An Abbreviated History of

Opera
Main Sources:
Oxford Music Online
Wikipedia
Encyclopedia Brittanica
Cennarium
Remembered Moments of The Canadian Opera Company 1950-1975
With Photos by: Robert C. Ragsdale, Alex Gray, Lukvik Dittrich
Virgil Thompson Organization
World of Opera
The Canadian Encycopedia: Article by Denise Mènard and Annick Poussart
Best of Sicily Magazine
StageAgent.com
Operaliege
Pacific Opera Victoria
City Opera Vancouver

Operatic Terminology
The words of an opera are known as:

The libretto (literally "small book"). Some composers, notably Wagner, have written their own libretti; others
have worked in close collaboration with their librettists, e.g. Mozart with Lorenzo Da Ponte.

Traditional opera, often referred to as "number opera", consists of two modes of singing: recitative, the plot-
driving passages sung in a style designed to imitate and emphasize the inflections of speech, and aria (an "air" or
formal song) in which the characters express their emotions in a more structured melodic style.

Vocal duets, trios and other ensembles often occur, and choruses are used to comment on the action. In some
forms of opera, such as singspiel, opéra comique, operetta, and semi-opera, the recitative is mostly replaced by
spoken dialogue.

Melodic or semi-melodic passages occurring in the midst of, or instead of, recitative, are also referred to as
arioso. The terminology of the various kinds of operatic voices is described in detail below. During both the
Baroque and Classical periods, recitative could appear in two basic forms, each of which was accompanied by a
different instrumental ensemble: secco (dry) recitative, sung with a free rhythm dictated by the accent of the
words, accompanied only by basso continuo, which was usually a harpsichord and a cello; or accompagnato (also
known as strumentato) in which the orchestra provided accompaniment. Over the 18th century, arias were
increasingly accompanied by the orchestra. By the 19th century, accompagnato had gained the upper hand, the
orchestra played a much bigger role, and Wagner revolutionized opera by abolishing almost all distinction
between aria and recitative in his quest for what Wagner termed "endless melody". Subsequent composers have
tended to follow Wagner's example, though some, such as Stravinsky in his The Rake's Progress have bucked the
trend.

Opera seria and opera buffa: broad comedy blended with tragic elements in a mix that jarred some educated
sensibilities, sparking the first of opera's many reform movements, sponsored by the Arcadian Academy, which
came to be associated with the poet Metastasio, whose libretti helped crystallize the genre of opera seria. Comedy
in Baroque-era opera was reserved for what came to be called opera buffa.
 The 1600s

1600
Giulio Romolo Caccini (also known as Giulio Romano) composes his first opera Euridice.
Caccini (1551 - 1618) was an Italian composer, teacher, singer, instrumentalist, and a writer of the very late Renaissance and
early Baroque eras. He was one of the founders of the genre of opera, and was one of the most influential creators of the then-
new Baroque style. He was also the father of musical daughters opera composer Francesca Caccini and her sister, singer
Settimia Caccini. He wrote music for three operas— Il rapimento di Cefalo (1600), excerpts of which were published in the first
Nuove musiche), and Euridice (1602), though the first two were collaborations with other composers (mainly Peri for the first
Euridice). It seems also that Caccini's character was less than perfectly honorable, as it is said he was frequently motivated by
envy and jealousy, not only in his professional life, but for personal advancement with the Medici family. His rivalry with both
Emilio de' Cavalieri and Jacopo Peri seems to have been intense: he may even have been the one who arranged for Cavalieri to
be removed from his post as director of festivities for the wedding of Henry IV of France and Maria de' Medici in 1600 (an
event which caused Cavalieri to leave Florence in fury). He also seems to have rushed his own opera Euridice into print before
Peri's opera on the same subject could be published. Today, none of his music for multiple voices survives, even though the
records from Florence indicate he was involved with polychoral music around 1610.

Sketch
Jacopo Peri

October 6, 1600
Jacopo Peri’s opera, Euridice is performed at the Pitti Pace in Florence to
celebrate the wedding of Maria de Medici to France’s Henri IV.
Jacopo Peri (1561–1633), also known under the pseudonym Il Zazzerino, was an
Italian composer and singer during the transitional period between the Renaissance
and Baroque styles of music. He is often called the inventor of opera, and his first
composition that could be called an opera was Dafne, which was composed around
1597. While Jacopo Peri's Dafne is generally recognized as the first work in the
opera genre and the earliest surviving opera is Peri's Euridice, Monteverdi’s L'Orfeo is
the earliest opera that is still regularly performed today. Unlike today, early music
dramas usually took place in the apartments of palaces, which placed performers and
audiences in close quarters with one another. The season of “Carnival” was when most
of these early music dramas were held, and, because often times spectacters were
masked, the lines between observer and observed and fantasy and reality were blurred.

Claudio Monteverdi
Painting by Bernardo Strozzi

February 24, 1607

Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi’s opera, Orfeo, is performed
before an exclusive audience at the Ducal palace in Mantua, Italy.
Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) is recognized as furthering
the development of opera during the 17th century. His L’Orfeo, sometimes called
La favola d’Orfeo, is a late Renaissance/early Baroque favola in musica, or opera,
with a libretto by Alessandro Striggio. It is based on the Greek legend of Orpheus,
and tells the story of his descent to Hades and his fruitless attempt to bring his
dead bride Eurydice back to the living world. It was written in 1607 for a court
performance during the annual Carnival at Mantua. Later works by this composer
include L'Arianna (1608), Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (The Return of Ulysses to his
Homeland) (1940), Le nozze d'Enea e Lavinia (The Marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia,
(1641), (music now lost), and L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea)
(1643). Today, his only surviving operas are: L’Orfeo, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria,
and L’incoronazione di Poppea.

May 28, 1608

Claudio Monteverdi’s second opera, L’Arianna, is performed as part of the musical festivities for a royal
wedding at the court of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga in Mantua.
Over time, all the music from this opera, except for the extended recitative known as the “Lamento d’Arianna” ("Ariadne's
Lament”) has been lost. The libretto, which survives complete, was written in eight scenes by Ottavio Rinuccini, who used
Ovid's Heroides and other classical sources to relate the story of Ariadne's abandonment by Theseus on the island of Naxos and
her subsequent elevation as bride to the god Bacchus. The composer later said that because of the time constraints that were
imposed on him, the effort of creating it almost killed him. The initial performance, produced with lavish and innovative
special effects, was highly praised, and the work was equally well received in Venice when it was revived under the composer's
direction in 1640 as the inaugural work for the Teatro San Moisè.

February 3, 1625
Francesca Caccini’s opera, La liberazione di Ruggiero Dall ‘ Isola D’Alcina (the liberation of Ruggiero from
the Island of Alcina) is first performed at the Villa di Roggio Imperiale in Florence, Italy, for the visiting crown
prince of Poland, Ladislaus Sigismondo (later Władysław IV).
Francesca Caccini (1587 after 1641) was an Italian woman operatic composer, singer, lutenist, poet, music teacher of the
early Baroque era, and, as well, was also the daughter of the then well-known musician/composer Giulio Caccini. She was also
known by the nickname "La Cecchina", which was given to her by the Florentinesm, which was probably a diminutive of
“Francesca.” Her composition La liberazione di Ruggiero Dall ‘ Isola D’Alcina combined witty parodies of early opera's stock
scenes and self-important characters with moments of surprising emotional intensity, and it is said her score shows that, by the
time La liberazione was composed, she had both already mastered a full range of musico-theatrical devices as well as a strong
sense of large-scale musical design. La liberazione so pleased the prince that he had it performed in Warsaw in 1628, and it is
the only operatic work of hers that survives today. Caccini left Medici service where she was employed on 8 May 1641 and
promptly disappeared from the public record.
Bust of Poppea
Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in Rome
1643
Claudio Monteverdi’s last opera, L’incoronazione di Poppea, with a libretto by Giovanni
Francesco Busenello, is performed at the Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo, in Venice during
Carnival season.
L’incoronazione di Poppea is one of the first operas to use historical events and people, and it describes
how Poppaea, mistress of the Roman emperor Nero, is able to achieve her ambition and be crowned
empress. Written when the genre of opera was only a few decades old, the music for L'incoronazione di
Poppea has been praised for its originality, its melody, and for its reflection of the human attributes of its
characters. The work helped to redefine the boundaries of theatrical music and established Monteverdi
as the leading musical dramatist of his time. The opera was revived in Naples in 1651, but was then
neglected until the rediscovery of the score in 1888, when it became the subject of scholarly attention in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since the 1960s, this opera has been performed and recorded numerous times.

Portrait
Luigi Rossi

February 22, 1642

Italian opera composer Luigi Rossi’s first opera, Il Palazzo Incantato, is
performed in Rome in a lavish production at the Teatro delle Quattro Fontane
(Palazzo Barberini).
Il Palazzo Incantato (The Enchanted Palace) or Il Palagio d’Atlante, overo La Guerriera
Amante (The Palace of Atlantes, or The Warrior Woman in Love as it was sometimes
known) is an opera with a prologue and three acts by the composer. The libretto, by
Giulio Rospigliosi, the future Pope Clement IX, is based on Ariosto's Orlando furioso,
and Rossi was criticized for giving too much music to his friend, the castrato
Marc'Antonio Pasqualini, who played Bradamante, at the expense of the other roles.
Some of the highly complicated stage machinery also failed to work during this first
performance, too.
March 2, 1647
Italian Baroque composer Luigi Rossi’s second opera L'Orfeo (Orpheus), premières at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in
Paris.
Luigi Rossi (c. 1597 – February 1653) was an Italian Baroque composer. He composed just two operas: Il palazzo incantato,
which was given at Rome in 1642; and Orfeo, written after he was invited by Cardinal Mazarin in 1646 to go to Paris for that
purpose. This opera has three acts, a prologue, and an epilogue, with the libretto by Francesco Buti. It was based on the myth
of Orpheus and Eurydice, and is one of the earliest operas to be staged in France. Again, in keeping with the local style in
France at the time, Rossi also included a ballet scene. He had returned to Rome from France by 1650 and never attempted
anything more for the stage.

Sketch
Francesco Cavalli

January 5, 1649
Italian composer Francesco Cavalli’s enormously successful opera Giasone
premieres at the Teatro S Casino in Venice, Italy.
Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676) was a singer, but is chiefly remembered for his operas. He
began to write for the stage in 1639 (Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo) soon after Venice’s first
public opera house the Teatro San Cassiano opened. He established so great a reputation
that he was summoned to Paris from 1660 until 1662, where he revived his opera Il Xerse
and produced the opera Ercole amante. During his lifetime, Cavalli wrote forty-one operas,
twenty-seven of which are still in existence today being preserved in the Biblioteca
Nazionale Marciana (Library of St Mark) in Venice. Copies of some of the operas also exist
in other locations as well. In addition, two operas (Coriolano and Masenzio), which are
clearly attributed to him, are lost. As well, there are twelve other operas that have been attributed to him, but, since the musical
scores have been lost, too, attribution has been impossible to prove.

Jean-Baptiste Lully
From Photo by
Paul Mignard

January 19, 1674

Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Alceste premières at the Paris Opèra.
Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) was an Italian-born French composer,
instrumentalist and dancer. He is considered a master of the French baroque style and
is known for disavowing any Italian influence in French music of the period. His operas
were described as "tragedies in music" (tragédies en musique). The point of departure
was a verse libretto, in most cases by the verse dramatist Philippe Quinault. For the
dance pieces, Lully would hammer out rough chords and a melody on the keyboard,
and Quinault would invent words. For the recitative, Lully imitated the speech
melodies and dramatic emphasis used by the best actors in the spoken theater, and his
attentiveness to transferring theatrical recitation to sung music shaped French opera
and song for a century. Unlike Italian opera of the day, which was rapidly moving
toward opera seria with its alternating recitative and da capo airs, Lully's operas focused on drama, expressed by a variety of
vocal forms: monologs, airs for two or three voices, rondeaux and French-style da capo, airs where the chorus alternates with
singers, sung dances, and vaudeville songs for a few secondary characters.

January 10, 1676

Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Atys is performed for the royal court at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye and, following
this, is first performed in public in April at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris.
Atys (Attis) is a tragédie en musique, a type of early French opera, in a prologue and five acts set to a libretto by Philippe
Quinault and based on Ovid's Fasti. Although this opera was met with indifference by the Parisian audience when it first
premièred, later on, it became known as "the king's opera" because of King Louis XIV's love for it.

1679
Pietro Alessandro Gaspare Scarlatti’s opera Gli equivoci nel sembiante is performed in Rome, Italy.
 Portrait
Alexxandro Scarlatti

Pietro Alessandro Gaspare Scarlatti (1660 – 1725) was an Italian Baroque

composer, known especially for his operas and chamber cantatas. He is considered
the founder of the Neapolitan school of opera. As well, he was also the father of two
other composers, Domenico Scarlatti and Pietro Filippo Scarlatti. The above opera
gained him the support of Queen Christina of Sweden, who was living in Rome at the
time. In February 1684, he became maestro di cappella to the viceroy of Naples, perhaps
through the influence of his sister, an opera singer, who might have been the mistress of
an influential Neapolitan noble. Here he produced a long series of operas, remarkable
chiefly for their fluency and expressiveness, as well as other music for state occasions.
Although today his operas are rarely performed, Scarlatti’s operas were enormously
popular and influential in their day. From about 1697 onwards (La caduta del
Decemviri), influenced partly perhaps by the style of Giovanni Bononcini and probably
more by the taste of the viceregal court, his opera arias become more conventional and
commonplace in rhythm, while his scoring is hasty and crude, yet said not without brilliance. The operas composed for
Ferdinando de' Medici are lost; they might have given a more favourable idea of his style as his correspondence with the prince
shows that they were composed with a very sincere sense of inspiration.

John Blow
by Charles Grignion the Elder

c1683
John Blow’s tragic opera Venus and Adonis premieres, either in London or
at the court of Windsor in England.
John Blow (1649 - 1708) was an English Baroque composer and organist,
appointed to Westminster Abbey in 1669. His pupils included William
Croft, Jeremiah Clarke and Henry Purcell. In
1685, he was named a private musician to
James II. Venus and Adonis was composed with
three acts and a prologue was written for the
court of King Charles II, and is considered by
some to be either a semi-opera or a masque, although The New Grove names it as the earliest
known English opera. The story is based on the Classical myth of Venus and Adonis, which
was also the basis for Shakespeare's poem Venus and Adonis, as well as Ovid's poem of the
same name in his Metamorphoses. Shakespear’s poem tells the story of Venus, the goddess of
Love; of her unrequited love; and of her attempted seduction of Adonis, an extremely
handsome young man, who would rather go hunting.

Venus and Adonis

Painting by
Cornelis van Haarlme

February 15, 1686

Jean-Baptiste Lully’s final collaboration with librettist Philippe Quinault, Armide, premières at the Paris Opéra
in France.
Armide’s libretto is based on Torquato Tasso's poem La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered). The work is in the form of a
tragédie en musique, a genre invented by Lully and Quinault. Critics in the 18th century regarded Armide as Lully's
masterpiece, and it continues to be well-regarded, featuring some of the best-known music in French baroque opera. Arguably,
Armide was ahead of its time in its psychological interest because, unlike most of Lully’s operas, Armide concentrates on the
sustained psychological development of a character focusing on Armide, who repeatedly tries without success to choose
vengeance over love.
 Henry Purcell c1689
Portrait by
John Closterman (1695)

English composer Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas is performed for
performance by students at a Josias Priest’s girls’ school in London.
This story by Henry Purcell (1659-1695) is based on Book IV of Virgil’s (an ancient
Roman poet of the Augustan period) Aeneid. Virgil is traditionally ranked as one of Rome's
greatest poets. His Aeneid has been considered the national epic of ancient Rome since the
time of its composition. Modeled after Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the Aeneid follows the
Trojan refugee Aeneas as he struggles to fulfill his destiny and reach Italy, where his
descendants Romulus and Remus were to found the city of Rome. This opera recounts the
love of Dido, Queen of Carthage, for the Trojan hero Aeneas, and her despair when he
abandons her. A monumental work in Baroque opera, Dido and Aeneas is remembered as one of Purcell's foremost theatrical
works, and, as well, it is his only true opera and only all-sung dramatic work. Known as being one of the earliest known
English operas, it is said England owes much to this opera both in structure and in overall effect, and the influence of Cavalli's
opera Didone also being apparent.[citation needed]

May 2, 1692
Henry Purcell’s semi-opera, The Fairy-Queen, premieres at the Dorset Garden Theatre in London, England.
The libretto for this opera is an anonymous adaptation of William Shakespeare's wedding comedy, A
Midsummer Night's Dream. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of Theseus, the Duke of
Athens, to Hippolyta, the former queen of the Amazons. These include the adventures of four young
Athenian lovers and a group of six amateur actors (the mechanicals) who are controlled and
manipulated by the fairies who inhabit the forest in which most of the play is set. The play is one of
Shakespeare's most popular works for the stage and is widely performed across the world. The Fairy-
Queen might be called a "semi-opera," but it requires a whole crowd of performers -- essentially three
separate casts comprising singers, dancers, and in its original form, actors, as well. Although based on
Shakespeare's popular play A Midsummer Night's Dream, Purcell disregarded it at will to make room
for self-contained musical masques (or scenes) in each of its five acts. Eventually, the musical numbers
eventually became so dominant that in modern performances the spoken portions of the drama are
often eliminated altogether. The Fairy-Queen was composed three years before Purcell's early death at
the age of 35. Following his death, the score was lost and only rediscovered early in the twentieth
century. Of note is the fact that the masques in The Fairy-Queen are related to the play metaphorically, rather than literally, and
many critics have stated that they bear no relationship to the play. Recent scholarship has shown that the opera, which ends
with a masque featuring Hymen, the God of Marriage, was composed for the fifteenth wedding anniversary of William III and
Mary II. The Fairy-Queen was the most lavish of what were called semi-operas at the time, and this particular production was
said to have been so extravagant that additional performances had to be organized the following year just to cover the expenses.

Painting
Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni

1694
Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni’s first opera Zenobia, regina de Palmireni, is performed
at the Grimani Theatre of the SS. Giovanni and Paolo in Venice, Italy.
Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni (1671 – 1751) was an Italian Baroque composer. While
famous in his day as an opera composer, he is known today for his instrumental music,
especially his concertos. He is especially remembered today for a work called "Adagio in G
minor", supposedly written by him, but probably written by Remo Giazotto, a modern
musicologist and composer, who was a cataloger of the works of Albinoni. While Zenobia
was his first opera, His last was, Artamene, which was given at the Teatro Sant'Angelo in
Venice during the carnival of 1740. Most of Albinoni’s operatic works have been lost,
largely because they were not published during his lifetime. During his lifetime, however,
he wrote at least fifty operas, of which twenty-eight were produced in Venice between 1723
and 1740. He, himself, claimed 81 operas (naming his second-to-last opera, in the libretto, as his 80th). In spite of his
enormous operatic output, today he is most noted for his instrumental music, especially his oboe concerti (from 12 Concerti a
cinque op. 7 and, most famously, 12 Concerti a cinque op. 9).
 The 1700s

January 30, 1700

Pietro Alessandro Gaspare Scarlatti’s opera L’Eraclea is performed at Naples, Teatro S Bartolomeo in Italy.
L’Eraclea, with libretto by Silvio Stampigliak, is an opera that was composed in three acts. In the tradition of earlier
Venetian opera, Scarlatti also mixed comic scenes into the otherwise serious story in this opera. Although born in Sicily, most
of his finest operatic works were considered to have been composed in Rome: Telemaco (1718); Marco Attilio Regolò (1719);
and his final work, Serenata, which was composed for the marriage of the prince of Stigliano, but which was left unfinished
when he died on October 22, 1725, aged 65, in Naples.

Portrait
Georg Frideric Händel

January 8, 1705
Georg Frideric Händel’s first opera Almira – announced as a Singspiel,
although it has no spoken dialogue – premieres at the opera house in
Hamburg, Germany.
George Handel, (born Georg Friedrich Händel (1685 - 1759) was born in
Halle-upon-Saale, Germany. He was a German, later British, Baroque composer,
who spent the bulk of his career in London, becoming well-known for his
operas, oratorios, anthems, and organ concertos. He received important training
in Halle-upon-Saale and worked as a composer in Hamburg and Italy before
settling in London in 1712 and becoming a naturalised British citizen in 1727.
Today, he is particularly noted for his operas, oratorios, and instrumental
compositions composed during the Baroque period. An Italian libretto was
written by Giulio Pancieri in Venice in 1691 for Giuseppe Boniventi's opera
L’Almira, however, the German translation used by Handel was made by
Friedrich Christian Feustking. The recitatives of the opera are in German, while
some of the arias are in German and others in Italian, as was the custom at the opera house in Hamburg. Almira is the sole
example among Handel's many operas with no role for a castrato— a male singer castrated in boyhood so as to retain a
soprano or alto voice, an invasive procedure, which was finally banned in the early 19th century; however, Italian doctors
continued to create castrati until 1870 for revered performances at the Sistine Chapel. 

April 27, 1720

Radamisto George Handel’s first opera for the newly-formed Royal Academy of Music premieres in London.
Radamisto is an opera seria in three acts by George Frideric Handel to an Italian libretto by Nicola Francesco Haym, based on
L'amor tirannico, o Zenobia by Domenico Lalli and Zenobia by Matteo Noris. The opera's plot is loosely based on incidents
from Tacitus's Annals of Imperial Rome. As with most opere serie, Radamisto
went unperformed for many years, but with the revival of interest in Baroque
music and historically informed musical performance since the 1960s,
Radamisto, like all Handel operas, receives performances at festivals and
opera houses today.

Queen Zenobie Found on the

Banks of the Araves
Painting by Nicolas Pousssin
January, 1721
Alessandro Scarlatti’s Griselda premieres at the Teatro Capranica, in Rome, Italy.
Griselda is an opera seria in three acts by the Italian composer Alessandro Scarlatti, the last of Scarlatti’s operas to survive
completely today.[clarification needed] The libretto is by Apostolo Zeno, with revisions by an anonymous author. Zeno wrote his work
in 1701, and it had already been set by Pollarolo and Antonio Maria Bononcini (Albinoni, Giovanni Bononcini and Vivaldi
would later produce versions). It is based on the story of Patient Griselda from Boccaccio's Decameron. When the opera was
performed at the Teatro Capranica, it was with an all-male cast: five castratos and a tenor.

February 13, 1725

George Handel’s Rodelinda premieres at the King’s Theatre in London, England.
Rodelinda, regina de' Longobardi (HWV 19) is an opera seria in three acts, which was composed for the first Royal Academy of
Music. The libretto is by Nicola Francesco Haym, based on an earlier libretto by Antonio Salvi, and Rodelinda has long been
regarded as one of Handel's greatest works. Handel was strongly influenced both by the great composers of the Italian Baroque
and by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition, and, during twelve months between 1724 and 1725, he wrote three
outstanding and successful operas, Giulio Cesare, Tamerlano and Rodelinda. His operas are filled with da capo arias, such as
Svegliatevi nel core. And, after composing Silete venti, he concentrated on opera and stopped writing cantatas such as Scipio,
from which the regimental slow march of the British Grenadier Guards is derived. Musicologist Winton Dean writes that his
operas show that "Handel was not only a great composer; he was a dramatic genius of the first order.” Handel composed more
than forty operas in over thirty years, and, since the late 1960s with the revival of baroque music and historically informed
musical performance, interest in his operas has grown.

John Gay
After a Sketch by
Godfrey Kneller
January 29, 1728
British poet and composer John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, a ballad opera in three acts
and with music arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch, takes London by storm.
The Beggar's Opera, composed by John Gay (1685 - 1732) was a ballad opera produced by
John Rich, in which Sir Robert Walpole, a British statesman was caricatured. This famous piece,
which was said to have made "Rich gay and Gay rich", was an innovation in many respects. Part
of the success of The Beggar's Opera may have been due to the acting of Lavinia Fenton,
afterwards Duchess of Bolton, in the part of Polly Peachum. The play ran for sixty-two nights.
Other opera works by Gay include: Acis and Galatea (1718) considered a pastoral opera; Polly
(1932), which, because of censorship, was never performed during his lifetime; and Achilles
(1733), which also premièred following his death.

Portrait
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi

September 5, 1733
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s opera seria Il prigioniero superbo premieres at Teatro S
Bartomomeo, in Naples, Italy.
Giovanni Pergolesi (1710 – 1736) was an Italian composer, violinist and organist. La serva
padrona was one of the most popular intermezzos in the 18th century and has beome
the ‘textbook’ intermezzo familiar to most students of music. Il prigionier superbo (The
Proud Prisoner) is an opera seria in three acts composed by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi to a
libretto attributed to Gennaro Antonio Federico and based on an earlier libretto by Francesco
Silvani for Gasparini's opera, La fede tradita e vendicata. After its premiere, it received further
performances in October. The opera, with its labyrinthine plot involving the rivalry of
Metalce (King of the Goths) and Viridate (Prince of Denmark) for the hand of Rosmene (a
Norwegian princess whose father is Metalce's prisoner), soon sank into oblivion, but its comic intermezzo, La serva padrona
(also by Pergolesi) was to achieve considerable success when performed on its own.Among Pergolesi's other operatic works are
his first opera La Salustia (1732), Lo frate 'nnamorato (The brother in love, (1732), to a text in the Neapolitan language),
L'Olimpiade (January 1735) and Il Flaminio (1735), to a text also in the Neapolitan language). His operas all were premiered
in Naples, apart from L'Olimpiade, which was first given in Rome. Pergolesi died of tuberculosis. He was only 26 years old.
 Jean-Philippe Rameau
Painting by
Jacques Aved (1728)

August 23, 1735

Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opéra-ballet, Les Indes galantes, premières at the
Paris Opéra and is a fascinating window on 18th century exoticism.
Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) was one of the most important French
composers and music theorists of the 18th century. He replaced Jean-Baptiste
Lully as the dominant composer of French opera and is also considered the
leading French composer for the harpsichord of his time, alongside François
Couperin.[2] From 1733, Rameau dedicated himself almost exclusively to opera.
On a strictly musical level, 18th-century French Baroque opera is richer and
more varied than contemporary Italian opera, especially in the place given to
choruses and dances but also in the musical continuity that arises from the
respective relationships between the arias and the recitatives. Another essential
difference: whereas Italian opera gave a starring role to female sopranos and
castrati, French opera had no use for the latter. Les Indes galantes was followed by
two tragédies en musique, Castor et Pollux (1737) and Dardanus (1739), and
another opéra-ballet, Les fêtes d'Hébé (also 1739). All these operas of the 1730s are
among Rameau's most highly regarded works.[17] However, the composer followed them with six years of silence, in which the
only work he produced was a new version of Dardanus (1744). The reason for this interval in the composer's creative life is
unknown, although it is possible he had a falling-out with the authorities at the Académie royale de la musique.

1747
Maria Teresa Agnesi Pinottini’s opera the Cantata Pastorale Il Restauro di Arcadia (lost) premières at the Teatro
Degio Ducal in Milan.
Maria Teresa Agnesi Pinottini (1720 – 1795) was an Italian composer. Though she was most famous for her compositions,
she was also an accomplished harpsichordist and singer, and the majority of her surviving compositions were written for
keyboard, the voice, or both. Not much is known about Maria Teresa other than she was born to an overbearing man. She had
a restrictive marriage. She also had several famous performances, perhaps the most famous on July 16, 1739, when famous
French traveler Charles de Brosses was very impressed by her music. He was not the
only one; the Count Gerolamo Riccati wrote several letters praising her compositions
and musical talent. Another very famous performance was the above theatrical debut,
in which she dedicated her piece to various rulers of the surrounding areas of Saxony
and Austria. Agnesi enjoyed the patronage of Maria Theresia, holy Roman Empress
and sovereign of Lombardy, and Maria Antonia Walpurgis, a gifted composer and
contemporary, and it said that the Empress herself sang at the Il Restauro di Arcadia
performance. Her other operas were: La Sofonisba (dramma eroico, 3, G.F. Zanetti);
Ciro in Armenia (dramma serio, 3, ? Agnesi), Milan, Teatro Regio Ducal, (26 Dec
1753), Act 3 fragments; Il re pastore (dramma serio, 3, P. Metastasio), (?1755); La
Insubria Consolata (Componimento drammatico, 2), Milan, 1766-Nitocri (dramma
serio, 3, A. Zeno), Act 2 fragments; Ulisse in Campania (serenata, 2).

Maria Teresa Agnesi Pinottini

Portrait by:
Saiko (Own Work)

Niccolò Piccini
Portrait by Hippolyte Pauquet (1797-1871)

Autumn, 1754
Niccolò Piccinni’s first opera, Le donne dispettose, is performed at the Teatro dei
Fiorentini in Naples.
Niccolò Piccinni (1728 - 1800) was an Italian composer. Although he is somewhat obscure today, Piccinni was one of
the most popular composers of opera—particularly the Neapolitan opera buffa—of his day. In 1760, when this opera was
performed in Rome, it "enjoyed a two-year run and was played in all the important European capitals. It can probably be
called the most popular opera buffa of the 18th century...[even more than]... Pergolesi's La serva padrona...[and]... was the first
of the new era, culminating in the masterworks of Mozart.”

February 6, 1760
Niccolò Piccinni’s opera La buona figliuola (The Good-Natured Girl or The Accomplish’d Maid) premieres at the
Teatro delle Dame in Rome with an all-male cast.
The libretto for La buona figliuola was by the great Carlo Goldoni and was adapted from Samuel Richardson’s hugely
popular English novel, Pamela. This was Piccinni's most successful Italian opera. There was a sequel entitled La buona
figliuola maritata (1761) and La buona figliuola supposta vedova by Gaetano Latilla, which followed in 1766.

Christoph Willibald (Ritter von) Gluck

Portrait by Joseph Siffred Dupplessis (Art Project)

December 26, 1767

Christoph Willibald (Ritter von) Gluck’s reform opera, Alceste, premieres
at the Vienna Burgtheatre.
Gluck (1714-1787) was a composer of Italian and French opera in the early
classical period. Born in the Upper Palatinate and raised in Bohemia,[4] both part of
the Holy Roman Empire, he gained prominence at the Habsburg court at Vienna.
There he brought about the practical reform of opera's dramaturgical practices
for which many intellectuals had been campaigning. With a series of radical new
works in the 1760s, among them Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste, he broke the
stranglehold that Metastasian opera seria had enjoyed for much of the century.
Gluck introduced more drama by using simpler recitative and cutting the usually
long da capo aria. His later operas have half the length of a typical baroque opera.
Fusing the traditions of Italian
opera and the French (with
rich chorus) into a unique
synthesis, Gluck wrote eight operas for the Parisian stage. Iphigénie en
Tauride was a great success and is generally acknowledged to be his finest
work. Though he was extremely popular and widely credited with
bringing about a revolution in French opera, his mastery of the Parisian
operatic scene was never absolute, and, after the poor reception of his
Echo et Narcisse, he left Paris in disgust and returned to Vienna to live out
the remainder of his life.

Painting
The Death of Alcestis
By Angelica Kauffman

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Painting: Anonymous, 1763
Possibly by Pietro Antonio Lorenzoni
On commission from Leopold Mozart
September/October, 1768
Twelve-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart gives a probable performance of singspiel Bastien und Bastienne at
the home of Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer, the inventor of ‘magnetism therapy,’ which Mozart would later parody
in his opera, Così fan tutte.
Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791) composed more than 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic,
concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers, and his
influence is profound on subsequent Western art music. Ludwig van Beethoven composed his own early works in the shadow
of Mozart, and Joseph Haydn wrote: "posterity will not see such a talent again in 100
years”. Bastien und Bastienne was allegedly commissioned by Viennese physician and
'magnetist' Dr. Franz Mesmer (who himself would later be parodied in Così fan tutte) as
a satire of the 'pastoral' genre then prevalent, and specifically as a parody of the opera Le
devin du village by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The story of tested love, the German libretto
is by Friedrich Wilhelm Weiskern, Johann Heinrich Friedrich Müller (de) and Johann
Andreas Schachtner, based on Les Amours de Bastien et Bastienne by Justine Favart and
Harny de Guerville. After its supposed premiere in Mesmer's garden theater (that is only
corroborated by an unverified account of Nissen), it was not revived again until 1890. It
is not clear whether this piece was performed in Mozart's lifetime. The first known
performance was on 2 October 1890 at Architektenhaus in Berlin.

Shepherd & Shepherdess Reposing (1761)

Painting By: François Boucher

May 1, 1769
Mozart’s first full opera buffa, La finta semplice (The Fake Innocent), is performed at the Archbishop’s palace in
Salzburg. The day is uncertain, but it was probably the first day of May.
La finta semplice (The Fake Innocent), K. 51 (46a) is an opera buffa in three acts for seven voices and orchestra, composed in
1768 by then 12-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Young Mozart and his father Leopold were spending the year in Vienna,
where Leopold was trying to establish his son as an opera composer. He was acting on a suggested request from the Emperor
Joseph II that the young boy should write an opera. Leopold chose an Italian libretto by the Vienna court poet Marco
Coltellini, which was based on an early work by Carlo Goldoni. During rehearsals, the opera was the victim of intrigues from
competing composers claiming that the work was not from the 12-year-old boy, but from his father. Threatened with a
sabotaged first night by the impresario Giuseppe Affligio, Leopold prudently decided to withdraw, and the opera was never
staged in Vienna. It was probably performed the following year in Salzburg at the request of the Prince-Archbishop. Mozart
produced a full score of three acts, 26 numbers, in a manuscript of 558 pages. It includes an overture/Sinfonia, one coro, one
duet, three ensembles (at the end of each act), and 21 arias.

December 26, 1770

Mozart’s first opera seria, Mitridate, re di ponte, premieres at the Teatro Regio Ducal (at the Milan Carnival), in
Italy despite the composer’s youth and the opera’s running time: six hours.
Mitridate, re di Ponto (Mithridates, King of Pontus), K. 87 (74a), is an early opera seria in three acts by Mozart. The libretto is
by Vittorio Amedeo Cigna-Santi (it), after Giuseppe Parini's Italian translation of Jean Racine's play Mithridate, and Mozart
wrote Mitridate while touring Italy in 1770. The subject is drawn from ancient history. Mithridates VI Eupator reigned over
the kingdom of Pontus, around the Black Sea. Famous for having gradually accustomed to poisons through mithridatization,
he long resisted the Romans. He finally killed himself after being betrayed by his own son.The musicologist Daniel E. Freeman
has recently demonstrated that this opera was composed with close reference to the opera La Nitteti by Josef Mysliveček. The
latter was the opera being prepared for production in Bologna when Mozart met Mysliveček for the first time with his father in
March 1770. Mitridate was a success, and was performed twenty-one times despite doubts because of Mozart's extreme youth –
he was 14 at the time. No revival took place until the 20th century. This opera features virtuoso arias for the principal roles, but
only two ensemble numbers: the act 2 ending duet between Aspasia and Sifare ("Se viver non degg’io"), and the brief quintet
that ends the opera, very characteristic of standard baroque opera seria where the opera ends with a short coro or tutti number.
 Franz Joseph Haydn
Painting by John Hopper (1791)

August 3, 1777
(Franz) Joseph Haydn’s Il mondo della luna premieres at Eszterháza.
Joseph Haydn (1732 – 1809) was an Austrian composer of the Classical period. ... He
was a friend and mentor of Mozart, a teacher of Beethoven, and the older brother of
composer Michael Haydn. His operas were mostly composed to the taste of his
employers at Eszterháza, and, although his operas never achieved the international
stature of either his instrumental works or the operas by his younger contemporary
(Mozart), they have begun to receive more attention in recent years. During his lifetime
he wrote 107 symphonies in total, as well as 83 string quartets, 45 piano trios, 62 piano
sonatas, 14 masses and 26 operas, amongst countless other scores.

January 29, 1781

Mozart’s first mature opera, Idomeneo, premieres at the Cuvilliés Theatre in Munich, Germany.
Idomeneo, re di Creta ossia Ilia e Idamante (Italian for Idomeneus, King of Crete, or, Ilia and Idamante; usually referred to
simply as Idomeneo, K. 366) is an Italian language opera seria. The libretto was adapted by Giambattista Varesco from a French
text by Antoine Danchet, which had been set to music by André Campra as Idoménée in 1712. Idomeneo is an opera seria on the
story of Idomeneus's return to Crete. In this version, Poseidon (Neptune in the opera) spares Idomeneo's son Idamante, on
condition that Idomeneo relinquish his throne to the new generation. Mozart and Varesco were commissioned in 1780 by Karl
Theodor, Elector of Bavaria for a court carnival. He probably chose the subject, though it might have been Mozart.

July 16, 1782

Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) premieres at the Vienna Burgtheater.
Mozart’s opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio; also known as Il Seraglio) is an opera Singspiel in three acts by Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart. The German libretto is by Gottlieb Stephanie, based on Christoph Friedrich Bretzner's Belmont und
Constanze, oder Die Entführung aus dem Serail. The plot concerns the attempt of the hero Belmonte, assisted by his servant
Pedrillo, to rescue his beloved Konstanze from the seraglio of Pasha Selim. Mozart conducted this premiere performance.

Giovanni Paisiello
Painting by
Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1791)

September 15/26, 1782

Giovanni Paisiello’s Il barbiere di Siviglia premières at the Hermitage in St.
Petersburg, Russia.
Giovanni Paisiello (or Paesiello) (1740 – 1816) was an Italian composer of the
Classical era and was the most popular opera composer of the late 1700s. Rossini's
opera, also now known as Il barbiere di Siviglia, is now acknowledged as Rossini's
greatest work, while Paisiello's opera is only infrequently produced—a strange instance
of poetical vengeance, since Paisiello himself had many years previously endeavoured to
eclipse the fame of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi by resetting the libretto of his famous
intermezzo, La serva padrona. Paisiello left Russia in 1784, and, after producing Il re
Teodoro in Venezia, he entered the service of Ferdinand IV of Naples, where he
composed many of his best operas, including Nina and La Molinara. After many
vicissitudes, resulting from political and dynastic changes, he was invited to Paris
(1802) by Napoleon, whose favour he had won five years previously by composing a
march for the funeral of General Hoche. Paisiello is known to have composed 94 operas, many of which are known for their
gracefully beautiful melodies. Perhaps the best-known tune he ever wrote is Nel cor più non mi sento from La Molinara,
immortalized when Beethoven composed variations based on it. Manuscript scores of many of his operas were presented to the
library of the British Museum by Domenico Dragonetti. Though his Il barbiere di Siviglia opera was fated to be eclipsed by
Rossini’s later setting of the same story, this opera achieved enormous success at the time.
February 26, 1784
Joseph Haydn’s final opera, Armida, premieres at Eszterhàza Court Theatre.
Armida, Hob. XXVIII/12, is an opera in three acts by Joseph Haydn, set to a libretto based upon Torquato Tasso's poem
Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered): To prevent the capture of Jerusalem by the knights of the First Crusade, The Prince
of Darkness has sent the enchantress Armida into the world to seduce the Christian heroes and turn them from their duty. The
bravest of these, Rinaldo, has fallen under Armida's spell. She comes to love
him so deeply that she cannot bring herself to destroy him. The story in
purely instrumental terms contains occasional echoes of Sarti's Giulio Sabino,
played at Esterháza in 1783, and it went on to receive 54 performances from
1784 to 1788 at the Esterháza Court Theatre. During the composer's lifetime
it was also performed in Pressburg, Budapest, Turin and Vienna, and Haydn
himself regarded Armida as his finest opera. Armida then disappeared from
the general operatic repertoire; it was revived in 1968 in a concert rendition
in Cologne, and later a production in Bern.The United States premiere of the
opera was given at the Palace Theatre in Manchester, New Hampshire, with
the New Hampshire Symphony Orchestra for the Monadnock Music Festival
in September 1981. Sarah Reese sang the title role; the director Peter Sellars
set the production during the Vietnam War.
Rinaldo Enchanted by Armida
Painting by Battista Tiepolo (Art Project)

Portrait
André-Ernest-Modest Grétry

October 21, 1784

André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry’s rescue opera, Richard Coeur-de-Lion,
premières at the Comédie-Italienne, Paris.
André Ernest Modeste Grétry (1741 - 1813) was a composer from the Prince-Bishopric
of Liège (present-day Belgium). He worked from 1767 onwards in France and took
French nationality. He is most famous for his opéras comiques. Altogether he
composed some fifty operas. His masterpieces are Zémire et Azor and Richard Coeur-
de-lion—the first produced in 1771, the second in 1784. The latter in an indirect way
became connected with a great historic event. In it occurs the celebrated romance, O
Richard, O mon Roi, l'univers t'abandonne, which was sung at the banquet – "fatal as
that of Thyestes," remarks Carlyle – given by the bodyguard to the officers of the
Versailles garrison on 3 October 1789. La Marseillaise not long afterwards became the
reply of the people to the expression of loyalty borrowed from Grétry's opera. Richard
Cœur de Lion was translated and adapted for the English stage by John Burgoyne.[citation needed]. Following this, Grétry sat out
the bad times, then brought this opera back when Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor.

May 1, 1786
Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) is the first of his three great
collaborations with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, and has its premiere at the Vienna
Burgtheater.
The Marriage of Figaro is an opera buffa (comic opera) in four acts, with an Italian
libretto written by Lorenzo Da Ponte. The opera's libretto is based on a stage comedy
by Pierre Beaumarchais, La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro ("The Mad Day, or
The Marriage of Figaro"), which was first performed in 1784. It tells how the servants
Figaro and Susanna succeed in getting married, foiling the efforts of their philandering
employer Count Almaviva to seduce Susanna and teaching him a lesson in fidelity. The
opera is a cornerstone of the repertoire and appears consistently among the http://
www.apple.com/ top ten in the Operabase list of most frequently performed operas.
Early 19th Century Engraving depicting
Count Almaviva and Suzanna in Act 3
October 29, 1787
Mozart’s Don Giovanni premieres at the Prague Italian opera at the National Theatre (of Bohemia) now called the Estates
Theatre.
Don Giovanni complete title: Il dissoluto punito, ossia il Don Giovanni (literally The Rake Punished, namely Don Giovanni or The
Libertine Punished) is an opera in two acts with music by Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart and Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It is based on the legends of
Don Juan, a fictional libertine and seducer. Da Ponte's libretto was billed as a
dramma giocoso, a common designation of its time that denotes a mixing of
serious and comic action. Mozart entered the work into his catalogue as an opera
buffa. Although sometimes classified as comic, it blends comedy, melodrama and
supernatural elements. A staple of the standard operatic repertoire, Don Giovanni
for the five seasons 2011/12 through 2015/16 was ninth on the Operabase list of
the most-performed operas worldwide.[2] It has also proved a fruitful subject for
writers and philosophers. Although the legendary title character serves as the
centra force of the story, it is said that it is the three women, whose lives are
altered through their encounters with him, are the characters that audiences
remember.

Gon Giovanni
Painting by
Max Slevogt (Art Project)

Antonio Salieri
Painting by
Joseph Willibrord Mühler

January 8, 1788
Antonio Salieri’s Axur, re d’Ormus premieres to a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte.
Antonio Salieri (1750 – 1825) was an Italian classical composer, conductor, and teacher.
He was born in Legnago, south of Verona, in the Republic of Venice, and spent his adult
life and career as a subject of the Habsburg Monarchy. Axur, re d'Ormus ("Axur, king of
Ormus") is an operatic dramma tragicomico in five acts, with the libretto was by Lorenzo
da Ponte. Axur is the Italian version of Salieri's 1787 French-language work Tarare which
had a libretto by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. The finale of Axur appears in
the 1984 film Amadeus. In this opera, Axur, King of the Persian Gulf kingdom of Ormus,
orders one of his soldiers, Altamor, to abduct Aspasia. She's the wife of Atar, the heroic
commander of Axur's army. Not knowing who kidnapped Aspasia but suspecting an
overseas enemy, Atar speaks with the king and begs for justice. Moved by his appeal, Axur
allows Atar to take a ship and seek his wife. Before Atar leaves, Axur's slave-servant, Biscroma, tells the general that the king has
abducted Aspasia and hidden her in the royal harem. Enemy troops now threaten to invade Ormus, and the people plead with
Atar to save them. Axur undermines Atar by telling the people that the general has better things to do than lead the army.
Enraged, Atar declares himself ready to stand at the head of the army and wipe out the nation's enemies.[1] While a feast is
being held prior to the battle, Biscroma disguises Atar as a Nubian and smuggles him into the harem. Axur discovers "the
Nubian" in the harem, but does not realize who he is. Axur decides to marry Aspasia to the Nubian as punishment for being
unfaithful to Atar. Axur then changes his mind, and instead sends a squad of soldiers into the harem to kill "the Nubian". The
soldiers discover "the Nubian's" true identity. They decide not to kill Atar, because they only have orders to kill "the Nubian"
and not the general of the army. But they have orders to arrest Atar, so they do so and bring him before the king. Atar is
dragged into court as Axur is wooing Aspasia. The husband and wife embrace. Axur sentences Atar to death for violating the
royal harem, and Atar is dragged off to the place of execution. But a crowd surrounds the palace and demands Atar's freedom
so that he can save the nation. Axur, realizing he has lost the love of the people, removes his crown and commits suicide. The
people proclaim Atar the new King of Ormus. Among the other most successful of Salieri’s 37 operas staged during his
lifetime were Armida (1771), La fiera di Venezia (1772), La scuola de' gelosi (1778), Der Rauchfangkehrer (1781), Les Danaïdes
(1784), which was first presented as a work of Gluck's, La grotta di Trofonio (1785), Tarare (1787) (Tarare was reworked and
revised several times as was Les Danaïdes ), La cifra (1789), Palmira, regina di Persia (1795), Il mondo alla rovescia (1795),
Falstaff (1799), and Cesare in Farmacusa (1800).
 Joseph Quesnel
Painting by
Gerritt Schipper (1808-1809)
Collection du Musée régional du Vaudreuil-Soulanges

1790
Canadian opera composer Joseph Quesnel’s first opera, Colas et Colinette,
premiéres in Montreal, Quebec.
Quenel (1746 - 1809) was a French Canadian composer, poet, and playwright, and
Colas et Colinette is considered to be Canada’s first opera. Inspired by Rousseau's
philosophy, the plot centres on Monsieur Dolmont's ward, the shepherdess Colinette,
who would rather have Colas, a simple and honest young shepherd, as a husband than le
Bailli, who claims to be well established but is old and depraved. The score consists of 14
musical pieces, comprising arias for each character, duos, and a final chorus. The libretto
and music are of French inspiration and recall certain works by Quesnel's
contemporaries Grétry, Monsigny, and Philidor. The tunes are suited to the personalities
of the characters, vivacious or noble according to the situation. Occasionally the style is even dramatic. The score does not state
the type of voice required for each role, but the tessitura assigns a soprano to Colinette, a tenor to Colas, and basses to le Bailli
and Monsieur Dolmont. The ABA form used in several pieces applies to the harmonic and metric structure more often than to
melodic reprise.His other works are Lucas et Cécile; LAngomanie and Rèpublicans Français. Quesnel's son Jules Maurice
Quesnel travelled with Simon Fraser on his journey to the Pacific Ocean; the town of Quesnel, British Columbia is named for
him. Quesnel was also the subject of the comic opera Le Père des amours, written by Eugène Lapierre in 1942.

January 26, 1790

Mozart’s Così fan tutte, premieres at the Burgtheater in Vienna, Austria.
Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti; (All Women Do It, or The School for Lovers), K. 588, is an Italian-language
opera buffa in two acts with the libretto bt written by Lorenzo Da Ponte, who also wrote Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni.
Although it is commonly held that Così fan tutte was written and composed at the suggestion of the Emperor Joseph II,
modern-day research does not support this idea. There is evidence that Mozart's
contemporary Antonio Salieri tried to set the libretto, but left it unfinished: In 1994, John
Rice uncovered two terzetti by Salieri in the Austrian National Library. The opera was given
only five times before the run was stopped by the death of the Emperor Joseph II and the
resulting period of court mourning. It was performed twice in June 1790 with the
composer conducting the second performance, and, again, in July (twice) and August
(once). After that it was not performed in Vienna during Mozart's lifetime. According to
William Mann, Mozart disliked prima donna Adriana Ferrarese del Bene, da Ponte's
arrogant mistress for whom the role of Fiordiligi had been created, and knowing her
idiosyncratic tendency to drop her chin on low notes and throw back her head on high
ones, he filled her showpiece aria Come scoglio with constant leaps from low to high and
high to low in order to make Ferrarese's head "bob like a chicken" onstage. Considered
both irresistable as well as controversial when it was first staged, the subject-matter did not
offend Viennese sensibilities the time, but in the 19th and early 20th centuries its storyline
was considered risqué, vulgar, and even immoral so it was rarely performed during this
period. After World War II it regained a place in the standard operatic repertoire and is
now frequently performed.

September 6, 1791
Wolfgang Mozart’s opera La clemenza di Tito, premieres at the Estates Theatre in Prague.
La clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus), K. 621, is an opera seria in two acts composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to
an Italian libretto by Caterino Mazzolà, after Pietro Metastasio. It was started after the bulk of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic
Flute), the last opera that Mozart worked on, was already written. In this opera, the Queen of the Night persuades Prince
Tamino to rescue her daughter Pamina from captivity under the high priest Sarastro; instead, he learns the high ideals of
Sarastro's community and seeks to join it. Separately, then together, Tamino and Pamina undergo severe trials of initiation,
which end in triumph, with the Queen and her cohorts vanquished. The earthy Papageno, who accompanies Tamino on his
quest, fails the trials completely but is rewarded anyway with the hand of his ideal female companion Papagena.
 Portrait
Domenico Cimerosa

February 7, 1792
Domenico Cimerosa’s Il matrimonio segreto (The Secret Marriage), premieres at
the Vienna Burgtheater in the presence of Emperor Leopold II.
Domenico Cimarosa (1749 - 1801) was an Italian opera composer of the Neapolitan
school. He wrote more than eighty operas including his above masterpiece, Il
matrimonio segreto during his lifetime. Il matrimonio segreto is Cimarosa's only work still
to be regularly performed, and is arguably one of the greatest 18th century opera buffa
apart from those by Mozart. It is an opera in two acts, music by Domenico Cimarosa,
on a libretto by Giovanni Bertati, based on the play The Clandestine Marriage by
George Colman the Elder and David Garrick where a wealthy citizen of Bologna,
Geronimo, has two daughters, Elisetta and Carolina, and a sister Fidalma, who runs the
household. He also has a young secretary, Paolino, who is secretly married to the
younger daughter, Carolina, and who becomes entangled in trying to get the older sister
married so that his and Carolina’s will be acceptable. When the interrelationships become enormously complicated, the two
have to finally own up that they are already secretly married. This opera’s premiere was the occasion of the longest encore in
operatic history, and Leopold II, who was in attendance, was so delighted he ordered supper served to the company and the
entire opera repeated immediately after.

The 1800s

Ludwig Van Beethoven

November 20, 1805

Beethoven’s rescue opera, Fidelio, premieres at the Vienna Theater an der
Wien.
Fidelio (originally titled Leonore, oder Der Triumph der ehelichen Liebe; (Leonore, or
The Triumph of Marital Love), Op. 72, is Ludwig van Beethoven's only opera. The
German libretto was originally prepared by Joseph Sonnleithner from the French of
Jean-Nicolas Bouilly. The libretto, with some spoken dialogue, tells how Leonore,
disguised as a prison guard named "Fidelio", rescues her husband Florestan from
death in a political prison. Bouilly's scenario fits Beethoven's aesthetic and political
outlook: a story of personal sacrifice, heroism, and eventual triumph. With its
underlying struggle for liberty and justice mirroring contemporary political
movements in Europe, such topics are typical of Beethoven's "middle period".
Notable moments in the opera include the "Prisoners' Chorus" (O welche Lust—"O
what a joy"), an ode to freedom sung by a chorus of political prisoners, Florestan's
vision of Leonore come as an angel to rescue him, and the scene in which the rescue
finally takes place. The finale celebrates Leonore's bravery with alternating contributions of soloists and chorus. The following
year, Stephan von Breuning (de) helped shorten the work from three acts to two. After further work on the libretto by Georg
Friedrich Treitschke, a final version was performed at the Kärntnertortheater on 23 May 1814. By convention, both of the first
two versions are referred to as Leonore. Although critics have noted the similarity in plot with Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice,
the underground rescue mission in which the protagonist must control, or conceal, his emotions in order to retrieve his or her
spouse, we do not know whether or not Beethoven or any of the librettists had this in mind while constructing the opera.
Beethoven cannot be said to have enjoyed the difficulties posed by writing and producing an opera, since, in a letter to
Treitschke he said, "I assure you, dear Treitschke, that this opera will win me a martyr's crown. You have by your co-operation
saved what is best from the shipwreck. For all this I shall be eternally grateful to you.” The full score of Fidelio was not
published until 1826, and all three versions are known as Beethoven's Opus 72.
 Giachino Antonio Rossini
Portrait by
Vincenzo Comuccini - OperaGlass

May 22, 1813

Gioachino Antonio Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri premieres at Teatro S Benedetto,
Venice, Italy.
Gioachino Rossini (1792 – 1868) was an Italian composer who wrote 39 operas as well as
some sacred music, songs, chamber music, and piano pieces. He was a precocious composer of
operas, and he made his debut at age 18 with La cambiale di matrimonio. His best-known
operas include the Italian comedies The Barber of Seville (Il barbiere di Siviglia), The Italian Girl
in Algiers (L'italiana in Algeri), and Cinderella (La Cenerentola). He also wrote a string of serious
operas in Italian, including works such as Tancredi, Otello, and Semiramide, and The Thieving
Magpie (La gazza ladra) which features one of his most celebrated overtures. Despite an unenthusiastic welcome in Venice
of L’italiana in Algeri, the opera went on to great success being also the first of the composer’s operas to be produced
in Germany.

February 20, 1816

Gioachino Antonio Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, set to the same libretto as Paisiello’s opera of 1782,
premieres at the Teatro Agentina in Rome, Italy.
Il barbiere di Siviglia, (The Barber of Seville or The Useless Precaution) is an opera buffa in two acts with an Italian libretto by
Cesare Sterbini. The libretto was based on Pierre Beaumarchais's French comedy Le Barbier de Séville (1775). Rossini's Barber
has proven to be one of the greatest masterpieces of comedy within music, and has been described as the opera buffa of all
"opere buffe” and, after two hundred years, it remains a popular work.The initial premiere was a disaster: the audience hissed
and jeered throughout, and several on-stage accidents occurred. Furthermore, many of the audience were supporters of one of
Rossini's rivals, Giovanni Paisiello, who played on mob mentality to provoke the rest of the audience to dislike the opera. The
second performance, however, was successful.

January 25, 1817

Gioachino Antonio Rossini’s much loved La Cenerentola, with its Cinderella setting, premières at the Teatro
Valle in Rome, Italy.
La Cenerentola, ossia La bontà in trionfo (Cinderella, or Goodness Triumphant) is an operatic dramma giocoso in two acts. The
libretto was written by Jacopo Ferretti, based on the fairy tale Cendrillon by Charles Perrault. Rossini composed La Cenerentola
when he was 25 years old, following the success of The Barber of Seville the year before. La Cenerentola, which he completed in
a period of three weeks, is considered to have some of his finest writing for solo voice and ensembles. Rossini saved some time
by reusing an overture from La gazzetta and part of an aria from The Barber of Seville and by enlisting a collaborator, Luca
Agolini, who wrote the secco recitatives and three numbers (Alidoro's "Vasto teatro è il mondo", Clorinda's "Sventurata!" and
the chorus "Ah, della bella incognita"). The facsimile edition of the autograph has a different aria for Alidoro, "Fa' silenzio, odo
un rumore"; this seems to have been added by an anonymous hand for an 1818 production. For an 1820 revival in Rome,
Rossini wrote a bravura replacement, "La, del ciel nell'arcano profondo”. At the first performance, the opera was received with
some hostility, but it soon became popular throughout Italy and beyond; it reached Lisbon in 1819, London in 1820 and New
York in 1826. Throughout most of the 19th century, its popularity rivalled that of Barber, but as the coloratura contralto, for
which the leading role was originally written, became rare, it fell slowly out of the repertoire. From the 1960s onward, Rossini's
work enjoyed a renaissance, and a new generation of Rossini contraltos ensured that La Cenerentola would once again be heard
around the world. The opera is now considered a staple of the standard repertoire.

June 18, 1821

Carl Maria von Weber’s ‘magic opera,’ Der Freischütz, (The Marksman) premieres at Berlin’s Schauspielhaus in
Germany.
 Carl Maria von Weber
Portrait by Caroline Bardua

Carl Maria von Weber (1786 – 1826) was a German composer, conductor, pianist,
guitarist and critic, and was one of the first significant composers of the Romantic school.
His operas Der Freischütz, Euryanthe and Oberon greatly influenced the development of the
Romantische Oper (Romantic opera) in Germany, and Der Freischütz
came to be regarded as the first German "nationalist" opera. With
Euryanthe, von Weber helped to develop the Leitmotif technique to
an unprecedented degree, and Oberon may have been the opera that
influenced Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Der Freischütz revealed Weber's lifelong interest in the music of non-
Western cultures and also influenced the work of later German
opera composers, such as Marschner, Meyerbeer, Wagner, and 19th-
century composers such as Glinka. As well, 20th-century composers
such as Debussy, Stravinsky, Mahler (who completed Weber's unfinished comic opera Die drei Pintos
and made revisions of Euryanthe and Oberon) and Hindemith (composer of the popular Symphonic
Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber) all paid homage to this composer.

Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini

October 27, 1827

Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini’s Il pirata premieres at La Scala, and
begins a phenomenally-successful six-year collaboration between the composer
and librettist Felice Romani.
Vincenzo Bellini (1801 – 1835) was an Italian opera composer, who was known for his long-
flowing melodic lines for which he was named "the Swan of Catania”. Many years later, in
1898, Giuseppe Verdi "praised the broad curves of Bellini's melody: 'there are extremely long
melodies as no-one else had ever made before’." In considering which of his operas can be seen
to be his greatest successes over the almost two hundred years since his death, Il pirata laid
much of the groundwork in 1827, achieving very early recognition in comparison to
Donizetti's having written thirty operas before his major 1830 triumph with Anna Bolena. Both
I Capuleti ed i Montecchi at La Fenice in 1830 and La sonnambula in Milan in 1831 reached new triumphal heights, although
initially Norma, given at La Scala in 1831 did not fare as well until later performances elsewhere. "The genuine triumph" of I
puritani in January 1835 in Paris capped a significant career. Certainly, Il pirata, Capuleti, La sonnambula, Norma, and I
puritani are regularly performed today. After his initial success in Naples, most of the rest of Bellini’s short life was spent
outside of both Sicily and Naples, those years being followed with his living and composing in Milan and Northern Italy, and
—after a visit to London—then came his final masterpiece in Paris, I puritani. Only nine months later, Bellini died in Puteaux,
France at the age of 33 after having produced a string of lasting favourites in just nine years, from 1827 to 1835.
August 3, 1829
Gioachino Antonio Rossini’s grand opera, Guillaume Tell (William Tell), premières at the Paris Opéra.
Guillaume Tell is a French-language opera in four acts by Italian composer Gioachino Rossini to a libretto by Victor-Joseph
Étienne de Jouy and L. F. Bis, based on Friedrich Schiller's play William Tell, which, in turn, drew on the William Tell legend.
According to the legend, Tell was an expert marksman with the crossbow who assassinated Albrecht Gessler, a tyrannical reeve
of the Habsburg dukes positioned in Altdorf, in the canton of Uri. Tell's defiance and tyrannicide encouraged the population
to open rebellion and a pact against the foreign rulers with neighbouring Schwyz and Unterwalden, marking the foundation of
the Swiss Confederacy. Paris Opéra archivist Charles Malherbe discovered the original orchestral score of the opera at a
secondhand book seller's shop, resulting in its being acquired by the Paris Conservatoire. The opera's length, roughly four
hours of music, and casting requirements, such as the high range required for the tenor part, have contributed to the difficulty
of producing the work. When performed, the opera is often cut. Performances have been given in both French and Italian.
Political concerns have also contributed to the varying fortunes of the work. The opera was Rossini's last, although he lived for
nearly 40 more years. Fabio Luisi said that Rossini planned for William Tell to be his last opera even as he composed it.

Tell is arrested for not saluting Gessler’s hat

(mosaic at the Swiss National Museum
Hans Sandreuter (1901)
 Gaetano Donizetti
Portrait by
Giuseppe Rillosi

December 26, 1830

Gaetano Donizetti’s Anna
Bolena, one of his serveral
operas on subjects from
English history, premières
at the Teatro Carcano in
Milan.
Donizetti (1797 - 1848) was a
leading composer of the bel canto opera style during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Over the course of his career, he wrote almost 70 operas. An offer in 1822 from Domenico
Barbaja, the impresario of the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, which followed the composer's
ninth opera, led to his move to that Naples and his residency there, which lasted until the production of Caterina Cornaro in
January 1844. In 1830, when Anna Bolena was premiered, Donizetti made a major impact on the Italian and international
opera scene and this shifted the balance of success away from primarily comedic operas,[6] although even after that date, his
best-known works included comedies such as L'elisir d'amore (1832) and Don Pasquale (1843). In 1847 he was confined to an
institution for the mentally ill. He died in Bergamo, Italy, the place of his birth.

March 6, 1831
Vincenzo Bellini’s La somnambula premieres at the Teatro Carcano in Milan, Italy.
La sonnambula (The Sleepwalker) is an opera semiseria in two acts, with music in the bel canto tradition by Vincenzo Bellini set
to an Italian libretto by Felice Romani, based on a scenario for a ballet-pantomime written by
Eugène Scribe and choreographed by Jean-Pierre Aumer called La somnambule, ou L'arrivée d'un
nouveau seigneur. The story concerns a Swiss village girl (Admina), engaged to fellow villager. All is
happy in their pastoral paradise until the arrival of a mysterious stranger, Count Rodolfo (the
suave Michele Pertusi), whose admiration for Amina causes jealousy in Elvino. This is exacerbated
when Amina is discovered in Rodolfo’s room at the local inn late at night. The misunderstanding
is happily resolved when it becomes clear that Amina is an innocent sleepwalker, a somnambulist.
The ballet had first premiered in Paris in September 1827 at the height of a fashion for stage works
incorporating somnambulism.

The Sleepwalker in Act 2 sc. 2

By William e Leftwich Dogs (1899)

Portrait
Giacomo Meyerbeer

November 21, 1831

Giacomo Meyerbeer’s first great success, Robert le diable, premières at Paris
Opéra.
Giacomo Meyerbeer (Jacob Liebmann Beer) was born in Tasdorf (now a part of
Rüdersdorf ), near Berlin, then the capital of Prussia, to a Jewish family. His father was
the enormously wealthy financier Judah Herz Beer and his mother, Amalia (Malka)
Wulff, to whom he was particularly devoted, also came from the moneyed elite. His
1824 opera Il crociato in Egitto was the first to bring him Europe-wide reputation, but
it was Robert le diable (1831) which raised his status to great celebrity, and with Robert
le diable he became the first to give the genre of grand opera its 'decisive character.’ To
achieve his grand opera style, the German orchestra style and Italian vocal tradition
were merged. These were employed in the context of sensational and melodramatic
libretti created by Eugène Scribe, were enhanced by the up-to-date theatre technology
of the Paris Opéra, and set a standard, which helped to maintain Paris as the opera capital of the nineteenth century. During
Meyerbeer’s, public career lasted until his death. He was at his peak with his operas Les Huguenots (1836) and Le prophète
(1849), and his last opera (L'Africaine) was performed posthumously. His operas made him the most frequently performed
composer at the world's leading opera houses in the nineteenth century. During the twentieth century, however, with the
critical assaults of Wagner and his supporters and Nazi suppression of his work in Germany, his operas declined in popularity.
In the 21st century, however, his major French grand operas have begun to reappear in the repertory of numerous European
opera houses. Meyerbeer died in Paris on 2 May 1864, and it is said that Rossini, who, not having heard the news, came to his
apartment the next day intending to meet him, was shocked, fainted, and was so moved, he wrote a choral tribute to the
composer on the spot (Pleure, pleure, muse sublime!).

Gaetano Donizetti
Portrait by
Giuseppe Rillosi

May 12, 1832

Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore premieres in the Teatro Cannobiana,
Milan, Italy.
L'elisir d'amore (The Elixir of Love) is a comic opera (melodramma giocoso) in two acts
by the Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti. Felice Romani wrote the Italian libretto,
after Eugène Scribe's libretto for Daniel Auber's Le philtre (es) (1831). L’elisir d’amore
follows Adina, the beautiful but fickle landowner, and Nemorino, the clumsy but
lovable young man, through the ups and downs of their love story. Nemorino is
madly in love with Adina, but Adina holds him at arm’s
length, feigning indifference to tease him. Over and over
again, he professes his love to her, but she tells him to
move on. Adina teases him by pretending to marry the
pompous Sergeant Belcore. Desperate, Nemorino
purchases an “elixir” that will make Adina fall in love with
him, which actually is red wine that simply makes him
tipsy. Convinced that she will fall for him, he begins to pretend not to love her anymore, which
causes Adina to act out of jealousy, moving the wedding forward. After many twists and turns,
Adina finally realizes and confesses her love for Nemorino, and they rejoice with the town. Written
in haste in a six-week period, L'elisir d'amore was the most often performed opera in Italy between
1838 and 1848 and has remained continually in the international opera repertory. Today it is one of
the most frequently performed of all Donizetti's operas.

Giuseppe Frezzolini as Dulcama (1832)

Richard Wagner (1871)

1833
Richard Wagner begins composing his first complete opera, Die Feen (The Fairies),
which is not performed until after his death.
Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883) was a German composer. For Die Feen, he both
composed the opera imating the style of von Weber, and wrote the libretto after Carlo
Gozzi's La donna serpente as well. Although then as now, it has never established itself
firmly in the operatic repertory, it does receive occasional performances, on stage or in
concert, most often in Germany. Having returned to Leipzig in 1834, Wagner held a brief
appointment as musical director at the opera house in Magdeburg during which he wrote
Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. This was
staged at Magdeburg in 1836 but closed before the second performance, and this, together
with the financial collapse of the theatre company employing him, left the composer in
bankruptcy. Until his final years, Wagner's life was characterised by political exile, turbulent
love affairs, poverty and repeated flight from his creditors. His controversial writings on music, drama and politics have
attracted extensive comment, notably, since the late 20th century, where they express antisemitic sentiments. The effect of his
ideas can be traced in many of the arts throughout the 20th century, and it is said his influence spread beyond composition
into conducting, philosophy, literature, the visual arts and theatre.

January 24, 1835

Vincenzo Bellini’s final opera, I Puritani, with its now-famous ‘mad scene,’ premières at the Théâtre Italien,
Paris, France.
I puritani (The Puritans) is an opera was originally written in two acts and later changed to three acts on the advice of
Gioachino Rossini, with whom the young composer had become friends. The music was set to a libretto by Count Carlo
Pepoli, an Italian émigré poet whom Bellini had met at a salon run by the exile Princess Belgiojoso, which became a meeting
place for many Italian revolutionaries.The subject was Têtes Rondes et Cavalieres (Roundheads and Cavaliers), written by Jacques-
François Ancelot and Joseph Xavier Saintine, which some sources state was based on Walter Scott's novel Old Mortality, while
others state that there is no connection. The story: Lord Valton, a puritan supporter of Cromwell, is preparing the wedding of
his daughter Elvira to Arturo, to the great displeasure of Riccardo who vehemently yearns after her. However, Arturo belongs to
the rival Stuart clan and saves the mysterious prisoner who Valton is tasked with taking to prison, Queen Enrichetta. Elvira,
believing she has been abandoned, sinks into madness…. Under the terrible dictatorship of Cromwell in England in the 17th
century, the Puritans preached in favour of an austere lifestyle, focused on the Bible. A love story emerging from adverse winds
offered Bellini a subject that was most definitely conducive to exploiting the facets of the nascent romantic opera style, but also
to articulating a wide range of human passions. Elvira’s scene of madness is only equalled by another from a contemporary
work, Lucia di Lammermoor. Based on a true story, this last work by Bellini was composed over a long time, taking nine
months. The master amended the libretto and rearranged the music following the advice of Rossini. Its first performance was
triumphant.

Princess Amalia of Saxony

Portrait by:
Vincente López y Portaña

September 17, 1835

Princess Amalia of Saxony’s La casa disabitata premières in the court theatre of
Pillnitz Castle in Dresden.
Amalie Marie Friederike Auguste (1794 – 1870), Princess of Saxony, (full name Maria
Amalia Friederike Augusta Karolina Ludovica Josepha Aloysia Anna Nepomucena
Philippina Vincentia Franziska de Paula Franziska de Chantal), was a German composer,
who wrote under the pen name A. Serena, and a dramatist under the name Amalie
Heiter. She was the daughter of Prince Maximilian of Saxony and Princess Carolina of
Parma and granddaughter of Frederick Christian, Elector of Saxony; niece of Frederick
Augustus I, King of Saxony and Anthony, King of Saxony; sister of Frederick Augustus II,
King of Saxony and John, King of Saxony; and aunt of Albert, King of Saxony and
George, King of Saxony. Her composition La casa disabitata (The Uninhabited House) is a
comic opera in one act composed by the Princess to her own Italian-language libretto.
After this one, the opera had no further performances until it was revived in 2012 as part of the Dresden Music Festival after
its manuscript score was found in a Moscow library. La casa disabitata was the last of the 12 short comic operas, which the
Princess had composed to her own libretti as entertainments for the Saxon court in Dresden. Its story is not original. The
opera's title, plot, setting, and characters are the same as those of Giovanni Giraud's one-act farce La casa disabitata, first
performed in 1808 and published in 1825. Giraud's play was also the basis of the two-act opera La casa disabitata, composed
by Lauro Rossi to a libretto by Jacopo Ferretti. Rossi's opera premiered at La Scala to great success in 1834, a year before
Princess Amalia's version, and was subsequently performed throughout Italy and in Paris.

September 26, 1835

Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor premieres at the Teatro S Carlo in Naples.
Lucia di Lammermoor is a dramma tragico (tragic opera) in three acts. Salvadore Cammarano wrote the Italian-language
libretto loosely based upon Sir Walter Scott's historical novel The Bride of Lammermoor. The story concerns the emotionally
fragile Lucy Ashton (Lucia), who is caught in a feud between her own family and that of the Ravenswoods. The setting is the
Lammermuir Hills of Scotland (Lammermoor) in the 17th century. The obbligato accompaniment to the famous mad
scene, usually heard on flute and performed on that instrument in the first production, was originally composed for
glass harmonica, which contributes to the eery quality of the scene. Significant historical dramas did appear and succeed,
and they included Lucia di Lammermoor (the first to have a libretto written by Salvadore Cammarano), and one of the most
successful Neapolitan operas. In all, Naples presented 51 of Donizetti's operas.

Portrait
Mary Anne à Beckett
1835
Mary Anne à Beckett (1815 – 1863) composes her first opera: Agnus Sorel.
Beckett was an English composer, primarily known for opera. She was the wife of the writer
Gilbert à Beckett, who provided the libretti for two of her operas. Their children included the
writers Gilbert Arthur à Beckett and Arthur William à Beckett. Her theatrical connections
included her brother, the actor and producer impresario Augustus Glossop Harris, and his
eldest son, also an impresario, Sir Augustus Harris. She composed songs, piano pieces,
incidental music, and three operas: Agnes Sorel (1835), Little Red Riding Hood (1842) and The
Young Pretender (1846). The most successful of these was the first, described as "an operatic
farce", loosely based on the life of Agnès Sorel, mistress of Charles VII of France.

Giacomo Meyerbeer
Engraving from a Photograph
by Pierre Petit (1865)

February 29, 1836.

Giacomo Meyerbeer’s grand opera Les Huguenots premières at the Paris Opèra.
Les Huguenots is a French opera by Giacomo Meyerbeer, one of the most popular and
spectacular examples of the style of grand opera. In five acts, to a libretto by Eugène Scribe
and Émile Deschamps, it premiered in Paris in 1836. The story culminates in the historical
St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572 in which thousands of French Huguenots
(Protestants) were slaughtered by Catholics in an effort to rid France of Protestant
influence. Although the massacre was a historical event, the rest of the action, which
primarily concerns the love between the Catholic Valentine and the Protestant Raoul, is
wholly a creation of Scribe. A short orchestral prelude, featuring the Lutheran chorale Ein
feste Burg, replaces the extended overture Meyerbeer originally intended for the opera. Les
Huguenots was the first opera to be performed at the Opéra more than 1,000
times (the 1,000th performance being on 16 May 1906) and continued to be
produced regularly up to 1936, more than a century after its premiere. The Paris
Opera scheduled performances of Les Huguenots for 2018, the first time since
1936 for the opera to be performed there. Its many performances in all other of
the world's major opera houses give it a claim to being the most successful opera
of the 19th century.

Press Illustration
Les Huguenots Act 2

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka

Portrait by Yanenko
drawn in the 1840s

December 9, 1836
Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, considered the first full Russian
opera, premieres at the Bol’shoy Theatre in St. Petersburg.
Mikhail Glinka (1804 – 1857) was the first Russian composer to gain wide
recognition within his own country and is often regarded as the fountainhead of
Russian classical music. His compositions were an important influence on future
Russian composers, who took Glinka's lead and produced a distinctive Russian style
of music. A Life for the Tsar was the first of Glinka's two great operas and it was
originally entitled Ivan Susanin. Set in 1612, it tells the story of the Russian peasant
and patriotic hero Ivan Susanin who sacrifices his life for the Tsar by leading astray a
group of marauding Poles who were hunting him. The Tsar himself followed the work's progress with interest and
suggested the change in the title. It was a great success at its premiere under the direction of Catterino Cavos, who
had written an opera on the same subject in Italy. Although the music is still more Italianate than Russian, Glinka
shows superb handling of the recitative which binds the whole work, and the orchestration is masterly,
foreshadowing the orchestral writing of later Russian composers. The Tsar rewarded Glinka for his work with a ring
valued at 4,000 rubles. And, during the Soviet era, the opera was staged under its original title Ivan Susanin).

Giuseppe Verdi
Portrait by Giacomo Brogi

November 17, 1839

Giuseppe Fortunino Verdi first opera premieres at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan,
Italy. begins composing his first opera (Oberto) to a libretto by the journalist
Antonio Piazza.
Giuseppe Fortunino Verdi (1813-1901) was born near Busseto, Italy to a provincial
family of moderate means and was able to receive a musical education with the help of a
local patron. Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio is an opera in two acts. It was written over a
period of four years and set to a libretto by journalist Antonio Piazza. The story takes
place in 1228, and, before the action takes place, a battle has been fought between
Oberto, Count of San Boniface, and the Salinguerra, led by Ezzelino da Romano. Oberto
has lost and has retreated to Mantua. Meanwhile, his daughter Leonora has been seduced
and abandoned by Riccardo, Count of Salinguerra, and Riccardo is about to marry Cuniza, Ezzelino's sister. Leonora makes
her way to Bassano on Riccardo's wedding day, intent on confronting him. He came to dominate the Italian opera scene after
the era of Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Gioachino Rossini, whose works significantly influenced him. By his 30s,
he had become one of the pre-eminent opera composers in history, and, while he was working on his second opera Un giorno
di regno, Margherita, his wife, died of encephalitis at the age of 26. Devastated, his opera Un giorno, a comedy, was premiered
only a few months later. It was a flop and only given one performance.
Following its failure, it is claimed Verdi vowed never to compose again, but
in his Sketch he recounts how Merelli persuaded him to write a new opera.
Verdi was to claim that he gradually began to work on the music for
Nabucco, the libretto of which had originally been rejected by the
composer Otto Nicolai: By the autumn of 1841 it was complete, originally
under the title Nabucodonosor. Well received at its first performance on 9
March 1842, Nabucco underpinned Verdi's success until his retirement
from the theatre, twenty-nine operas (including some revised and
updated versions) later.

Town and citadel of Bassano, Italy

where opera is set.

January 2, 1843
Richard Wagner’s first mature opera, Der Fliegende Holländer,
(The Flying Dutchman) premieres at the Königliches Sächsisches Holftheater, in Dresden, Germany.
Wagner wrote the first prose draft of the story in Paris early in May 1840, basing the story on Heinrich Heine's satire "The
Memoirs of Mister von Schnabelewopski" ("Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski") published in Der Salon in 1834.
In Heine's tale, the narrator watches a performance of a fictitious stage play on the theme of the sea captain cursed to sail
forever for blasphemy. Heine introduces the character as a Wandering Jew of the ocean, and also added the device taken up so
vigorously by Wagner in this, and many subsequent operas: the Dutchman can only be redeemed by the love of a faithful
woman. In Heine's version, this is presented as a means for ironic humour; however, Wagner took this theme literally and in
his draft, the woman is faithful until death. By the end of May 1841 Wagner had completed the libretto or poem as he
preferred to call it. Composition of the music had begun during May to July of the previous year, 1840, when Wagner wrote
Senta's Ballad, the Norwegian Sailors' song in act 3 ("Steuermann, lass die Wacht!") and the subsequent Phantom song of the
Dutchman's crew in the same scene. These were composed for an audition at the Paris Opéra, along with the sketch of the plot.
Wagner actually sold the sketch to the Director of the Opéra, Léon Pillet, for 500 francs, but was unable to convince him that
the music was worth anything. He composed the rest of the Der Fliegende Holländer during the summer of 1841, with the
Overture being written last, and by November 1841 the orchestration of the score was complete. While this score was designed
to be played continuously in a single act, Wagner later divided the piece into a three-act work. In doing so, however, he did not
alter the music significantly, but merely interrupted transitions that had originally been crafted to flow seamlessly (the original
one-act layout is restored in some performances). In his original draft
Wagner set the action in Scotland, but he changed the location to Norway
shortly before the first production staged in Dresden and conducted by
himself in January 1843. The Flying Dutchman is a legendary ghost ship
that can never make port and is doomed to sail the oceans forever. The
myth is likely to have originated from the 17th-century golden age of the
Dutch East India Company (VOC). The oldest extant version has been
dated to the late 18th century. Sightings in the 19th and 20th centuries
reported the ship to be glowing with ghostly light. If hailed by another
ship, the crew of the Flying Dutchman will try to send messages to land, or
to people long dead. In ocean lore, the sight of this phantom ship is a
portent of doom.
The Flying Dutchman
by Albert Pinkhum Ryder (c. 1887)
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Captain Hendrick van der Decken

March 11, 1851

Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, based on Victor Hugo’s novel, Le roi s’amuse premieres at Teatro La Fenice in
Venice, Italy.
Rigoletto is an opera in three acts. The Italian libretto was written by Francesco Maria Piave based on the play Le roi s'amuse by
Victor Hugo. Despite serious initial problems with the Austrian censors who had control over northern Italian theatres at the
time, the opera had a triumphant premiere. Rigoletto is widely considered to be the first of the operatic masterpieces of Verdi's
middle-to-late career. The opera's original title, La maledizione (The Curse), refers to a curse placed on both the Duke and
Rigoletto by a courtier whose daughter the Duke has seduced with Rigoletto's encouragement. The curse comes to fruition
when Gilda falls in love with the Duke and sacrifices her life to save him from assassins hired by her father. From 1852,
Rigoletto began to be performed in major cities worldwide, reaching as far afield as
Alexandria and Constantinople in 1854 and both Montevideo and Havana in 1855.
The UK premiere took place on 14 May 1853 at what is now the Royal Opera
House, Covent Garden in London with Giovanni Matteo Mario as the Duke of
Mantua and Giorgio Ronconi as Rigoletto. In the US, the opera was first seen on 19
February 1855 at New York's Academy of Music in a performance by the Max
Maretzek Italian Opera Company. In modern times, Rigoletto has become a staple of
the standard operatic repertoire, although in several of these modern productions,
the original setting has been radically changed.

Rigoletto
Set Design by Philippe Chaperon

Jacques Offenback c1860s

Photograph by Nadari (a.k.a. Gaspard-Feéix Tournachon) (1820-1910)

October 21, 1858

Jacques Offenbach’s first full-length operetta, Orphée aux enfers ("Orpheus in the
Underworld"), premieres.
Offenbach (1819 - 1880) was a German-French composer, cellist and impresario of the
romantic period. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s–1870s and
his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann. Orphée aux enfers, whose title translates from
the French as Orpheus in the Underworld, is an opéra bouffe (a form of operetta), or opéra
féerie in its revised version. Its score was composed by Jacques Offenbach to a French text
written by Ludovic Halévy and later revised by Hector-Jonathan Crémieux. The work, first
performed in 1858, is said to be the first classical full-length operetta. Offenbach's earlier
operettas were small-scale one-act works, since the law in France did not allow full-length
works of certain genres. Orpheus was not only longer, but more musically adventurous than
Offenbach's earlier pieces. This also marked the first time that Offenbach used Greek mythology as a background for one of his
pieces. The operetta is an irreverent parody and scathing satire on Gluck and his Orfeo ed Euridice and culminates in the risqué
Galop infernal ("Infernal Galop") that shocked some in the audience at the premiere. Other targets of satire, as would become
typical in Offenbach's burlesques, are the stilted performances of classical drama at the Comédie-Française and the scandals in
society and politics of the Second French Empire Offenback was also a powerful influence on later composers of the operetta
genre, particularly Johann Strauss, Jr. and Arthur Sullivan. His best-known works were continually revived during the 20th
century, and many of his operettas continue to be staged in the 21st. The Tales of Hoffmann remains part of the standard opera
repertory. During the 1860s, he produced at least 18 full-length operettas, as well as more one-act pieces. His works from
this period included La belle Hélène (1864), La Vie parisienne (1866), La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867) and La Périchole
(1868). The risqué humour (often about sexual intrigue) and mostly gentle satiric barbs in these pieces, together with
Offenbach's facility for melody, made them internationally known, and translated versions were successful in Vienna, London
and elsewhere in Europe.

Charles Gounod

March 19, 1859

Charles Gounod’s most popular opera, Faust, premières at the Théâtre
Lyrique in Paris.
Gounod (1818 - 1893) wrote his first opera, Sapho, in 1851 at the urging of his friend,
the singer Pauline Viardot; it was a commercial failure. He had no great theatrical
success until Faust, derived from Goethe. This remains the composition for which he is
best known; and, although it took a while to achieve popularity, it became one of the
most frequently staged operas of all time, with no fewer than 2,000 performances of the
work having occurred by 1975 at the Paris Opéra alone. The story of Faust is complex:
he is bored and depressed with his life as a scholar. After an attempt to take his own life,
he calls on the Devil for further knowledge and magic powers with which to indulge all
the pleasure and knowledge of the world. In response, the Devil's representative,
Mephistopheles, appears. He makes a bargain with Faust: Mephistopheles will serve
Faust with his magic powers for a set number of years, but, at the end of the term, the
Devil will claim Faust's soul, and Faust will be eternally enslaved. During the term of the bargain, Faust makes use of
Mephistopheles in various ways. In many versions of the story, particularly Goethe's drama, Mephistopheles helps Faust seduce
a beautiful and innocent girl, usually named Gretchen, whose life is ultimately destroyed when she gives birth to Faust's bastard
son. Realizing this unholy act, she drowns the child, and is held for murder. However, Gretchen's innocence saves her in the
end, and she enters Heaven after execution. In Goethe's rendition, Faust is saved by God via his constant striving—in
combination with Gretchen's pleadings with God in the form of the eternal feminine. However, in the early tales, Faust is
irrevocably corrupted and believes his sins cannot be forgiven; when the term ends, the Devil carries him off to Hell. Gounod’s
other works include the romantic and melodious Roméo et Juliette (based on the Shakespeare play Romeo and Juliet), which
premiered in 1867. Mireille, first performed in 1864, has been admired by connoisseurs rather than by the general public. The
other Gounod operas have been lost.

Louis-Hector Berlioz
Lithograph by August Prinzhofer
Vienna (1845)

November 4, 1863
Louis-Hector Berlioz’s grand opera, Les Troyens (The Tojans), premiéres at
the Théâtre Lyrique, Paris.
Louis-Hector Berlioz (1803 - 1869) was a French Romantic composer. Les
Troyen was composed with five acts, and the libretto was written by Berlioz himself
from Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid. The score was composed between 1856 and
1858, and Les Troyens is Berlioz's most ambitious work, the summation of his entire
artistic career, but he did not live to see it performed in its entirety. Under the title
Les Troyens à Carthage, the last three acts were premièred with many cuts by Léon
Carvalho's company, the Théâtre Lyrique, at their theatre (now the Théâtre de la
Ville) on the Place du Châtelet in Paris on 4 November 1863, with 21 repeat
performances. Today, Berioz is best known for his compositions Symphonie fantastique, Harold en Italie, Roméo et Juliette,
Grande messe des morts (Requiem), L'Enfance du Christ, Benvenuto Cellini, La Damnation de Faust, and Les Troyens. His influence
was critical for the further development of Romanticism, especially in composers such as Richard Wagner, Nikolai Rimsky-
Korsakov, Franz Liszt, Richard Strauss, and Gustav Mahler.

Bedrich Smetana

January 5, 1866
Bedřich Smetana’s opera The Brandenburgers in Bohemia is performed at the
Czech Provisional Theatre in Prague.
Bedřich Smetana (1824 – 1884) was a Czech composer, who pioneered the
development of a musical style that became closely identified with his country's
aspirations to independent statehood. The opera is set in Prague during the 13th
cenury when
Bohemia is occupied by forces of the Margraviate of Brandenburg. Upon the death of
King Ottokar II in the 1278 Battle on the Marchfeld, his widow Kunigunda had called
in the Brandenburgian troops to lend aid against the army of victorious Rudolph of
Habsburg. Rudolph retires to Austria, but nevertheless the Brandenburgers soon act like
occupants: they arrested Kunigunda and her seven-year-old son Wenceslaus at Bezděz
Castle and agreed with Rudolph that they would retain the Bohemian rule for the next
five years. The Prague people led by mayor Volfram Olbramovič suffer from the
Brandenburg occupation, and the citizen Junoš reports on plundering and lootering by
Brandenburgian troops. Ludiše, the mayor's daughter, rejects the approaches made by
the German townsman Jan Tausendmark, who thereupon joins the occupants. The serf
Jíra is designated the leader of a rebel movement. He openly charges Tausendmark with the kidnapping of the three daughters
of the mayor, Ludiše, Vlčenka and Děčana. To avoid clashes of arms, Olbramovič has Jíra arrested. The mayor's daughters are
kept by Brandenburg troops and Olbramovič asks Tausendmark to arrange for their liberation. However, the Brandenburg
captain Varnemann demands a high ransom. Meanwhile, Jíra is put on trial and condemned to death. However, it is Junoš, in
love with Ludiše, who manages to save Jíra. Tausendmark, who intends to abduct Ludiše, fails to reach an agreement with
Varnemann. He and the Brandenburgers are driven out of Prague, and the city is liberated. Smetana has been regarded in his
homeland as the father of Czech music. Internationally he is best known for his opera The Bartered Bride and for the
symphonic cycle Má vlast ("My Homeland"), which portrays the history, legends and landscape of the composer's native land.
Of his later operas, The Two Widows and The Secret were warmly received, while The Kiss was greeted by an "overwhelming
ovation”. The ceremonial opera, Libuše, received thunderous applause when performed, but, in October, 1882, The Devil's Wall
was not well received. A complete Má vlast cycle followed in November, and at the end of Blaník the audience was beside itself
and the people it is said could not bring themselves to take leave of the composer.”

Ludwig and Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld

in the first performance,
conducted by Hans von Bulöw
Photo by: Joseph Albert

June 10, 1865

Wilhelm Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde premieres at
the Königliches Hof-und Nationaltheater in Munich.
Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883) was a German
composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who
is chiefly known for his operas (or as some of his later
works were known, “music dramas.” Tristan und Isolde is an
opera, or music drama, in three acts, set to a German libretto by
the composer, based largely on the 12th-century romance
“Tristan” written by Gottfried von Strassburg. It was composed
between 1857 and 1859 and premiered with Hans von Bülow conducting. Wagner referred to the work not as an opera, but
called it "eine Handlung" (literally a drama, a plot or an action), which was the equivalent of the term used by the Spanish
playwright Calderón for his dramas, and the composition of Tristan und Isolde was inspired by the philosophy of Arthur
Schopenhauer (particularly The World as Will and Representation), as well as by Wagner's affair with Mathilde Wesendonck.
Widely acknowledged as one of the peaks of the operatic repertoire, Tristan was notable for Wagner's unprecedented use of
chromaticism, tonal ambiguity, orchestral colour and harmonic suspension. This opera was enormously influential among
Western classical composers and provided direct inspiration to composers such as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Karol
Szymanowski, Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg and Benjamin Britten. Other composers like Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel
and Igor Stravinsky formulated their styles in contrast to Wagner's musical legacy. Many see Tristan as the beginning of the
move away from common practice harmony and tonality and consider that it lays the groundwork for the direction of classical
music in the 20th century. Both Wagner's libretto style and music were also profoundly influential on the symbolist poets of
the late 19th century and early 20th century.

December 24, 1871

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi’s Aida premières at the newly-opened Khedivial Opera House in Cairo,
Egypt.
Giuseppe Verdi (1813 - 1901) was an Italian opera composer. He was born near Busseto to a provincial family of moderate
means, and developed a musical education with the help of a local patron. He came
to dominate the Italian operafter the era of Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti,
and Gioachino Rossini, whose works significantly influenced him. By his 30s, he
had become one of the pre-eminent opera composers in history. Aida, set in
ancient Egypt, is a timeless story of love and betrayal against the backdrop of war:
Aida is an Ethiopian princess held captive in Egypt, in love with a General,
Radames, and he with her. When he is chosen to lead a war with Ethiopia, we
follow the conflict of Aida’s love for both Radames and for her country. Aida is an
opera in four acts set to an Italian libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni. Giovanni
Bottesini conducted after Verdi himself withdrew. Today the work holds a central
place in the operatic canon, receiving performances every year around the world; at
New York's Metropolitan Opera alone, Aida has been sung more than 1,100 times
since 1886. Ghislanzoni's scheme follows a scenario often attributed to the French
Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, but Verdi biographer Mary Jane Phillips-Matz
argues that the source is actually Temistocle Solera. An intensely private person,
Verdi retired following the success of Aida, but then surprised the musical world by
returning and composing three later masterpieces: Requiem (1874), and the operas
Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893). He died in Italy. He was 87 years old.

Original Aida Vocal Score Cover

Restoration

February 8, 1874
Modest Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov premieres at the
Marinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Modest Mussorgsky (1839 – 1881) composed Boris Godunov
between 1868 and 1873 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It is
Mussorgsky's only completed opera and is considered his
masterpiece. Its subjects are the Russian ruler Boris Godunov, who
reigned as Tsar (1598 to 1605) during the Time of Troubles, and
his nemesis, the False Dmitriy (reigned 1605 to 1606). The
Russian-language libretto was written by the composer and is based
on the drama Boris Godunov by Aleksandr Pushkin, and, in the
Revised Version of 1872, on Nikolay Karamzin's History of the
Russian State. Among major operas Boris Godunov shares with Giuseppe Verdi's Don
Carlos (1867) is the distinction of having an extremely complex creative history, as well
as a great wealth of alternative material. The composer created two versions—the
Original Version of 1869, which was rejected for production by the Imperial Theatres,
and the Revised Version of 1872, which received its first performance as noted above.
 Johann Strauss II

April 5, 1874
Johann Strauss II’s light opera, Die Fledermaus (The Fittermouse or The Revenge of
the Bat) premieres at Theater an der Wien, Vienna, Austria.
Johann Strauss II’s operetta Die Fledermaus was composed to a German libretto by Karl
Haffner (de) and Richard Genée. The original literary source for it was Das Gefängnis (The
Prison), a farce by German playwright Julius Roderich Benedix[1] that premiered in Berlin in
1851. On 10 September 1872, a three-act French vaudeville play by Henri Meilhac and
Ludovic Halévy, Le Réveillon, loosely based on the Benedix farce, opened at the Théâtre du
Palais-Royal. Meilhac and Halévy had provided several successful libretti for Offenbach and
Le Réveillon later formed the basis for the 1926 silent film So This Is Paris, directed by Ernst
Lubitsch. Strauss' most famous operettas are Die Fledermaus, Eine Nacht in Venedig, and Der
Zigeunerbaron. There are also many dance pieces drawn from themes of his operettas, such as
"Cagliostro-Walzer" Op. 370 (from Cagliostro in Wien), "O Schöner Mai" Walzer Op. 375 (from Prinz Methusalem), "Rosen
aus dem Süden" Walzer Op. 388 (from Das Spitzentuch der Königin), and "Kuss-Walzer" op. 400 (from Der lustige Krieg), that
have survived obscurity and become well-known. Strauss also wrote an opera, Ritter Pázmán, and was in the middle of
composing a ballet, Aschenbrödel, when he died in 1899.
Georges Bizet
by Étienne Carat

March 3, 1875
Georges Bizet’s Carmen premières at the Opéra-Comique in Paris.
Georges Bizet (1838 - 1875) was a French composer of the romantic
era. Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his early death, he
achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, which has become one
of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera
repertoire. The production of Carmen, was delayed because of fears that its
themes of betrayal and murder would offend audiences. After its premiere,
with Bizet being convinced that the work was a failure, he died of a heart
attack in June unaware that it would prove a spectacular and enduring
success. Among the opera's early champions were Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and
particularly Wagner, who commented: "Here, thank God, at last for a change is somebody
with ideas in his head."Another champion of the work was Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed
to know it by heart said, "It is music that makes no pretensions to depth, but it is delightful in its simplicity, so unaffected and
sincere”. By broad consent, Carmen represents the fulfilment of Bizet's development as a master of music drama and the
culmination of the genre of opéra comique.

Illustration:
Die Götterdämmerung (1973)

August 13-17, 1876

First performance of Wagner’s complete Ring cycle premieres at the
Bayreuth Festival.
Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), WWV 86, is a cycle of four
German-language epic music dramas composed by Richard Wagner. Wagner
wrote the libretto and music over the course of about twenty-six years, from
1848 to 1874, and the four parts that constitute the Ring cycle are, in sequence:
Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold); Die Walküre (The Valkyrie); Siegfried; and
Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). The works are based loosely on
characters from the Norse sagas and the Nibelungenlied. The composer termed
the cycle a "Bühnenfestspiel" (stage festival play), structured in three days
preceded by a Vorabend ("preliminary evening"). The plot revolves around a
magic ring that grants the power to rule the world, forged by the Nibelung
dwarf Alberich from gold he stole from the Rhine maidens in the river Rhine.
The Ring itself as described by Wagner is a Rune-magic taufr ("tine", or
"talisman") intended to rule the feminine multiplicative power by a fearful magical act termed as 'denial of
love' ("Liebesverzicht"). With the assistance of the god Loge, Wotan – the chief of the gods – steals the ring from Alberich, but
is forced to hand it over to the giants, Fafner and Fasolt in payment for building the home of the gods, Valhalla, or they will
take Freia, who provides the gods with the golden apples that keep them young. Wotan's schemes to regain the ring, spanning
generations, drive much of the action in the story. His grandson, the mortal Siegfried, wins the ring by slaying Fafner (who
slew Fasolt for the ring) – as Wotan intended – but is eventually betrayed and slain as a result of the intrigues of Alberich's son
Hagen, who wants the ring for himself. Finally, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde – Siegfried's lover and Wotan's daughter who lost her
immortality for defying her father in an attempt to save Siegfried's father Sigmund – returns the ring to the Rhine maidens as
she commits suicide on Siegfried's funeral pyre. Hagen is drowned as he attempts to recover the ring. In the process, the gods
and Valhalla are destroyed.It is often referred to as the Ring Cycle, Wagner's Ring, or simply The Ring. Wagner wrote the
libretto and music over the course of about twenty-six years, from 1848 to 1874. Although individual works of the sequence
have occasionally been performed separately, Wagner intended them to be performed in series. The first performance as a cycle
at the first Bayreuth Festival began with Das Rheingold and ended with Götterdämmerung. Opera stage director Anthony
Freud stated that Der Ring des Nibelungen "marks the high-water mark of our art form, the most massive challenge any opera
company can undertake.”

Pyotr Il’ych Tchaikovsky

January 23, 1881

Pyotr Il’ych Tchaikovsky’s Yevgeny Onegin (Eugene Onegin) premieres at the
Malï Theatre in Moscow.
An earlier performance had been given in 1879 by students at the Moscow
Conservatory, and an earlier opera, The Voyevoda, based on a play by Alexander
Ostrovsky, premiered in 1869. The composer became dissatisfied with it, however, and,
having re-used parts of it in later works, destroyed the manuscript. Undina followed in
1870. Only excerpts were performed, and it, too, was destroyed. Between these
projects, Tchaikovsky started to compose an opera called Mandragora, to a libretto by
Sergei Rachinskii; the only music he completed was a short chorus of Flowers and
Insects. The first Tchaikovsky opera to survive intact, The Oprichnik, premiered in
1874. During its composition, he lost Ostrovsky's part-finished libretto, and, too
embarrassed to ask for another copy, decided to write the libretto himself, modelling
his dramatic technique on that of Eugène Scribe. The Oprichnik continues to be
performed from time to time in Russia. The last of the early operas, Vakula the Smith (Op.14), was composed in the second
half of 1874. The libretto, based on Gogol's Christmas Eve, was to have been set to music by Alexander Serov, but, with Serov's
death, the libretto was opened to a competition with a guarantee that the winning entry would be premiered by the Imperial
Mariinsky Theatre. Tchaikovsky, some of whose works are among the most popular music in the classical repertoire, was was
the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally.

Parsifal & Kundry by

Rogelio de Egusquiza

July 26, 1882

Richard Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal, premieres at the second
Bayreuth Festspielhaus.
Parsifal is an opera in three acts. It is loosely based on Parzival by Wolfram von
Eschenbach, a 13th-century epic poem of the Arthurian knight Parzival
(Percival) and his quest for the Holy Grail (12th century). Wagner conceived
the work in April 1857, but did not finish it until 25 years later. In composing
it, he took advantage of the particular acoustics of his Bayreuth Festspielhaus.
Parsifal was his only work written especially for his Bayreuth Festspielhaus and is described in the score as a
"Bühnenweihfestspiel" ("festival play for the consecration of the stage”). It is thought that elements of Buddhist renunciation in
the opera were suggested by Wagner's readings of Schopenhauer.[178] He described it to his wife Cosima as his "last card”, and
it remains controversial because of its treatment of Christianity, its eroticism and its expression, as perceived by some
commentators, of German nationalism and antisemitism. Despite the composer's own description of the opera to King Ludwig
as "this most Christian of works”, Ulrike Kienzle has commented that "Wagner's turn to Christian mythology, upon which the
imagery and spiritual contents of Parsifal rest, is idiosyncratic and contradicts Christian dogma in many ways.” Musically the
opera has been held to represent a continuing development of the composer's style, and Barry Millington describes it as "a
diaphanous score of unearthly beauty and refinement”. The Bayreuth Festival maintained a 30-year monopoly on Parsifal
productions until 1903, so it wasn’t until December 24, 1903 that the opera was finally able to be performed at the
Metropolitan Opera in New York.

October 3, 1883
Johann Strauss II’s operetta, Eine Nacht in Venedig (A Night in Venice), premieres at the Neues Frederich
Wilheimstädisches Theater in Berlin, Germany.
Johann Strauss II (1825-1899) like his father was an Austrian composer. Eine Nacht in Venedig (A Night in Venice) is
an operetta in three acts. Its libretto was by F. Zell and Richard Genée based on Le Château Trompette by Eugène Cormon and
Richard Genée. The farcical, romantic story involves several cases of mistaken identity. Although the press praised Strauss's
music, they criticized the libretto as banal and silly; for instance, references were made to roast beef made from the sole of a
boot and, in the waltz scene, the character of Duke Urbino was singing passages of "meows", which was met with much
embarrassment from the Berlin audience.[citation needed] Unperturbed, Strauss made several alterations to the work with his
librettists and scored a triumph in his native Vienna at the Theater an der Wien, where it ran for 44 consecutive performances
from 9 October 1883.[citation needed] The operetta became established as one of Strauss's three most recognisable stage works
alongside Die Fledermaus and Der Zigeunerbaron.[citation needed] A 1923 production, starring Richard Tauber at the Theater an
der Wien, used a score and libretto revised by composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold and writer Hubert Marischka, which was
later used in other productions and recordings as well. It became one of Strauss's three most famous stage works and has been
seen in New York, London and elsewhere, and was adapted for film. Strauss was diagnosed with pleuropneumonia, and at the
time of his death, he was still composing his ballet Aschenbrödel.

Jules Massenet

January 19, 1884

Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet’s Manon premières at the Paris Opéra-Comique
in France.
Jules Massenet (1841-1912) was a French composer during the Romantic era. He is best
known for his operas, of which he wrote more than thirty. The two most frequently
staged are Manon (1884) and Werther (1892). Manon is Massenet's most popular and
enduring opera. Manon is an opéra comique in five acts by Jules Massenet to a French
libretto by Henri Meilhac and Philippe Gille, based on the 1731 novel L’histoire du
chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut by the Abbé Prévost with sets designed by Eugène
Carpezat (Act I), Auguste-Alfred Rubé and Philippe Chaperon (Acts II and III), and Jean-
Baptiste Lavastre (Act IV). The story is set in France and Louisiana in the early 18th
century, and follows the hero, the Chevalier des Grieux, and his lover, Manon Lescaut:
Des Grieux comes from a noble and landed family, but forfeits his hereditary wealth and
incurs the disappointment of his father by running away with Manon. In Paris, the young
lovers enjoy a blissful cohabitation, while Des Grieux struggles to satisfy Manon's taste for
luxury. He scrounges together money by borrowing from his unwaveringly loyal friend
Tiberge and by cheating gamblers. On several occasions, his wealth evaporates (by theft, in a house fire, etc.), prompting
Manon to leave him for a richer man because she cannot stand the thought of living in penury. The two lovers finally end up in
New Orleans, to which Manon has been deported as a prostitute, where they pretend to be married and live in idyllic peace for
a while. But when Des Grieux reveals their unmarried state to the Governor and asks to be wed with Manon. Then, the
Governor's nephew sets his sights on winning Manon's hand. In despair, Des Grieux challenges the Governor's nephew to a
duel and knocks him unconscious. Thinking he had killed the man and fearing retribution, the couple flee New Orleans and
venture into the wilderness of Louisiana, hoping to reach an English settlement. Manon dies of exposure and exhaustion the
following morning, however, and, after burying his beloved, Des Grieux is eventually taken back to France by Tiberge. Manon,
it is said, is the quintessential example of the charm and vitality of the music and culture of the Parisian Belle Époque.
Massenet also wrote a one-act sequel to Manon, Le portrait de Manon (1894), involving the Chevalier des Grieux as an older
man.The composer worked at the score both at his country home outside Paris and also at a house at The Hague once
occupied by Prévost himself. In 1893 an opera by Giacomo Puccini entitled Manon Lescaut, and based on the same novel also
premiered and also became popular.
February 5, 1887
Otello, one of the most universally-respected of Verdi’s operas, premieres at Teatre alla Scala in Milan.
Gieseppe Verdi’s opera Otello was composed in four acts, set to an Italian libretto by Arrigo Boito, and based on
Shakespeare's play Othello. The story is about Othello, who was a noble black warrior general in the Venetian army, his
unfaithful ensign Iago, a prominent senator named Brabantio, and his beautiful daughter Desdemona, who has secretly wed
Otello. In the last scene, Desdemona prepares for bed. She has just finished saying her evening prayers when Otello enters and
wakes her with a kiss to tell her he is about to kill her. Paralyzed with fear, she again protests her innocence. Otello coldly
strangles her. He then learns that Cassio (another soldier) has killed Roderigo, a dissolute Venetian lusting after Othello's wife
Desdemona. In the end, Iago’s plot is finally revealed and Otello realizes what he has done. Reflecting on his past glory, he pulls
out a dagger and stabs himself, dying with a final kiss for his wife.
Otello was Verdi's penultimate opera, and, given its varied and
enduring themes of racism, love, jealousy, betrayal, revenge and
repentance, it is still often performed in professional and
community theatre alike, and has been the source for numerous
operatic, film, and literary adaptations. With the composer's
reluctance to write anything new following the success of Aida in
1871, it took his Milan publisher Giulio Ricordi ten years, to
convince him to come out of retirement to compose Otello. Then,
when it finally premiered, it proved to be such a resounding success
that further stagings soon followed at leading theatres throughout
Europe and America.

Desdemona & Othello

Painting by
Antonio Muñoz Degrain

Pietro Mascagni

May 17, 1890

Pietro Antonio Stefano Mascagni’s one-act verismo opera, Cavalleria rusticana
(Italian for Rustic Chivalry), premieres at the Teatro Costanzi, Rome, Italy.
Pietro Mascagni (1863 - 1945) Pietro Mascagni was an Italian composer most noted
for his operas. His masterpiece Cavalleria Rusticana caused one of the greatest sensations
in opera history and single-handedly ushered in the Verismo movement in Italian
dramatic music.) It is an opera in one act to an Italian libretto by Giovanni Targioni-
Tozzetti and Guido Menasci, adapted from an 1880 short story and and subsequent play
by Giovanni Verga. The story of Cavalleria rusticana, if local folklore is to be believed,
really took place in Vizzini, Sicily before the time of Verga. In this simple yet revealing
“fable", all the vices, hypocrisies, prejudices and, yes, virtues of rural Sicily at the time of
Verga are revealed. To be sure, Verga's story poses no great political or social question,
but merely exposes raw human emotions and folly among a small group of ordinary
people in the mountains of eastern Sicily. It is a drama that could be replayed countless times over the course of the centuries.
Considered one of the classic verismo operas, since 1893, it has often been performed in a so-called Cav/Pag double-bill with
Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo.

December 19, 1890

Pyotr IIlyichTchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades premieres at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The Queen of Spades is an opera in 3 acts (7 scenes) by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to a Russian libretto by the composer's brother
Modest Tchaikovsky. It is based on a short story of the same name by Alexander Pushkin, but the plot was dramatically altered.
In the opera, Hermann, an ethnic German, is an officer of the engineers in the Imperial Russian Army. He constantly watches
the other officers gamble, but never plays himself. One night, Tomsky tells a story about his grandmother, an elderly countess,
who, many years ago in France, lost a fortune at cards, and then won it back with the secret of the three winning cards, which
she learned from the notorious Count of St. Germain. Hermann then becomes obsessed with obtaining the secret. While
composing the music, Tchaikovsky actively edited the libretto, changing some of the text and adding his own lyrics to two
arias. The composer himself took part in the preparation of the Saint Petersburg premiere. Critics gave the opera rave reviews,
and Tchaikovsky later wrote, "Figner and the Saint Petersburg orchestra... have made true miracles.” The opera was just as
successful at the Kiev premiere twelve days later. The Bolshoi Theatre premiere
took place the following year. Tchaikovsky was extremely pleased with his effort.

Tchaikovsky
with Nikolay & Medeya Figner
who sang the roles
of Herman and Liza
in the premier.

Ruggiero Leoncavallo

May 21, 1892

Ruggero Leoncavallo’s I pagliacci (Clowns) premieres at the Teatro Dal
Verme, Milan, Italy
Ruggero Leoncavallo (1859-1919) was an Italian composer. His composition,
Pagliacci, is an Italian opera in a prologue and two acts, with music and he wrote the
libretto as well. It is the only Leoncavallo opera that is still widely performed. The
opera, a dramatic tale of love and betrayal, revolves around a commedia del arte
troupe: Canio and Nedda are married, and the leads in the troupe along with Tonio
and Beppe. However, Nedda is secretly having an affair with Silvio, and, fearing
Canio’s anger, Nedda continues to hide the affair, and even goes as far to attempt to
break it off with Silvio. Silvio and Nedda’s love is strong, however, and they plan to run
away together. Tonio, also in love with Nedda, confesses his love for her, but she turns
him away, shaming him. In an act of revenge, Tonio tells Canio that Nedda is having
an affair like he suspected. During a performance, Canio confronts Nedda, and stabs
her. Silvio attempts to save Nedda, running up on stage, but gets stabbed by Canio as
well. The audience, not realizing it was real, claps until Canio screams at them, “the comedy is ended.” This premiere
performance was conducted by Arturo Toscanini, with Adelina Stehle as Nedda, Fiorello Giraud as Canio, Victor Maurel as
Tonio, and Mario Ancona as Silvio. Based, like Cavalleria rusticana, on a true story, I pagliacci was composed with the
earlier opera in mind, and the two are linked in modern performance tradition. Pagliacci received mixed critical reviews
upon its world premiere, but it was instantly successful with the public and has remained so ever since. The Metropolitan
Opera first staged the work on 11 December as a double-bill with Orfeo ed Euridice, with Nellie Melba in the role of Nedda.

Giacomo Antonio Momenio Michele Secondo Maria Puccini

February 1, 1893
Giacomo Antonio Momenio Michele Secondo Maria Puccini’s Manon
Lescaut premieres at La Scala, Milan, Italy.
Giacomo Puccini (1858 – 1924) was an Italian opera composer who has been called
"the greatest composer of Italian opera after Verdi”. Puccini's early work was rooted in
traditional late-19th-century romantic Italian opera, and later, he successfully
developed his work in the realistic verismo style, of which he became one of the
leading exponents. When his publisher tried to dissuade him from composing an
opera on a subject (Manon) that had already had great success in a treatment by
Massenet (see 1884), Puccini is said to have replied, ‘Why shouldn’t there be
two opera about her? A woman like Manon can have more than one lover.’ The
opera’s success has borne him out. His most renowned works are La bohème
(1896), Tosca (1900), Madama Butterfly (1904), and Turandot (1924), all of which
are among the important operas played as standards.
February 9, 1893
Giuseppe Verdi’s great comic portrait, Falstaff, premieres at La Scala, Milan.
Falstaff is a comic opera in three acts. The libretto was adapted by Arrigo Boito from
Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor and scenes from Henry IV, parts 1 and 2. For the
first night, official ticket prices were thirty times higher than usual. Royalty, aristocracy, critics
and leading figures from the arts all over Europe were present. The performance was a huge
success; numbers were encored, and, at the end, the applause for Verdi and the cast lasted an
hour. That was followed by a tumultuous welcome when the composer, his wife, and Boito
arrived at the Grand Hotel de Milan.[128] Even more hectic scenes ensued when he went to
Rome in May for the opera's premiere at the Teatro Costanzi, when crowds of well-wishers at
the railway station initially forced Verdi to take refuge in a tool-shed. He witnessed the
performance from the Royal Box at the side of King Umberto and the Queen. Verdi wrote
Falstaff, which was the last of his 28 operas, as he was approaching the age of 80. It was his
second comedy, and his third work based on a Shakespeare play, following Macbeth and
Otello. The plot revolves around the thwarted, sometimes farcical, efforts of the fat knight, Sir
John Falstaff, to seduce two married women to gain access to their husbands' wealth. While
staying at the Grand Hotel, he suffered a stroke on 21 January 1901, gradually grew more
feeble over the next week, and died on 27 January at the age of 87.

Falstaff
By Desgranges Aix-les-Bains and Nice

Englebert Humperdinck

December 23, 1893

Englebert Humperdinck’s opera Hansel and Gretel, conducted by Richard
Strauss, is first performed at Hoftheater in Weimar, Germany.
Englebert Humperdinck (1854-1921) was a German composer. He described
Hansel and Gretel as a Märchenoper (fairy-tale opera). The libretto was written by
Humperdinck's sister, Adelheid Wette, based on the Grimm brothers' fairy tale
"Hansel and Gretel". It is much admired for its folk music-inspired themes, one of
the most famous being the "Abendsegen" ("Evening Benediction") from act 2. The
idea for the opera was proposed to the composer by his sister, who approached him
about writing music for songs that she had written for her children for Christmas
loosely based on the fairy-tale. After
several revisions, the musical sketches
and the songs were turned into a full-
scale opera. He composed it in
Frankfurt in 1891 and 1892. Today it is
still most often performed at Christmas time. On 5 January 1921 Humperdinck
suffered a severe stroke. Although he recovered, his left hand remained
permanently paralyzed. He continued to compose, completing Gaudeamus with
the help of his son, Wolfram, in 1918. On 26 September 1921 Humperdinck
attended a performance of Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz in Neustrelitz,
Wolfram's first effort as a stage director. He suffered a heart attack during the
performance and died the next day from a second heart attack. The Berlin State
Opera performed Hansel and Gretel in his memory a few weeks later. He was
buried at the Südwestkirchhof (de) in Stahnsdorf near Berlin.

Hansel & Gretel

Illustration by
Arthur Rackham (1909)
February 1, 1896
Giacomo Puccini’s perennial favourite, La bohème, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, premieres at the Teatro
Regio, Turin, Italy.
According to its title page, the libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa is based on
Henri Murger's novel, Scènes de la vie de bohème, a collection of vignettes portraying young
bohemians living in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the 1840s. Although usually called a novel,
it has no unified plot. Like the 1849 play by Murger and Théodore Barrière, the opera's
libretto focuses on the relationship between Rodolfo and Mimì, ending with her death. Also
like the play, the libretto combines two characters from the novel, Mimì and Francine, into
the single character of Mimì. Early in the composition stage, Puccini was in dispute with the
composer Leoncavallo, who said that he had offered Puccini a completed libretto and felt
that Puccini should defer to him. Puccini responded that he had had no idea of
Leoncavallo's interest and that having been working on his own version for some time, he
felt that he could not oblige him by discontinuing with the opera. Leoncavallo completed
his own version in which Marcello was sung by a tenor and Rodolfo by a baritone. It was
unsuccessful and is now rarely performed.

Poster by
Adolfo Hohenstein - Allposters

Franz Léhar

November 27, 1896

Franz Léhar’s first opera, Kukuschka (later reworked as Tatjana) premieres at the
Leipzig Stadttheater in Leipzig, Germany.

Franz Léhar (1870-1948) was a Austro-Hungarian composer. Kukuška, is an opera in 3

acts. The libretto, by Felix Falzari, was from American journalist and explorer George
Kennan's writings about his six years in Siberia, including Siberia and the Exile System
(1891). Léhar’s revised work, Tatjana, with changes to the libretto by Max Kalbeck was
premiered on 10 February 1905 in Brno, at the German Brünn Stadttheater. Léhar is most
famous for his operetta The Merry Widow (Die lustige Witwe) – but he also wrote sonatas,
symphonic poems and marches. Individual songs from some of the operettas have become
standards, notably "Vilja" from The Merry Widow and "You Are My Heart's Delight" ("Dein
ist mein ganzes Herz") from The Land of Smiles (Das Land des Lächelns). His most ambitious
work, Giuditta (1934) is closer to opera than to operetta, and it also contains the ever popular "Meine Lippen, sie küssen so
heiß" ("On my lips every kiss is like wine”). Lehár was also associated with the operatic tenor Richard Tauber, who sang in
several of his operettas, beginning with a revival of his 1910 operetta Zigeunerliebe (1920) and then Frasquita (de) in 1922, in
which Lehár once again found a suitable post-war style.

January 14, 1900

Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca premieres at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, Italy.
Tosca is an opera in three acts by to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. The work,
based on Victorien Sardou's 1887 French-language dramatic play. La Tosca is a melodramatic piece set in
Rome in June 1800, with the Kingdom of Naples's control of Rome threatened by Napoleon's invasion
of Italy. It contains depictions of torture, murder and suicide, as well as some of Puccini's best-known
lyrical arias. Musically, Tosca is structured as a through-composed work, with arias, recitative, choruses
and other elements musically woven into a seamless whole. Puccini used Wagnerian leitmotifs to identify
characters, objects and ideas. While critics have often dismissed the opera as a facile melodrama with
confusions of plot—musicologist Joseph Kerman called it a "shabby little shocker"—the power of its
score and the inventiveness of its orchestration have been widely acknowledged. The dramatic force of
Tosca and its characters continues to fascinate both performers and audiences, and the work remains one
of the most frequently performed operas. Many recordings of the work have been issued, both of studio
and live performances.
Original Poster depicting the death of Scarpia (Act 2)
Author: Adalfo Hofenstein (1854-1928)
 Achille-Claude Debussy
Portrait by Atelier Nadar, Paris
Bibliothèque nationale de France

April, 30, 1902

Achille-Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande premières at the Opéra-Comique,
Paris, France.
Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first
Impressionist composer, although he rejected the term. He was among the most influential
composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The academic and journalist Stephen Walsh
calls Pelléas et Mélisande (begun 1893, staged 1902) "a key work for the 20th century”. The
composer Olivier Messiaen was fascinated by its "extraordinary harmonic qualities and ...
transparent instrumental texture". The opera is composed in what Alan Blyth describes as a sustained and heightened recitative
style, with "sensuous, intimate" vocal lines. The story takes place in the imaginary kingdom of Allemonde, governed by
the aged King Arkel. After meeting Mélisande, a fragile and mysterious creature, while hunting in the forest, Prince
Golaud marries her without learning anything about her and then presents Mélisande to his half brother Pelléas. A
secret bond forms between the two...is it love? Golaud starts to spy on Pelléas and Mélisande. First, he tells his half
brother to stay away from his wife, but then becomes more threatening as he is devoured by fear and jealousy. Pelléas
and Mélisande end up confessing their love for each other. As they kiss, Golaud surprises them and kills Pelléas with
his sword as Mélisande escapes. In the presence of Arkel and Golaud, who is filled with remorse, the mysterious
Mélisande gradually dies of an unidentified affliction. Golaud never finds out the truth about her relationship with
Pelléas. This opera influenced composers as different as Stravinsky and Puccini. In 1890 Debussy had met Erik Satie, who
proved a kindred spirit in his experimental approach to composition. Both were bohemians, enjoying the same café society and
struggling to stay afloat financially. In the same year, he began a relationship with Gabrielle (Gaby) Dupont, a tailor's daughter
from Lisieux; in July 1893 they began living together. In February 1894, he completed the first draft of Act I of his operatic
version of Pelléas et Mélisande, and worked to complete the composition for most of the year. While still living with Dupont,
he had an affair with the singer Thérèse Roger, and, in 1894, he announced their engagement. His behaviour was widely
condemned; anonymous letters circulated denouncing his treatment of both women, as well as his financial irresponsibility and
debts. The engagement was broken off, and several of Debussy's friends and supporters disowned him, including Ernest
Chausson, hitherto one of his strongest supporters. When the opera opened, and although the first-night audience was divided
between admirers and sceptics, the work quickly became a success making Debussy a well-known name in France and abroad;
The Times commented that the opera had "provoked more discussion than any work of modern times, excepting, of course,
those of Richard Strauss”. The Apaches, led by composer Maurice Ravel (who attended every one of the 14 performances in the
first run), were loud in their support while the conservative faculty of the Conservatoire tried in vain to stop its students from
seeing the opera.

February 17, 1904

Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly premieres at La Scala in Milan, Italy.
Butterfly is based on the short story "Madame Butterfly" (1898) by John Luther Long, which, in turn, was based on stories told
to Long by his sister Jennie Correll and on the semi-autobiographical 1887 French novel Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti.
Long's version was dramatized by David Belasco as the one-act play Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan, which, after
premiering in New York in 1900, moved to London, where Puccini saw it in the summer of
that year. The original version of the opera, in two acts, was poorly received, despite such
notable singers as soprano Rosina Storchio, tenor Giovanni Zenatello and baritone Giuseppe
De Luca being cast in lead roles but this was due in part to a late completion by Puccini, and
thus inadequate time for rehearsals. Puccini revised the opera, splitting Act II into two (with
the Humming Chorus as a bridge to what became Act III) and making other changes.
Success ensued, starting with the first performance on 28 May 1904 in Brescia. Today,
Madama Butterfly is a staple of the operatic repertoire around the world, ranked 6th by
Operabase; Puccini's La bohème and Tosca rank 3rd and 5th.

Madama Butterfly
Canadian Opera Company Performance Photo:
Giuseppe Campora, Maria Pellegrini (1975)
 Richard Georg Strauss
Portrait by
Max Liebermann (1918)

December 9, 1905
Richard Georg Strauss’s opera Salome premieres at the Dresden Hofoper
in Germany.
Richard Strauss (1864 - 1949) was a leading German composer of the late
Romantic and early modern eras. Salome is an opera in one act, was set to a
German libretto by the composer, and was based on Hedwig Lachmann's German
translation of the French play Salomé by Oscar Wilde. The composer dedicated the
opera to his friend Sir Edgar Speyer, and the final scene is frequently heard as a
concert-piece for dramatic sopranos. Salome is set to the biblical story about
Herodias, who was infuriated by John's condemnation of her marriage, prompting
her daughter Salome to dance and then, when Herod promises her anything, asks
for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. The unwilling Herod is forced by his
oath to Salome to have John beheaded, and then Salome takes the platter with
John's head and gives it to her mother. Salome is a somewhat dissonant modernist opera, with the combination of the Christian
biblical theme, the erotic and the murderous, which so attracted Wilde to the tale, shocking opera audiences from its first
appearance. Some of the original performers were very reluctant to handle the material as written: for example, the first
Salome, Marie Wittich, "refused to perform the 'Dance of the Seven Veils'", thus creating a situation where a dancer stood in
for her. This precedent has been largely followed, one early notable exception being that of Aino Ackté, whom Strauss himself
dubbed "the one and only Salome”. The premiere of Salome was a major success, with the artists taking more than 38 curtain
calls, and, after its initial premiere, within two years, Salome had been performed in 50 other opera houses. Many later
performances of the opera were also successful not only with the general public, but also with Strauss's peers: Maurice Ravel
said that Salome was “stupendous”, and Gustav Mahler describing it as "a live volcano, a subterranean fire”. As with the later
Elektra, Salome features an incredibly taxing lead soprano role. Strauss often remarked that he preferred writing for the female
voice, which is apparent in these two sister operas—the male parts are almost entirely smaller roles, included only to
supplement the soprano's performance. Strauss’s works have also always been popular with audiences in the concert hall and
continue to be so. He has consistently been in the top 10 composers most performed by symphony orchestras in the US and
Canada over the period 2002–10. He is also in the top 5 of 20th Century composers (born after 1860) in terms of the number
of currently available recordings of his works.

Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari

March 6, 1906
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s I quatro rusteghi (The Four Curmudgeons, The Four
Ruffians, in Edward J. Dent's translation School for Fathers) is first
performed at the Hoftheater in Munich, Germany
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari was an Italian composer. I quatro rusteghi is a comic opera
in three acts, music by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari to a libretto by Luigi Sugana (it) and
Giuseppe Pizzolato based on Carlo Goldoni's 18th-century play I rusteghi. The
action takes place in 18th century Venice with four curmudgeonly husbands, who
vainly attempt to keep their women in order. The women decide to teach their
menfolk a lesson by allowing Lunado's daughter Lucieta to see Filipeto, the son of
Maurizio, before their pre-arranged marriage, even though the men have forbidden
this. The opera is written in Venetian dialect, hence "quatro" instead of “quattro".
Wolf-Ferrari’s most successful comic operas, I quattro rusteghi (The Four
Cumudgeons, The Four Ruffians or School for Fathers) and Il segreto di Susanna (The
Secret of Susanne) (1909), were all presented in 18th-century styles orchestrated in
the manner of the 20th century. Today, his work is not performed very widely (with
the exception of several of his overtures and his Jewels of the Madonna intermezzo), although he is generally thought of as
probably the finest writer of Italian comic opera of his time. His works often recall the opera buffa of the 18th century,
although he also wrote more ambitious works in the manner of Pietro Mascagni, which are thought of less well.
November 11, 1906
Dame Ethel Smyth’s opera The Wreckers (in German, Standrecht) premieres at the Neues Theater, Leipzig,
Germany.
Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Her father,
John Hall Smyth, who was a major general in the Royal Artillery, was very much opposed to her making a career in music.
Undeterred, she was determined to become a composer, and studied with a private tutor. She then attended the Leipzig
Conservatory, where she met many composers of the day. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music,
orchestral and concertante works, choral works, and operas. The Wreckers is considered by some critics to be the "most
important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten." The Wreckers is an opera in three acts,
composed to a libretto in French by Henry Brewster. From quotes from Smyth's memoirs about the pull of the subject matter,
she wrote: ‘Ever since those days I had been haunted by impressions of that strange world of more than a hundred years ago;
the plundering of ships lured on to the rocks by the falsification or extinction of the coast lights; the relentless murder of their
crews; and with it all the ingrained religiosity of the Celtic population of that barren promontory.’ Initially, production of The
Wreckers was impossible in England, until conductor Thomas Beecham championed the work: it finally premiered in England
in 1909, with funding support from her friend Mary Dodge. Describing the opera in the New Grove Dictionary, Stephen
Banfield notes "Its greatest strength is in its dramatic strategy, strikingly
prophetic of (Britten's) Peter Grimes in details such as

Dame Ethel Smyth

with her dog, Marco (1891)

the offstage church service set against the foreground confrontation in Act 1.”
However, Amanda Holden makes the point that, musically, Smyth is "no
Wagnerite: although she makes use of his motivic technique, while the texture,
orchestration, and even some of the music's dramatic density show knowledge
of the works of Richard Strauss ... but it also slips too readily into operatic
convention.” Another of her operas, Der Wald, mounted in 1903 was, for
more than a century, the only opera by a woman composer ever produced
at New York's Metropolitan Opera (until Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin,
was scheduled for the 2016–2017 season). It is said, “Smyth’s music was
seldom evaluated as simply the work of a composer among composers, but as
that of a "woman composer,” which worked to keep her on the margins of the
profession, and, coupled with the double standard of sexual aesthetics, also
placed her in a double bind: On the one hand, when she composed powerful,
rhythmically vital music, it was said that her work lacked feminine charm; on
the other, when she produced delicate, melodious compositions, she was
accused of not measuring up to the artistic standards of her male colleagues.”
Smyth was the first woman composer to receive an an Order of the Empire.
Smyth died in Woking, England at age 86.

January 25, 1909

Richard Strauss’s Elektra premieres at the Dresden Hofoper.
Elektra (1909), took Richard Strauss’s use of dissonance even further, in particular with the Elektra chord. Elektra was the first
opera in which Strauss collaborated with the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The two subsequently worked together on
numerous occasions. For his later works with Hofmannsthal, Strauss moderated his harmonic language: he used a more lush,
melodic late-Romantic style based on Wagnerian chromatic harmonies that he had used in his tone poems, with much less
dissonance, and exhibiting immense virtuosity in orchestral writing and tone color. This resulted in operas such as Der
Rosenkavalier (1911) having great public success. Strauss continued to produce operas at regular intervals until 1942. With
Hofmannsthal he created Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), Die ägyptische Helena (1928), and Arabella
(1933). For Intermezzo (1924) Strauss provided his own libretto. Die schweigsame Frau (1935), was composed with Stefan
Zweig as librettist; Friedenstag (1935–36) and Daphne (1937) both had a libretto by Joseph Gregor and Stefan Zweig; and Die
Liebe der Danae (1940) was with Joseph Gregor. Strauss's final opera, Capriccio (1942), had a
libretto by Clemens Krauss, although the genesis for it came from Stefan Zweig and Joseph
Gregor. He was born in 1864 and was a leading German composer of the late
Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der
Rosenkavalier, Elektra, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last
Songs; his tone poems, including Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel's Merry
Pranks, Also sprach Zarathustra, Ein Heldenleben, Symphonia Domestica, and An Alpine Symphony;
and other instrumental works such as Metamorphosen and his Oboe Concerto.

Anna von Milenburg as Clymnestra in the

Vienna Court Opera’s 1909 Production

January 26, 1911

Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier premieres at the Königliches Opernhaus, Dresden.
Der Rosenkavalier (The Knight of the Rose or The Rose-Bearer), Op. 59, is a comic opera in three acts by Richard Strauss to
an original German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It is loosely adapted from the novel Les amours du chevalier de Faublas
by Louvet de Couvrai and Molière’s comedy Monsieur de Pourceaugnac. It was first performed under the direction of Max
Reinhardt, with Ernst von Schuch conducting. Though a comic opera, the work incorporates some weighty themes
(particularly through the Marschallin's character arc), including infidelity, aging, sexual predation, and selflessness (or the lack
of it) in love. Until the premiere the working title was Ochs auf Lerchenau. (The
choice of the name Ochs is not accidental, for in German "Ochs" means "ox,"
which describes the character of the Baron throughout the opera.) The opera has
four main characters: the aristocratic Marschallin; her very young lover, Count
Octavian Rofrano; her brutish cousin Baron Ochs; and Ochs' prospective fiancée,
Sophie von Faninal, the daughter of a rich bourgeois. In the story, at the
Marschallin's suggestion, Octavian acts as Ochs' Rosenkavalier by presenting a
ceremonial silver rose to Sophie. This causes the young people fall in love on the
spot, and soon devise a comic intrigue to extricate Sophie from her engagement.
They accomplish this with help from the Marschallin, who then yields Octavian to
the younger woman. Today, there are many recordings of the opera, and it is
regularly performed.This opera was a favourite of the composer, and its
glorious final trio was performed at a memorial service after his death.

Ernst Edler von Schuch conducting

Der Rosenkavalier (1912)
by Robert Sterl

Hans Erich Pfitzner circa 1910

Portrait by
Wanda Debschitz-Kunowski (1870-1935)

June 12, 1917

Hans Erich Pfitzner’s opera, Palestrina, a fictional account of the
Council of Trent and the composition of Palestrina’s Missa Papae
Marcelli, premieres at the Prinzregententheater, Munich, Germany.
Hans Erich Pfitzner (1869 - 1949) was a German composer and self-
described anti-modernist. His best known work is the post-Romantic opera
Palestrina, loosely based on the life of the sixteenth-century composer Giovanni
Pierluigi da Palestrina, who saves the art of contrapuntal music (polyphony) for
the Church in the sixteenth century, through his composition of the Missa
Papae Marcelli. The wider context is that of the European Reformation and the
role of music in relation to it. The character of Cardinal Borromeo is depicted,
and a General Congress of the Council of Trent is the centrepiece of Act II.
Palestrina was Pfitzner's most successful opera and is still regularly performed in
German-speaking countries, though revivals abroad are rarer. From the mid-1920s, his music increasingly fell in the shadow of
Richard Strauss, and his opera, Das Herz (1932) was unsuccessful. During World War II, Pfitzner remained a peripheral figure
in the musical life of the Third Reich, and his music was performed less frequently than in the late days of the Weimar
Republic.[12] Following long neglect, Pfitzner's music began to reappear in opera houses, concert halls and recording studios
during the 1990s, including a controversial performance of the Covent Garden production in Manhattan's Lincoln Center in
1997.

Charles Wakefied Cadman

March 23, 1918

Charles Wakefield Cadman’s opera Shanewis (The Robin Woman) premieres
at the Metropolitan Opera, New York and is performed for two concurrent
seasons.
Charles Wakefield Cadman (1881 - 1946) was an American composer. For 40
years he worked closely with Nelle Richmond Eberhart, who wrote most of the texts
to his songs, including Four American Indian Songs, as well as the librettos for his five
operas, two of which were based on Indian themes. Shanewis is loosely based on the
life of the Cherokee/Creek mezzo-soprano Tsianina Redfeather Blackstone,
who advised Cadman on the work. Music for another opera, The Land of Misty
Waters or Da O Ma (1912), which was completed, but never produced or published,
was rejected by the Boston Opera Company, the White-Smith Music Publishing
Company, and the Metropolitan Opera. Blackstone also collaborated on the libretto
based on contemporary Native American issues for which she received no official
credit. Shanewis was performed in 1924 in Denver and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles in 1926. Blackstone also provided
much of the semi-autobiographical elements for Shanewis, and, at the Denver performance, she performed the title role in her
operatic debut. Shanewis was very popular in the 1920s, and other Cadman opera compositions are: Da O Ma (The Land of the
Misty Waters (1912);The Garden of Mystery (1925), after Rappaccini's Daughter); The Ghost of Lollypop Bay (1926); Lelawala
(1926); A Witch of Salem (1926); The Belle of Havana (1928); South of Sonora (1932); The Willow Tree, Radio Opera (1932);
Ramala, a revision of The Land of the Misty Waters (unperformed). His opera The Sunset Trail (1922) was part of the touring
repertoire of Vladimir Rosing's American Opera Company.

May 24, 1918

Béla Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle premieres at the Royal Hungarian Opera
House in Budapest.
Béla Bartók (1881 - 1945) was a Hungarian composer. In 1911 Bartók wrote his
only opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, an allegorical treatment of the legendary wife
murderer with a score permeated by characteristics of traditional Hungarian folk songs,
especially in the speechlike rhythms of the text setting. The technique is comparable to
that used by the French composer Claude Debussy in his opera Pelléas et Mélisande
(1902), and Bartók’s opera has other impressionistic qualities as well. The Hungarian
conductor István Kertész believed that we should not relate this to the fairy tale on which
it was based, but that Bluebeard was Bartók himself,
and that it portrays his personal suffering and his
reluctance to reveal the inner secrets of his soul,
which are progressively invaded by Judith. In this way
he can be seen as Everyman, although the composer
himself was an intensely private man. Here the blood
that pervades the story is the symbol of his suffering. A ballet, The Wooden Prince (1914–
16), and a pantomime, The Miraculous Mandarin (1918–19), followed; thereafter he wrote
no more for the stage.
Bluebeard
Woodcut by Jules Hetzel (Paris 1862)
Published for the first time in Les Contes de Perrault
Illustrated by: Gustave Doré
Soldier Reception
 Healey Willan

May 24-8 1928

Healey Willan’s ballet-opera L’Ordre du bon temps (The Order of Good Cheer)
premières at the CPR Festivals in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada.
Healey Willan (1880 - 1968) was a prolific English/Canadian composer.
This opera is based on the theme revolving around sailors travelling to the
New World and the Order of Good Cheer, which was founded by Samuel de
Champlain at Port-Royal, Nova Scotia on November 14, 1606. The Order
was originally chartered under the Royal auspices of the Jean de Biencourt de
Poutrincourt et de Saint-Just and Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons, and the
Order's Charles Wilam Jefferys practices were established by the first Chief
Steward Marc Lescarbot. In 1606, it was recorded that there were less than 70
men at Port-Royal, and Lescarbot states that, in total, about 50 Frenchmen,
joined by Indians, participated in a welcoming home celebration for
Poutrincourt as well as the first gathering of the Order. The guests of the
Order likely sat at other tables, probably getting equally good dinners as the
rest, but without being recognized as official members of the organization. Because of the small size of the
community, it is likely that everyone at the settlement took part in the staging of "Le Théâtre de Neptune en la
Nouvelle-France," written by Lescarbot, and is now believed to be
the first theatrical performance in North America. Other operatic
works by Willan include: Prince Charlie and Flora (1929); The
Ayrshire Ploughman (?) Maureen [lost]; Indian Christmas Play [lost];
Transit through Fire (1942); written for Canadian Radio); and
Deirdre (1946), also written for Canadian Radio and revised for
stage in 1965. During his lifetime, Willan composed more than 800
works. In 1967, he also received an Order of Canada, the year it was
established.
Reception
The Order of Good Cheer
by Charles Willam Jeffery

Alban Berg
Sketch by Emil Stumpp

December 14, 1925

Alban Maria Johannes Berg’s first opera, Wozzeck, with Erich Kleiber
conducting premieres at the Staatsoper (Berlin State Opera) in
Germany.
Alban Berg (1885 – 1935) was an Austrian composer of the Second Viennese
School. Wozzeck was composed between 1914 and 1922 and first performed in
1925. The opera is based on the drama Woyzeck, which was left incomplete by
the German playwright Georg Büchner at his death. The plot depicts the
everyday life of soldiers and the townspeople of a rural German-speaking town,
and after he attended the first production in Vienna of Büchner's play on 5 May
1914, he knew at once that he wanted to base an opera on it. From the
fragments of unordered scenes left by Büchner, he selected fifteen to form a
compact structure of three acts with five scenes each. He adapted the libretto
himself, retaining "the essential character of the play, with its many short scenes,
its abrupt and sometimes brutal language, and its stark, if haunted, realism….”
His compositional style combined Romantic lyricism with twelve-tone technique, and Wozzeck—perhaps the most frequently
performed theatrical work in the atonal idiom—represents Berg’s first attempt to deal with social problems within the
framework of opera. From numerous statements he made, it is evident that he intended this opera to portray far more than the
tragic fate of the protagonist: He wanted, in fact, to make it symbolic of human existence. It was composed between 1914 and
1922 and after 137 rehearsals, the Berlin performance was its first. Musically, its unity stems from large overall symmetries
within which are set traditional forms (such as the passacaglia and sonata), excerpts in popular music style, dense chromaticism
(use of notes not belonging to the composition’s key), extreme atonality, and passing approaches to traditional tonality, all of
which function to create a work of notable psychological and dramatic impact. Although it antedates Schoenberg’s early 12-
tone compositions, the opera also includes a theme using the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Berg died aged 50 in Vienna, on
Christmas Eve 1935, from blood poisoning apparently caused by an insect-sting-induced carbuncle on his back that occurred
in November.

April 25, 1926

Puccini’s final opera, Turandot, left incomplete at the composer’s death and completed by Franco Alfano,
premieres at La Scala under the baton of Toscaninni, who stops the opera at the death of the slave Liù, where
Puccini’s own completed score ends.
Though Puccini's first interest in the subject was based on his reading of Friedrich Schiller's 1801 adaptation of the play, his
work is most nearly based on the earlier text Turandot (1762) by Count Carlo Gozzi. The
original story is based on one of the seven stories in the epic Haft Peykar (The Seven
Beauties), a work of 12th-century Persian poet Nizami where Nizami aligned the seven
stories with the seven days of the week, the seven colors and the seven corresponding
planets. This particular opera tells the story of Tuesday, as told to King Bahram by his
companion of the red dome, associated with Mars. In the very first line of this story, the
protagonist is identified as a Russian princess. The name of the opera is based on Turan-
Dokht (daughter of Turan), which is a common name used in Persian poetry for Central
Asian princesses.This opera's version of the story is set in China and involves Prince Calaf,
who falls in love with the cold Princess Turandot and, to obtain permission to marry her, a
suitor has to solve three riddles; any wrong answer results in death.

The cover of the score printed by Ricordi

Original German Poster
from Berlin (1928)

Bertolt Brecht
Photographer: Jörg Kolbe

August 31, 1928

Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera)
opens to great success at Berlin’s Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Germany.
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (1898 – 1956), known professionally as Bertolt
Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Die Dreigroschenoper is a
"play with music" by Bertolt Brecht, and is adapted from a translation by Elisabeth
Hauptmann of John Gay's 18th-century English ballad opera, The Beggar's Opera, and
four ballads by François Villon, with music by Kurt Weill. Although there is debate as to
how much, if any, Hauptmann might have
contributed to the text, Brecht is usually listed as
sole author. This work offers a Socialist critique
of the capitalist world. The title Die
Dreigroschenoper was determined only a week
before the opening; it had been previously
announced as simply The Beggar's Opera (in
English), with the subtitle "Die Luden-Oper" ("The Pimp's Opera”). Writing in 1929,
Weill made the political and artistic intents of the work clear: With the
Dreigroschenoper, he said, “we reach a public which either did not know us at all or
thought us incapable of captivating listeners [...] Opera was founded as an aristocratic
form of art [...] If the framework of opera is unable to withstand the impact of the
age, then this framework must be destroyed…. In the Dreigroschenoper,
reconstruction was possible insofar as here we had a chance of starting from scratch.”
Songs from The Threepenny Opera have been widely covered and become standards,
most notably "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" ("The Ballad of Mack the Knife")
and "Seeräuberjenny" ("Pirate Jenny”). Despite an initially poor reception, Die Dreigroschenoper became a great success,
playing 400 times in the next two years following its premiere. The performance was a springboard for one of the best known
interpreters of Brecht and Weill's work, Lotte Lenya, who was married to Weill. Ironically, the production became a great
favourite of Berlin's "smart set" – Count Harry Kessler recorded in his diary meeting at the performance an ambassador and a
director of the Dresdner Bank (and their wives), and concluded "One simply has to have been there.” Critics did not fail to
notice that Brecht had included the four Villon songs translated by Ammer. Brecht responded by saying that he had "a
fundamental laxity in questions of literary property.” By 1933, when Weill and Brecht were forced to leave Germany by the
Nazi seizure of power, the play had been translated into 18 languages and been performed more than 10,000 times on
European stages. It also became one of the longest-running musical shows in Broadway history.

Igor Stravinsky

February 23, 1928

Igor Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex has its first performance in an
unstaged production at the Théatre Sarah Bernhardt, Paris, France.
Oedipus rex is an "Opera-oratorio after Sophocles" by Igor Stravinsky, scored for orchestra,
speaker, soloists, and male chorus. The libretto, based on Sophocles's tragedy, was written by
Jean Cocteau in French and then translated by Abbé Jean Daniélou into Latin; the narration,
however, is performed in the language of the audience. Prior to the start of the tale regarding
Oedipus Rex, Oedipus has become the king of Thebes while unwittingly fulfilling a prophecy
that he would kill his father, Laius (the previous king), and marry his mother, Jocasta (whom
Oedipus took as his queen after solving the riddle of the
Sphinx). The action of Sophocles' play concerns
Oedipus' search for the murderer of Laius in order to
end a plague ravaging Thebes, unaware that the killer he is looking for is none other than
himself. At the end of the play, after the truth finally comes to light, Jocasta hangs herself
while Oedipus, horrified at his patricide and incest, proceeds to gouge out his own eyes
in despair. Oedipus rex was written towards the beginning of Stravinsky's neoclassical
period, and is considered one of the finest works from this phase of the composer's
career. He had considered setting the work in Ancient Greek, but decided ultimately on
Latin: in his words "a medium not dead but turned to stone.”

Oedipus after he solves the riddle of the Sphinx

Painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
The Walters Art Museum

Virgil Thomson

February 8, 1934
Virgil Thomson’s ‘opera to be sung,’ Four Saints in Three Acts, premieres in
Hartford, CT.
Virgil Thomson (1896 – 1989) was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental
in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music. He has been described as a
modernist, a neoromantic, a neoclassicist, and a composer of "an Olympian blend of
humanity and detachment" whose "expressive voice was always carefully muted" until his late
opera Lord Byron, which, in contrast to all his previous work, exhibited an emotional content
that rises to "moments of real passion”. In 1927 he journeyed to Spain from France to
collaborate with Gertrude Stein on their opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, which they
completed in 1928. The opera premiered with an all-black cast in an extraordinary visual
production with choreography by Frederick Ashton. Four Saints in Three Acts was written in
1927-8, contains about 20 saints, and is in at least four acts. It was ground breaking for form,
content, and its all-black cast, with singers directed by Eva Jessye, a prominent black choral
director, and supported by her choir. Thomson suggested the topic, and the libretto, as delivered, can be read in Stein's
collected works. The opera features two 16th-century Spanish saints—the former mercenary Ignatius of Loyola and the mystic
Teresa of Avila—as well as their colleagues, real and imagined: St. Plan, St. Settlement, St. Plot, St. Chavez, etc. Thomson
decided to divide St. Teresa's role between two singers, "St. Teresa I" and "St. Teresa II", and added the master and created
scores that were used for The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River (films by Pare Lorentz), and Louisiana Story (film by
Robert Flaherty) during 1936 and 1937. Thomson was the first composer to write the portrait in the subject’s presence, as a
painter would do, and, indeed, as Gertrude Stein had done to produce her literary portraits. Returning to New York in 1940,
he settled into his final home, the Chelsea Hotel, and accepted a job as chief music critic for the New York Herald Tribune, a
position he held until 1951. His second opera with Stein, The Mother of Us All, based on the life of suffragette Susan B.
Anthony, premiered in 1947. Much later, the critic Andrew Porter would write in the pages of the New Yorker that he
considered The Mother of Us All one of the greatest American operas. After his resignation from the Tribune, Thomson devoted
himself to a third opera, Lord Byron, and to writing his autobiography in 1966 and his book American Music Since 1910 in
1971.

George Jacob Gershwin (1937)

Photograph by: Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964)

September 30, 1935

George Jacob Gershwin’s magnum opus, his folk opera, Porgy and Bess, premieres in
Boston followed next by a premiere in New York City on October 10, 1935.
George Jacob Gershwin (1898 – 1937) was an American composer and pianist. His
compositions spanned both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are
widely known. Gershwin’s most ambitious composition was Porgy and Bess, which is an
English-language opera with a libretto written by author DuBose Heyward and lyricist Ira
Gershwin. The libretto of Porgy and Bess tells the story of Porgy, a disabled black street-beggar
living in the slums of Charleston. It deals with his attempts to rescue Bess from the clutches of
Crown, her violent and possessive lover, and Sportin' Life, her drug dealer. The opera plot generally follows the stage play. It
was adapted from Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward's play Porgy, itself an adaptation of DuBose Heyward's 1925 novel
of the same name. It featured a cast of classically trained African-American singers—a daring artistic choice at the time. After
suffering from an initially unpopular public reception due in part to its racially charged theme, a 1976 Houston Grand Opera
production gained it new popularity, and it is now one of the best-known and most frequently performed operas. Gershwin
had read Porgy in 1926 and proposed to Heyward to collaborate on an operatic version. In 1934, Gershwin and Heyward
began work on the project by visiting the author's native Charleston, South Carolina. In a 1935 New York Times article,
Gershwin explained why he called Porgy and Bess a folk opera: “Its people naturally would sing folk music. When I first began
work in the music, I decided against the use of original folk material because I wanted the music to be all of one piece.
Therefore I wrote my own spirituals and folksongs. But they are still folk music – and therefore, and being in operatic form,
Porgy and Bess becomes a folk opera.” From the very beginning, this composition was considered another American classic by
the composer of 'Rhapsody in Blue'— even if critics couldn't quite figure out how to evaluate it. Was it opera, or was it simply
an ambitious Broadway musical? 'It crossed the barriers, per se,’ theater historian Robert Kimball said. 'It wasn't a musical
work per se, and it wasn't a drama per se – it elicited response from both music and drama critics. But the work has sort of
always been outside category.” After the commercial failure of Porgy and Bess, Gershwin moved to Hollywood, California. He
died from a malignant brain tumor July 11, 1937, when he was only 38 years old. In the years following his death, Porgy and
Bess was adapted for smaller-scale performances, and it was adapted as a film in 1959. Some of the songs in the opera, such as
"Summertime" became popular, became frequently recorded songs, and live on in history.

Alban Maria Johannes Berg

June 2, 1937
Alban Maria Johannes Berg’s opera, Lulu, premieres at the Stadttheater in Zürich,
Switzerland.
His three-act opera Lulu was composed from 1929 to 1935 and premièred incomplete in 1937.
The German-language libretto was adapted by Berg himself from Frank Wedekind's two Lulu
plays, Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box, 1904). Berg died
before completing the third and final act, and, in the following decades, the opera was typically
performed incomplete. Many people found Lulu very shocking because the story is very
decadent. There is a lot of blood, murder, sex and violence in it. Also: Berg’s music was quite
difficult to understand. He uses twelve tone music, which is not in any particular key, although
he uses it to make a style of music which is often very Romantic and expressive.
 Gian Carlo Menotti

March 1, 1950
Gian Carlo Menotti’s first full-length opera, The Consul, has its first
performance at the Schubert Theatre in Philadelphia. A second premiere
follows two weeks later at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York City,
USA.
Gian Carlo Menotti (1911 – 2007) was an Italian-American composer and librettist.
Although he often referred to himself as an American composer, he kept his Italian
citizenship. The Consul is an opera in three acts, with music and libretto by Menotti. Its
plot is easily understood by many: John Sorel is a freedom fighter (or “hooligan” if you
own shares in a State enterprise) who must flee his unnamed country in that he is
wanted by the secret police. Before he makes a run for the border he tells his wife Magda
that she must go to the consulate of an also unnamed country and speak to The Consul,
who will not turn a deaf ear to her pleas. The secret police arrive and make less than
delicate inquiries of Magda, John’s mother (or is it her mother? the libretto has it both
ways) and much is made of the sickly nature of the Sorel infant (foreshadowing!). So
Magda heads off to the consulate where, like the beginning of the movie “Casablanca,”
she waits. And waits. And waits. “I must see the consul.” “You cannot see the consul, the consul is busy.” Needless to say,
the child dies, Magda is driven to suicide. The mother disappears. John is captured by the secret police, and all the while the
secretary stamps endless papers, the “Thunk!” of the stamp on the document doing a creditable imitation of the sound of the
guillotine at the end of Andrea Chenier...or The Dialogues of the Carmelites. Menotti won both a Pulitzer Prize and the New
York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Musical Play of the Year (the latter in 1954) for The Consul (1950) and for The Saint of
Bleecker Street (1955). He wrote the classic Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, along with over two dozen
other operas intended to appeal to popular taste. He founded the noted Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of the Two Worlds)
in Spoleto in 1958 and its American counterpart, Spoleto Festival USA, in 1977. In 1986, he commenced a Melbourne
Spoleto Festival in Australia, but he withdrew after three years. It was at Curtis in the US that Menotti wrote his first mature
opera, Amelia Goes to the Ball (Amelia al Ballo), to his own Italian text. The Island God (which he suppressed, though its libretto
was printed by the Metropolitan Opera and can be found in many libraries) and The Last Savage were the only other operas he
wrote in Italian, the rest being in English. His most successful works were composed in the 1940s and 1950s. He wrote the
libretti for two of Samuel Barber's operas, Vanessa and A Hand of Bridge, as well as revising the libretto for Antony and
Cleopatra. Amelia al Ballo is the only one of Menotti's operas still to be published in its original or perhaps "complementary"
Italian libretto (alongside the English) (see Ricordi editions 1937, 1976 and recent): it is an example of the traditional
Italianate style (with a nod to, but not an imitation of, Puccini and notably Mascagni), who at the time (1936) had had his last
opera (Nerone) performed. Its success prompted NBC to commission an opera specifically for radio, The Old Maid and the
Thief, one of the first such works. Following this, he wrote a ballet, Sebastian (1944), and a piano concerto (1945) before
returning to opera with The Medium and The Telephone, or L'Amour à trois. He died on February 1, 2007 at the age of 95 in a
hospital in Monte Carlo, Monaco, where he had a home. He was buried in East Lothian, Scotland.

Benjamin Britten (mid 1960s)

By Hans Wild

June 7, 1945
Edward Benjamin Britten’s opera, Peter Grimes, conducted by Reginald
Goodall premieres at London’s Sadler’s Wells in England.
Baron Britten of Aldeburgh (1913 – 1976) was an English composer,
conductor and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British classical
music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and
chamber pieces. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes (1945),
the War Requiem (1962) and the orchestral showpiece The Young Person's Guide
to the Orchestra (1945). Peter Grimes is an opera with a libretto adapted by
Montagu Slater from the narrative poem, "Peter Grimes," in George Crabbe's
book The Borough. The "borough" of the opera is a fictional village which shares
some similarities with Crabbe's, and later Britten's, own home of Aldeburgh, a
town on England's east coast. The work has been called "a powerful allegory of
homosexual oppression", and one of "the true operatic masterpieces of the 20th
century”. but the composer's own contemporary (1948) summation of the
work was simpler: (Grimes) is a subject very close to my heart—the struggle of the individual against the masses. The more
vicious the society, the more vicious the individual. The opera was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundations and
was "dedicated to the memory of Natalie Koussevitzky", wife of the Russian-born American conductor Serge Koussevitzky.
Britten’s most frequent and important muse was his personal and professional partner, the tenor Peter Pears; others included
Kathleen Ferrier, Jennifer Vyvyan, Janet Baker, Dennis Brain, Julian Bream, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Mstislav
Rostropovich. Though, as the writing of the libretto progressed, certain versions showed Grimes' relations with his apprentice
to be bordering on paederastic, Pears persuaded Slater to cut the questionable stanzas from the final version. Grimes was
Britten’s first critical and popular success and is still widely performed, both in the UK and internationally today. Other works
are: Billy Budd (1951), Gloriana (1953), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960) and Death in Venice (1973). Of the remaining
operas, The Rape of Lucretia (1946), Albert Herring (1947), The Little Sweep (1949) and The Turn of the Screw (1954) were
written for small opera companies. Noye's Fludde (1958), Curlew River (1964), The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966) and The
Prodigal Son (1968) were for church performance, and had their premieres at St Bartholomew's Church, Orford. The secular
The Golden Vanity was intended to be performed in schools, and Owen Wingrave, written for television, was first presented live
by the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in 1973, two years after its broadcast premiere.

April 20, 1946

Healey Willan’s opera Deirdre is aired on CBC, Canada.
Deirdre is an opera in three acts, for nine soloists, chorus, and full orchestra. The music, was composed 1943-5, by Healey
Willan, with the text by John Coulter. The first full-length opera commissioned by the CBC, and it was premiered on radio as
Deirdre of the Sorrows, conducted by Ettore Mazzoleni and with Frances James as Deirdre. Drawn from an Irish saga of the Red
Branch Knights of Ulster in the druidic era, the story tells of the doom of the ruthless Conochar, King of Ullah (Ulster), and
the tragic death of Naisi and his brothers, the Princes of Ullah, as a result of the rivalry between Conochar and Naisi for the
love of the foundling Deirdre. Since much of the original text was devoted to the description of action required by radio,
revisions for stage trimmed the material extensively. Willan wrote in his customary late 19th-century harmonic idiom, creating
a rich polyphonic texture that is effective on radio though problematic in the theatre, where it can overwhelm the singers.
Dramatically and musically Deirdre is a Wagnerian opera, yet with a character distinctively its own. The libretto (Toronto
1944, revised 1965) and a vocal score (Berandol 1972) have been published, and this opera was produced by the Canadian
Opera Company (COC), with Zarou as Deirdre. A preliminary version, Conochar's Queen, had been written by Willan as
incidental music for a radio play by Coulter in 1941. A shortened version of the opera was performed on CBC Radio by the
CBC Opera Company in 1951, conducted by Geoffrey Waddington and with James as Deirdre. A revision for stage was given
2 Apr 1965 by the Royal Conservatory Opera School (University of Toronto Opera Division) at the MacMillan Theatre with
Jeannette Zarou and Lillian Sukis alternating in the title role.

September 11, 1951

Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress premieres at Teatro La Fenice, Venice.
The Rake's Progress is an English-language opera in three acts and an epilogue by Igor Stravinsky. The libretto, written by W. H.
Auden and Chester Kallman, is based loosely on the eight paintings and engravings A Rake's Progress (1733–1735) of William
Hogarth, which Stravinsky had seen on 2 May 1947, in a Chicago exhibition. The story concerns the decline and fall of one
Tom Rakewell, who deserts Anne Trulove for the delights of London in the company of Nick Shadow, who turns out to be the
Devil. After several misadventures, all initiated by the devious Shadow, Tom ends up in Bedlam, a hospital for the 'insane' at
that time situated in the City of London. The moral of the tale is: "For idle hearts and hands and minds the Devil finds work
to do."

In this first painting of eight by William Hogarth ,

Tom has come into his fortune on the death of his miserly father.
While the servants mourn, he is measured for new clothes.
Although he has had a common-law marriage with her,
he now rejects the hand of his pregnant fiancée, Sarah Young,
whom he had promised to marry (she holds his ring and
her mother holds his love letters).
He will pay her off, but it is clear that she still loves him.
June 8, 1953
Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana, an opera about Elizabeth I of England, commissioned to celebrate the coronation
of Elizabeth II, has its premiere at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
Gloriana, Op. 53, is an opera in three acts to an English libretto by William Plomer, based on Lytton Strachey's 1928 Elizabeth
and Essex: A Tragic History. The first performance was presented during the celebrations of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth
II, and ‘Gloriana’ was the name given by the 16th-century poet Edmund Spenser to his character representing Queen Elizabeth
I in his poem The Faerie Queene. It became a popular name following Queen Elizabeth I’s birth, and it is also recorded that the
troops at Tilbury hailed her with cries of "Gloriana, Gloriana, Gloriana", after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
Gloriana depicts the relationship between Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex, and, at its first premiere, several in the
audience at its gala opening were disappointed by the opera: a representation of the first Elizabeth as being a sympathetic, but
flawed, character motivated largely by vanity and desire. The premiere was one of Britten's few critical failures, and the opera
was not included in the series of complete Decca recordings conducted by the
composer. However, a symphonic suite extracted from the opera by the composer
(Opus 53a), which includes the Courtly Dances, is often performed as a concert
piece. After the 1976 Aldeburgh Festival which he attended, he and long-time friend
Peter Pears travelled to Norway, where Britten began writing Praise We Great Men, for
voices and orchestra based on a poem by Edith Sitwell. In November, when he realised
that he could no longer compose, he gave him what he had written for this
composition to Russian composer Rostropovich. Britten died of congestive heart
failure on 4 December 1976. His funeral service was held at Aldeburgh Parish Church
three days later, and he was buried in its churchyard, with a gravestone carved by
Reynolds Stone.The authorities at Westminster Abbey had offered burial there, but
Britten had made it clear that he wished his grave to be side by side, in due course,
with Pears’. A memorial service was held at the Abbey on 10 March 1977, however,
with the congregation headed by Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.

Painting: Elizabeth I of England (c 1575)

called: “The Darnley Portrait,”
named after a previous owner.

Serge Prokofieff

November 25, 1954

Sergei Prokofiev’s opera, The Fiery Angel, is presented at the Théâtre des
Champs-Élysees in Paris, France and at the Venice Festival, Venice, Italy in
1955.
Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev (April 1891 – 1953) was a Russian Soviet composer,
pianist and conductor. As the creator of acknowledged masterpieces across numerous
musical genres, he is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. The
Fiery Angel was based on Valery Bryusov’s novel of the same name. The novel was
inspired by Bryusov's own experiences with one Nina Petrovskaya, and was considered
one of the beginnings of the Russian Symbolist movement known as Vesy, or “The
Scales.” Originally, the opera was in three acts and eleven scenes, but was eventually
reorganized into five acts and seven scenes. The novel was first serialized in the Russian
literary monthly Vesy in 1907–08, and then published in a book form (in two volumes)
in 1908. Set in sixteenth-century Germany, the story depicts a love triangle between
Renata, a passionate young woman, Ruprecht, a knight and Madiel, the fiery Angel. The novel tells the story of Ruprecht's
attempts to win the love of Renata whose spiritual integrity is seriously undermined by her participation in occult practices.
This love triangle is now recognised to be that which existed between the author, Bryusov, the symbolist novelist Andrei Bely
and their shared lover, the nineteen-year-old Nina Petrovskaya. The novel is a meticulous account of sixteenth-century
Germany, notably Cologne and the world of the occult. Characters such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Faust appear
alongside a description of a Black Mass. The novel was the prime source of inspiration for the work and was also the basis for
the libretto of Prokofiev’s opera, which Prokofiev himself wrote with the help of Demchinsky. His other works include such
widely-heard-of-works as the The Love for Three Oranges, the suite Lieutenant Kijé, the ballet Romeo and Juliet—from which
"Dance of the Knights" is taken—and Peter and the Wolf. Of the established forms and genres in which he worked, he created –
excluding juvenilia – seven completed operas, seven symphonies, eight ballets, five piano concertos, two violin concertos, a
cello concerto, a symphony-concerto for cello and orchestra, and nine completed piano sonatas. The Nazi invasion of the
USSR spurred him to compose his most ambitious work, an operatic version of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. In 1948,
Prokofiev was attacked for producing "anti-democratic formalism,” nevertheless, he enjoyed personal and artistic support from
a new generation of Russian performers, notably Sviatoslav Richter and Mstislav Rostropovich: he wrote his ninth piano sonata
for the former and his Symphony-Concerto for the latter. Over time, it has been suggested that The Fiery Angel may have
been one of Prokofiev’s largest challenges, since the writing, production, and location were all factor’s in the piece’s
progress. He died at the age of 61 of what may have been a cerebral hemorrhage.

Michael Tippett

May 29, 1962

Michael Tippett’s opera King Priam premieres at the Coventry Festival
celebrating the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in England.
Sir Michael Kemp Tippett (1905 – 1998) was an English composer who rose to
prominence during and immediately after the Second World War. In his lifetime, he was
sometimes ranked with his contemporary Benjamin Britten as one of the leading British
composers of the 20th century. King Priam is based on Homer's Iliad, except for the birth
and childhood of Paris, which are taken from the Fabulae of Hyginus, and Tippett also wrote
the libretto. The opera was composed for the arts festival held in conjunction with the
reconsecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, for which Benjamin Britten also wrote his
War Requiem, which was first performed in the Cathedral the day after the premiere of King
Priam. This opera next premiered in Germany at the Badisches Staatstheater in 1963, at the
1985 Athens Festival, in France at the Opéra de Nancy et de Lorraine in 1988, in Italy at Batignano in 1990, and in the
United States San Francisco Opera Center Showcase in 1994. In 2014, the work was again revived by English Touring Opera,
with a reduced orchestration by Iain Farrington, the first performance of this version being given at the Linbury Studio Theatre
at the Royal Opera House on 13 February 2014. Among Tippett’s best-known works are
the oratorio A Child of Our Time, the orchestral Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli,
and the opera The Midsummer Marriage. In 1933, Tippett also arranged the staging of a
shortened version of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, with locals playing the main parts, and
the following year he provided the music for a new folk opera, Robin Hood, with words by
Ayerst, himself and Ruth Pennyman. Both works proved hugely popular with their
audiences, and, although most of the music has disappeared, some of Robin Hood was
revived by Tippett for use in his Birthday Suite for Prince Charles of 1948 .

Priam Killed by Neaptolemus

detail of an Attic-figure amphora, ca. (520-510 BC)

Harry Somers

September 23, 1967

Harry Stewart Somers’ best known operatic work Louis Riel premieres at the
O’Keefe Centre in Toronto, Canada.
Harry Somers (1925 – 1999) was one of the most influential and innovative
contemporary Canadian composers of the past century. Louis Riel is an opera in three
acts, and was written for the 1967 Canadian centennial. It concerns the controversial Métis
leader Louis Riel, who was executed in 1885, and is one of Somers' biggest pieces. It is also
arguably one of Canada’s most famous operas. Somers set the music to an English and French
libretto by Mavor Moore and Jacques Languirand. It was commissioned by the Floyd S.
Chalmers Foundation and produced by the Canadian Opera Company with financial
assistance from the Canadian Centennial Commission, the Canada Council, and the Province
of Ontario Council for the Arts (Ontario Arts Council). His other operatic and vocal works
include: The Fool, a one-act chamber opera (1953); Twelve Miniatures (1964); Evocations (1966); Crucifixion (1966);
Voiceplay (1971); and Kyrie (1971). He was also a founding member of the Canadian League of Composers (CLC), and, as
such, was involved in the formation of other Canadian music organizations, including the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Canadian Music Centre. By the time he reached the 1990s, Somers had indisputably cemented his reputation as one of the
greatest composers Canada had ever produced. As such, he was permitted to be more selective of who he chose to compose for
in his old age and showed preference for his favourite artists.

Raymond Pannell

1976
Raymond Pannell’s The Luck of Ginger Coffee is performed.
Raymond Pannell (1935 - 2016) was a Canadian composer, pianist, writer who
began playing the piano at age five. His first opera ‘Aria Da Capo’ was performed by the
Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto followed by The Luck of Ginger Coffey, which was
commissioned and produced by the Canadian Opera Company for Canada's centennial.
This opera, which also became a movie, reflects the influence of US composers such as
Bernstein, Copland, and Harris, and Pannell stated that, 'It came from a different musical
culture, from the States, where my influences were and the piece reflected that, and that the
deliberate juxtaposition in this work of jazz, serial and popular song elements brings
together a number of sound environments to musically represent the different kinds of
modalities in which people thought'. This juxtaposition of styles has been viewed by critics
as ‘eclecticism’. The Luck of Ginger Coffey is Pannell's last traditional opera, and its plot sees
James "Ginger" Coffey (Robert Shaw), an unemployed Irishman, whose nickname stems from his red hair and mustache,
moving his family to Montreal in hopes of finding work. He has trouble getting a job, until a friend helps him land a lowly
position at a newspaper. Because of his poor prospects, his wife (Mary Ure) leaves him, taking their daughter with her. Ginger
works at becoming a reporter to win back his wife and impress his daughter, but booze and brawling distract him from his
goal. But, in the end, she recognizes his love for her, and they reunite.

Charles Wilson

1972
Charles Mills Wilson’s operas Héloise and Abelard is commissioned by the Canadian
Opera Company to mark its 25 anniverssary.
Charles Mills Wilson (1931- ) was born in Toronto, Canada. He began studying
piano at age six with Wilfred Powell and later studied organ with Charles Peaker.
He studied composition with Godfrey Ridout at the University of Toronto,
earning a Bachelor of Music in 1952
and a Doctor of Music degree in
Composition in 1956. As a
composer, Wilson is known for
employing a range of musical idioms
while maintaining a strong
emotional lyricism and sense of tonality. His early compositions were
primarily instrumental chamber music, while his latter output has been
more focused on vocal music including operas, choral works, and art
songs. He has written one oratorio, The Angels of the Earth (1966) and
several operas: Psycho Red (1977) a full-length opera with libretto by
Eugene Benson commissioned for the 1978 Guelph Spring Festival;
The Selfish Giant (1973), based on one of five stories in Oscar Wild’s
collection, The Happy Prince and Other Tales.
Plate illustration: The Selfish Giant (1888)
By Walter Crane (1845-1915)
 Philip Glass, Florence (1963)
Author: Pasquale Salano

July 25, 1976

Philip Glass’s first opera, Einstein on the Beach, premières at the Avignon
Festival, in France.
Philip Glass (1937 - ) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A. He developed
his appreciation of music from his father, discovering later his father's side of the
family had many musicians. His cousin Cevia was a classical pianist, while others had
been in vaudeville. He also learned his family was related to Al Jolson. Philp Glass’s
Einstein on the Beach is an opera in four acts (framed and connected by five "knee
plays" or intermezzos), composed by Philip Glass and directed by theatrical producer
Robert Wilson. The work became the first in Glass's thematically-related Portrait
Trilogy, along with Satyagraha (1979), and Akhnaten (1983). These three operas were
described by Glass as ‘portraits of people whose personal vision transformed the
thinking of their times through the power of ideas rather than by military force,’ and
the opera eschews traditional narrative in favor of a formalist approach based on
structured spaces laid out by Wilson in a series of storyboards. The music was written
"in the spring, summer and fall of 1975". Glass recounts the collaborative process: "I
put [Wilson’s notebook of sketches] on the piano and composed each section like a
portrait of the drawing before me. The score was begun in the spring of 1975 and
completed by the following November, and those drawings were before me all the
time.” The premiere took place on July 25, 1976, at the Avignon Festival in France. The opera contains writings by Christopher
Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs. It is Glass's first and longest opera score, taking approximately five hours in
full performance without intermission; given the length, the audience is permitted to enter and leave as desired. In the late
1980s and early 1990s, Glass's projects also included two highly prestigious opera commissions based on the life of explorers:
The Voyage (1992), with a libretto by David Henry Hwang, was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera for the 500th
anniversary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus; and White Raven (1991), about Vasco da Gama, a
collaboration with Robert Wilson and composed for the closure of the 1998 World Fair in Lisbon. Especially in The Voyage, the
composer "explore[d] new territory", with its "newly arching lyricism", "Sibelian starkness and sweep", and "dark, brooding
tone (...) a reflection of its increasingly chromatic (and dissonant) palette", as one commentator put it: Glass's prolific output
in the 1990s continued to include operas with an opera triptych (1991–1996), which the composer described as an "homage"
to writer and film director Jean Cocteau, based on his prose and cinematic work: Orphée (1949), La Belle et la Bête (1946), and
the novel Les Enfants Terribles (1929, later made into a film by Cocteau and Jean-Pierre Melville, 1950). In the same way the
triptych is also a musical homage to the work of the group of French composers associated with Cocteau, Les Six (and
especially to Glass's teacher Darius Milhaud), as well as to various 18th-century composers such as Gluck and Bach whose
music featured as an essential part of the films by Cocteau. The inspiration of the first part of the trilogy, Orphée (composed in
1991, and premiered in 1993 at the American Repertory Theatre) can be conceptually and musically traced to Gluck's opera
Orfeo ed Euridice (Orphée et Euridyce, 1762/1774), which had a prominent part in Cocteau's 1949 film Orphee. One theme of
the opera, the death of Eurydice, has some similarity to the composer's personal life: the opera was composed after the
unexpected death in 1991 of Glass's wife, artist Candy Jernigan: "(...) One can only suspect that Orpheus' grief must have
resembled the composer's own", K. Robert Schwartz suggests. The opera's "transparency of texture, a subtlety of instrumental
color, (...) a newly expressive and unfettered vocal writing" was praised, and The Guardian's critic remarked "Glass has a real
affinity for the French text and sets the words eloquently, underpinning them with delicately patterned instrumental textures”.
For the second opera, La Belle et la Bête (1994, scored for either the Philip Glass Ensemble or a more conventional chamber
orchestra), Glass replaced the soundtrack (including Georges Auric's film music) of Cocteau's film, wrote "a new fully operatic
score and synchronize[d] it with the film". The final part of the triptych returned again to a more traditional setting with the
"Dance Opera" Les Enfants Terribles (1996), scored for voices, three pianos and dancers, with choreography by Susan Marshall.
The characters are depicted by both singers and dancers. The scoring of the opera evokes Bach's Concerto for Four
Harpsichords, but in another way also "the snow, which falls relentlessly throughout the opera (...) bearing witness to the
unfolding events. Here time stands still. There is only music, and the movement of children through space" (Glass). Besides
writing for the concert hall, Glass continued his ongoing operatic series with adaptions from literary texts: The Marriages of
Zones 3, 4 and 5 ([1997] story-libretto by Doris Lessing), In the Penal Colony (2000), after the story by Franz Kafka), and the
chamber opera The Sound of a Voice (2003), with David Henry Hwang), which features the Pipa, performed by Wu Man at its
premiere. Glass also collaborated again with the co-author of Einstein on the Beach, Robert Wilson, on Monsters of Grace
(1998), and created a biographic opera on the life of astronomer Galileo Galilei (2001).
September 6, 1977
Thea Musgrave’s opera Mary Queen of Scots premieres at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Thea Musgrave (1928 - ) is a Scottish composer of opera and classical music. She has lived in the United States since 1972.
In the 1960s, she continued to compose chamber works and vocal pieces, but also turned to larger works, culminating in the
three-act opera The Decision (first performed 1967), a drama on the ordeal of a trapped miner told in abstract instrumental
terms. She has written more than a dozen operas and other music theatre works, many taking a historical figure as their
central character, among them Mary Queen of Scots (1977), Harriet Tubman (Harriet, the Woman called Moses, (1984)), Simón
Bolívar (1993) (premiere 1995 at the Virginia Opera), and Pontalba (2003). In 2008, her 80th birthday was marked by
premieres of Points of View, Green, Cantilena, Taking Turns and other
performances. In 2018, coinciding with Musgrave's 90th birthday, her
compositions were performed at the Edinburgh International Festival and
the BBC Proms. Her opera, Mary, Queen of Scots, is an opera in three
acts, and Musgrave also wrote the libretto based on Amalia Elguera's play
Moray. It focuses on events in the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, from her
return to Scotland in 1561 until 1568 when she was forced to flee to
England. The opera was first performed by the Scottish Opera, and
subsequently has had multiple performances in the UK, US, and
Germany. In response to an question once asked by Tom Service for the
BBC about Musgrave's view of being a ‘woman composer’ she replied,
"Yes I am a woman, and I am a composer. But rarely at the same time”. To
a later question, she admitted that pursuing music can be a difficult career,
and then, when asked by the BBC to offer advice to young composers, she
replied, "Don’t do it, unless you have to. And if you do, enjoy every
minute of it."

Portrait
Mary Queen of Scots

March 6, 1985

Judith Weir’s opera The Black Spider premieres in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, UK.
Judith Weir (1954 - ) was born in Cambridge, England, to Scottish parents. Her first stage work, The Black Spider, was
a three-act opera, loosely based on the 1842 novella Die schwarze Spinne by Jeremias Gotthelf, with Weir providing the libretto
herself. The opera exploits the collision of two plots and switches back and forth between a Polish legend of the Middle Ages
and a contemporary newspaper cutting about a curse on the opening of a tomb in Cracow Cathedral: Villagers oppressed by a
wicked landlord are given the task of carrying an entire beech forest to the mountain-top where he lives. A strange green man
appears and says he will undertake the task provided the village girl, Christina, weds him. Christina is planning to marry Carl,
but believes that she can the fix the matter later. The little green man fulfills his pledge as agreed, but Christina naturally breaks
her word, wedding Carl. At the ceremony a spider crawls out from her hand, and this then proceeds to cause a plague in the
village. Finally the disaster is stopped when Christina catches the spider and buries it in a grave outside the church. In the
modern story, excavations are taking place at the tomb of Casimir IV, in Wawel Cathedral, Cracow. More and more
archaeologists are affected by a deadly virus with no clue to why it is happening. The opera lasts around one hour and a quarter,
and Weir, herself, described the opera's tone as “somewhere between a video
nasty and an Ealing comedy”. In 2014, Weir became the first woman master
of Queen’s music, a position that has existed since 1625.
 Sir Harrison Birtwistle
By MITO SettembreMusica

May 21, 1986

Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s Mask of Orpheus premieres at the London Coliseum,
UK.
Harrison Birtwistle (1934 - ) is a British composer. He was born in Accrington, a mill
town in Lancashire some 20 miles north of Manchester. His interest in music was
encouraged by his mother, who bought him a clarinet when he was seven, and arranged
for him to have lessons with the local bandmaster. He became proficient enough to play
in the local military-style band, and also played in the orchestra that accompanied
Gilbert and Sullivan productions and the local choral society's performances of Messiah.
Birtwistle composed from around this time, later describing his early pieces as "sub
Vaughan Williams”. The Mask of Orpheus is an opera with music by Harrison Birtwistle
and a libretto by Peter Zinovieff. It was premiered in London at the English National
Opera on 21 May 1986 to great critical acclaim.[1] A recorded version conducted by
Andrew Davis and Martyn Brabbins has also received good reviews. The work is around three hours long.The structure of the
opera's plot is complex. Rather than telling a story by starting at A and going through B to C, The Mask of Orpheus explores the
Orpheus myth in a number of directions at once, examining the various contradictions
which are in the various versions of the myth. This is done by a very elaborate stage
design, whereby the stage is divided into a number of different areas, each containing its
own part of the action. In addition, each of the major characters – Orpheus, Euridice and
Aristaeus – appear in three forms: as a singer who represents their human forms; as a
mime, representing their heroic selves; and as a puppet, representing their myths. Also,
individual events may occur within the opera on several occasions, as they are being
predicted, as they happen, and as they are being remembered. An example of this process
in action is the seduction of Euridice by Aristaeus. When first seen in Act I, this event is
shown simultaneously in two different versions: in one, Euridice is raped by Aristaeus
before dying; in the other she is not. Later, in Act II, Orpheus remembers this event, but
now it is Orpheus, not Aristaeus, who is seducing Euridice before her death.

Thracian Girl Carrying

Head of Orpheus on His Lyre
Painting by: Gustave Moreau (1865)

John Coolidge Adam

October 22, 1987

John Coolidge Adam’s first opera Nixon in China, a treatment of the US President’s
1972 meeting with Chairman Mao, premieres at the Houston Grand Opera in
Houston, TX, USA.
John Adams (1947 - ) is an American composer, clarinetist, and conductor of classical music
and opera, with strong roots in minimalism. Nixon in China is an opera in three acts, with a
libretto by Alice Goodman, and inspired by U.S. President Richard Nixon's visit to China in
1972. As Adams worked on the opera, he came to see Nixon, whom he had once intensely
disliked, as an "interesting character", a complicated individual who sometimes showed
emotion in public. He also wanted Mao to be "the Mao of the huge posters and Great Leap
Forward so he cast him as a heldentenor” (a powerful tenor voice suitable for heros in opera).
Mao's wife, on the other hand, was to be "not just a shrieking coloratura, but also someone
who in the opera's final act can reveal her private fantasies, her erotic desires, and even a certain tragic awareness. And Nixon,
himself, he saw as a sort of Simon Boccanegra, a self-doubting, lyrical, at times self-pitying melancholy baritone.” The most
critically divisive pieces in Adams's collection are his historical operas, and, at first release, Nixon in China received mostly
negative press feedback. Donal Henahan, writing in the New York Times, called the Houston Grand Opera world premiere of
the work "worth a few giggles, but hardly a strong candidate for the standard repertory" and "visually striking but coy and
insubstantial." James Wierzbicki for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described Adams's score as the weak point in an otherwise well-
staged performance, noting the music as "inappropriately placid, cliché-ridden in the abstract" and [trafficked] heavily in
Adams's worn-out Minimalist clichés." With time, however, the opera has come to be revered as a great and influential
production. Robert Hugill for Music and Vision called the production "astonishing ... nearly twenty years after its premier.” His
other operas are: The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) based on the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestine
Liberation Front in 1985, and the hijackers' murder of 69-year-old Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer, who used a
wheelchair. This opera has drawn controversy, including allegations by some
(including Klinghoffer's two daughters) that the opera is antisemitic and
glorifies terrorism. I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (song
play) (1995), with El Niño (an opera-oratorio) (2,000).” Other operas by
Adams are: Doctor Atomic (2005), which covers Robert Oppenheimer, the
Manhattan Project, and the building of the first atomic bomb. A Flowering
Tree (2006); The Gospel According to the Other Mary (opera-oratorio) (2013);
Girls of the Golden West (was premiered by the San Francisco Opera,
November 2017).

Pat Nixon on Tour with

President Nixon in China (1972)

2000 & Beyond

August 15, 2000

Kaija Saariaho’s opera L’Amour de loin (Love from Afar) premiers at the Salzburg Festival in Austria.
Kaija Saariaho (1952 - ) was born in Helsinki, Finland. She studied at the Sibelius Academy under Paavo Heininen. After
attending the Darmstadt Summer Courses, she moved to Germany to study at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg under Brian
Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber. She found her teachers’ emphasis on strict serialism and mathematical structures stifling, saying
in an interview: “You were not allowed to have pulse, or tonally oriented harmonies, or melodies. I don't want to write music
through negations. Everything is permissible as long as it's done in good taste.” L'Amour de loin is an opera in five acts with
music by Kaija Saariaho and a French-language libretto by Amin Maalouf. Saariaho, living in Paris since 1982, had become
familiar in 1993 with La vida breve by one of the first great 12th-century troubadours, Jaufré Rudel. She did not think she was
capable of writing an opera until she saw Peter Sellars's staging of Messiaen’s opera, Saint-François d'Assise, at the 1992 Salzburg
Festival and thought: "If that is an opera, then I can write one”. Her idea for the opera evolved over the following seven or
eight years. She first set a Jaufré poem to music in Lonh (1996) for soprano and electronic instruments. The sensibilities and
backgrounds of both Maalouf, a Lebanese-French author and journalist also living in Paris, and Saariaho – both voluntary
exiles – brought them together to turn "a seemingly simple story into a complex story very simply told...[and with] the
straightforward trajectory of its plot, L’Amour de loin turns anxiously around deeper themes – obsession and devotion, reality
and illusion, the loneliness of the artist, the need to belong”. Having secured an advance commitment from Salzburg Festival
director Gerard Mortier to stage the opera, Saariaho began L'Amour de loin in 1999. The SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-
Baden-Freiburg, an ensemble well known for its excellence in contemporary music, was also
on board. L'Amour de loin received the 2003 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.
The Festival d'Opéra de Québec staged the opera, directed by Robert Lepage, during its
Summer 2015 season. On 1 December 2016, the Metropolitan Opera gave its first
performance of L'Amour de loin, the first opera by a female composer to be staged by the
company since 1903, and the second opera by a female composer ever to be presented
at the Metropolitan Opera. The subsequent transmission of the opera to cinema on 10
December 2016 as part of the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD series marked the first opera
by a female composer, and the first opera conducted by a female conductor (Susanna
Mälkki), in the series.
Kaija Saariaho
Paris (2013)
November, 2011
Andrew Paul MacDonald’s opera Mary’s Wedding premieres at Pacific Opera Victoria, Victoria, BC.
Andrew Paul MacDonald (1958 - ) is a Canadian classical composer, guitarist, conductor and music educator. His opera Mary’s
Wedding, with libretto by Stephen Massicotte based on Massicotte’s play of the same name is set in Western Canada in the
aftermath of World War I. Although the opera Mary's Wedding and the play on which it is based are
fictional, the character of Sergeant (later Lieutenant) Gordon Flowerdew is historical, and the battle
of Moreuil Wood, which is a pivotal event in the opera, actually took place. On March 30, 1918,
Flowerdew carried out one of the last great cavalry assaults in history, leading a squadron of Lord
Strathcona's Horse, armed with sabres, against German rifles and machine guns. The Canadians
helped to stop the German offensive, but at enormous cost. Nearly three-quarters of the Canadian
cavalry involved in this attack against German machine-gun positions at Moreuil Wood were killed
or wounded. Flowerdew himself died from his wounds and was posthumously awarded the Victoria
Cross. Following Flowerdew's death, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, supreme commander of all Allied
armies in Europe during 1918, reportedly commented that Flowerdew's charge at Moreuil Wood
possibly deflected the whole course of history. Mary's Wedding was commissioned by Pacific Opera
Victoria in time for Remembrance Day and ongoing commemorations of the WWI centenary.

Embarkation from Victoria 1916

From University of Victoria’s Archives & Special Collections
Photo by: Archie Willa

May 2016
Lori Laitman’s opera The Scarlet Letter premieres at the Opera Colorado, Denver, CO, USA
Lori Laitman (1955 - ) is an American composer. She has composed multiple operas and choral works, and over 250 songs,
setting texts by classical and contemporary poets (including those who perished in the Holocaust). Her music is widely
performed, internationally and throughout the United States, and has generated substantial critical acclaim. The Journal of
Singing wrote, “It is difficult to think of anyone before the public today who equals her exceptional gifts for embracing a poetic
text and giving it new and deeper life through music.” The Scarlet Letter (2008) is set to a libretto by David Mason based on
Hawthorne's 1850 romance novel that takes place in 17th-century Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, during the years 1642
to 1649. It tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and struggles to create a new life of
repentance and dignity. Throughout the book, Hawthorne explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt, love and hate,
freedom, repression and redemption. Of the CD released by Naxos in August 2017, Gramophone Magazine wrote: “The first
thing that leaps into one’s ears is the sheer beauty of the music. Laitman has devoted much of her career to the art song, and
her ability to meld words with lyrical, often soaring lines is on abundant display in her…impressive and fervent opera.” It was
also named a Critic’s Choice by Opera News, who wrote, “Lori Laitman’s score succeeds with a surging, sweeping,
unapologetically tonal landscape that offers carefully etched character portraits, rapturous choral expostulations and lush
orchestrations of insistently tuneful motifs.” Other works by Laitman include: The Three Feathers, a children’s opera with
librettist Dana Gioia, based on a Grimm’s fairytale, and
Ludlow (2009), based on Mason’s award-winning verse novel
about the 1914 Colorado mining town disaster, where
scores of miners went on strike. The town was
destroyed, and twelve people, mostly women and
children, were slaughtered by Colorado’s National
Guard.

Aftermath of Ludlow, Colorado

Coal-Mining Massacre (1914)

This photograph
forms part of the George Bain Collection
Library of Congress.
November 1, 2017
Brian Current’s opera Missing has its first performance in Vancouver, BC.
Brian Current (1972 - ) is a Canadian composer. Missing, was initially staged in the Russian Hall at the Downtown
Easide Heart of the City Festival before an invited audience of elders, families, friends and the DTES community of
the missing BC aboriginal girls and women. The opera tells a story that many people can understand: about a
woman no one remembers. Set in Vancouver and along the Highway of Tears, this music drama was created to give
voice to the story of Canada’s missing and murdered aboriginal women and girls and to show that each and every
one of these missing people is honoured. The libretto is by the distinguished First
Nations playwright Marie Clements, and it was co-produced by City Opera
Vancouver and Pacific Opera Victoria, where its world premiere was held. The
event in which the opera was performed was guided by an advisory group of four
DTES-involved aboriginal women and elders, and grief counselors were in
attendance. Cedar brushing and smudging was also available, and a medicine bag
was presented to every family at the opera's end. Its first public performance was
held at The York Theatre in Vancouver followed by performances at The Baumann
Centre for Opera in Victoria, BC.
City Opera Vancouver

Tobin Stokes

November 3, 2017
Tobin Stokes’ opera Rattenbury, in collaboration with The Other Guys
Theatre Company, premieres at Pacific Opera’s Baumann Centre in Victoria,
BC.
Tobin David Stokes (1966 - ) is a Canadian composer, notable for his work in
opera, choral music and television. His works have been performed by New York
City Opera, Long Beach Opera, City Opera of Vancouver, the Moscow Symphony
Orchestra, and the Victoria Symphony. The opera Rattenbury is based on the
tempestuous life and death of Victoria's most notorious architect: Francis Rattenbury. Described as a self-promoter,
adulterer, alcoholic, he was murdered by his young wife's teenage lover, an act, which, in turn, led to one of the most
sensational murder trials of the 1930s. For this premiere, the title role was performed by internationally-renowned
tenor Richard Margison with the performance lasting approximately 75 minutes, with no intermission. Apart from his
murder, Rattenbury was also famous for having designed Victoria’s Parliament Buildings, the Empress Hotel and
several other major buildings. Regarding this particular production, Times Colonist Sarah Petrescu wrote: “Victoria
composer and librettist Tobin Stokes reveals how Rattenbury’s ambition built him up and how his scoundrel
tendencies tore him down. In fact, there is not a wholly sympathetic character in the opera — save for the maid —
and that’s what makes it fun. Canadian tenor Richard Margison is Rattenbury and is best in his character’s older,
broody, gin-fuelled moments. Soprano Kathleen Brett is brilliant as his second wife, Alma, the twice-married,
coquettish songwriter and dope addict who he falls for at a party at the Empress. One of the greatest scenes in Stokes’
opera is when Ratz invites Alma to move into his family home while his first wife, Florrie, played by the strong mezzo-
soprano Emma Parkinson (also the maid Irene), is still living in the attic. She interrupts the lovers’ drunken attempt to
write a song together in an intense and cruel scene heightened by the ensemble singing over each other. The music is
lush but slightly morose throughout the opera, making it thoroughly enjoyable. Tyler Fitzgerald is fantastic as the boy
chauffeur-cum-murderous loverboy with a powerful baritone voice that carries some of the highest emotional
moments. The centre’s hall was intended as a rehearsal space and has superb acoustics that work well as an intimate
setting for a new opera.” This opera is seminal to BC’s history. It also played to
sold-out audiences for several days running.
British Columbia Archives

Francis Rattenbury
Alma Rattenbury (nee Packenham)
George Percy Stoner