to a Swedish mother and a half-Russian father. Gedda was raised by his aunt Olga Gedda and his adoptive father Mihail Ustinov (a distant relative of Peter Ustinov), who sang bass in Serge Jaroff’s Don Cossack Choir and was cantor in a Russian Orthodox church. Gedda grew up bilingual in Swedish and Russian. From 1929 to 1934 they lived in Leipzig, Germany, where young Nicolai learned German. They returned to Sweden after Hitler came to power. In school he later learned English, French and Latin. After leaving school he learned Italian by himself.
Gedda began his professional career as a bank teller in a local bank in Stockholm. One day he told a client that he was searching for a good singing teacher, and the client recommended Carl Martin Öhman, a well known Wagnerian tenor from the 1920s, who is also credited with discovering Jussi Björling. Later he also taught the Finnish bass Martti Talvela. Öhman was enthusiastic about Gedda and took him as a pupil, at the beginning without payment, because Gedda had to support his parents with his pay. After a few months he obtained a scholarship and was later able to pay for Öhman’s lectures.
In addition to his opera performances, Gedda cultivated an active parallel career as a recitalist, with a large repertoire of French, German, Scandinavian, and Russian art songs. As an interpreter of Lieder he often performed with the pianist Sebastian Peschko. Gedda’s language skills, intellectualism and intense musicality, as well as his extensive recordings, have rendered him particularly indispensable in this genre. Gedda has also taught and former students include Daryl Simpson of the Celtic Tenors.
In 1965 he became Swedish Court Singer, and in 1966 a member of the Swedish Academy of Music. Also in 1966 he received K.u.K ( Kaiser und König) award for singing. In 1968 he was decorated with the Swedish medal “Litteris et artibus.” In 1976 he got the golden Nobel medal and in 2007 he received Caruso prize.
In 2010 he received from the French president Nicolas Sarkozy the Legion of Honor, or Légion d’honneur, the highest French decoration.
Nicolai Gedda was a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London and in 1994 he was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy.