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[edit]Portal:Opera/Selected picture/1
Credit: Alfred Bryan
Gilbert and Sullivan created fourteen comic operas, including H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, and The Mikado, many of which are still frequently performed today. However, events around their 1889 collaboration, The Gondoliers, led to an argument and a lawsuit dividing the two. In 1891, after many failed attempts at reconciliation by the pair and their producer, Richard D'Oyly Carte, Gilbert and Sullivan's music publisher, Tom Chappell, stepped in to mediate between two of his most profitable artists, and within two weeks he had succeeded. This cartoon in The Entr'acte expresses the magazine's pleasure at the reuniting of D'Oyly Carte (left), Gilbert (centre), and Sullivan (right).
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Credit: D. H. Friston
An engraving by D. H. Friston of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Trial by Jury, shortly after its première. A satire of courtroom antics, which invoked "almost boisterous hilarity" in its original audience, Trial by Jury remains a favourite throughout the English-speaking world, and is performed regularly to this day.
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Credit: Arthur Thiele, Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News
A scene from Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin, as performed at its London première in 1875. The story, part of the Knight of the Swan tradition, is taken from medieval German romances, including a secondary plot in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and the main plot of its sequel, Lohengrin, and the epic of Garin le Loherain which inspired it. The opera was first performed on 28 August 1850 at the Staatskapelle Weimar conducted by Franz Liszt. Several excerpts have become famous, most notably "Treulich geführt" from act 3, scene 1, commonly known as "Here Comes the Bride".
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The Palais Garnier, also known as the Opéra de Paris or Opéra Garnier, but more commonly as the Paris Opéra, is a 2,200-seat opera house on the Place de l'Opéra in Paris, France. A grand landmark designed by Charles Garnier in the Neo-Baroque style, it is regarded as one of the architectural masterpieces of its time.
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Poster: Otis Lithograph Co; Restoration: Adam Cuerden
A poster for a 1908 American production of Aida, an opera by Giuseppe Verdi that premiered on December 24, 1871, to great acclaim at the Khedivial Opera House in Cairo, Egypt. However, Verdi was most dissatisfied that the audience consisted of invited dignitaries and critics, but no members of the general public. He therefore considered the European premiere, held at La Scala, Milan, to be its real premiere.
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The final scene of Rossini's opera Le comte Ory at its premiere in 1828. The opera contains some of Rossini's most colorful orchestral writing and recounts a farcical tale of Count Ory and his men who attempt to seduce the women of Formoutiers while their husbands are away in the Crusades.
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Credit: Joseph Albert
Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld and his wife, Malwine Schnorr von Carolsfeld, in the original production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in 1865. It was at Wagner's own request that the couple were cast in the title roles. Six weeks, and three performances later, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld died in Dresden, only days after his 29th birthday. After his death, his widow could not bring herself to continue with her career and retired from the stage.
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Valencia's Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències (City of Arts and Sciences) at night. The building to the left is the city's opera house and cultural centre, the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía. Designed by Santiago Calatrava, the Palau de les Arts was officially opened in October 2005 and staged its first opera, Beethoven's Fidelio, in October 2006. The opera house suffered a setback in December of that year when the main stage platform collapsed with the complete set of Jonathan Miller's production of Don Giovanni.
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Credit: Metropolitan Job Print, 222 West 26th Street, New York
A poster for the original production of John Philip Sousa's operetta El Capitan (1896), starring DeWolf Hopper. Don Enrico Medigua, the viceroy of Spain-occupied Peru, fears assassination by rebels. After he secretly has the rebel leader El Capitan killed, he disguises himself as El Capitan. Estrelda, the former viceroy's daughter, impressed by tales of El Capitan's daring, falls in love with the disguised Medigua, who is already married. Meanwhile, Medigua's wife and daughter search for him, and the rebels capture the Lord Chamberlain, mistaking him for the viceroy. Medigua leads the hapless rebels against the Spaniards, taking them in circles until they are too tired to fight. The Spaniards win, the mistaken identities are revealed, the love stories are untangled, and the story ends happily.
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Credit: The Illustrated London News, 22 November 1845
The wedding of Don Cæsar and Maritana, in the original 1845 production of William Vincent Wallace's Maritana. Don Cæsar, facing execution, agrees to marry a mysterious woman (Maritana) in order to have what he sees as a more fitting death. However, the person who arranged this, Don José, has intercepted Don Cæsar's pardon, in order to use him as part of a scheme to change the unwitting Maritana from a mere peasant into the widow of a nobleman: the King has shown an interest in her, and he hopes that if faced with her at court every day, he will get enough evidence to convince the queen that her husband is unfaithful, and can thus convince the queen into an affair. However, a peasant boy, Lazarillo, that Don Cæsar had helped removes all the bullets from the firing squad's guns, and the plot begins to unravel, eventually resulting in a happy ending for Don Cæsar and Maritana, and the death of Don José.
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Death of Gormas, Le Cid
Credit: Auguste Tilly for L'Illustration, 5 December 1885The climactic event in the first half of Jules Massenet's Le Cid: Rodrigue's father has obliged his son to defend his honour, but Rodrigue only afterwards learns that the person he has to duel is his beloved Chimène's father, the Comte de Gormas. He is honour-bound to go through with it, and wins the duel, but Chimène now both loves and hates him, and this internal conflict powers the drama of the rest of the opera. From L'Illustration's coverage of the opera's première.
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Princess Ida, act 2
Credit: William Russell FlintThe climax of act 2 in Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Princess Ida as illustrated by William Russell Flint. The opera tells the story of Princess Ida who founds a women's university and teaches that women are superior to men and should rule in their stead. The prince to whom she had been married in infancy sneaks into the university, together with two friends, with the aim of collecting his bride. They disguise themselves as women students, but are discovered, precipitating a war between the sexes. Ida sings...
Though I am but a girl,
Defiance thus I hurl
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Credit: Bain News Service
Italian tenor Enrico Caruso was an opera singer of international renown, and one of the key pioneers of recorded music. His "Vesti la giubba" (from Ruggiero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci) was, in its various versions, the first recording to sell a million copies.
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Credit: Massimo Catarinella
The facade of the Concertgebouw concert hall in Amsterdam. It opened on 11 April 1888, with an inaugural concert in which an orchestra of 120 musicians and a chorus of 500 singers performed works by Wagner, Handel, Bach, and Beethoven. The hall now hosts 800 performances every year, including concert performances of opera. Its resident orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, also serves as one of the orchestras for The Netherlands Opera.
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Credit: Napoleon Sarony
An 1882 portrait of Oscar Wilde, the Irish playwright, poet and author. In 1905 his play Salomé was adapted into operas by two different composers – Salome by Richard Strauss and Salomé by Antoine Mariotte. Wilde himself is the protagonist of Theodore Morrison's opera Oscar which premiered in 2013 at Santa Fe Opera with David Daniels in the title role.
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Credit: Thomas Pintaric
The Austrian city of Salzburg, the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the home of the annual Salzburg Festival. In 2006, the festival celebrated the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth by staging all 22 of his operatic works (including two unfinished operas). All the productions were filmed and released to the general public in November 2006.
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Credit: Thomas Wolf
Neuschwanstein Castle, commissioned by Ludwig II of Bavaria as a retreat and as an homage to Richard Wagner. The young king was so moved by Wagner's opera Lohengrin, based on the legend of the Swan Knight, that he named his castle "New Swan Stone," or "Neuschwanstein". It was King Ludwig's patronage that later gave Wagner the means to build a theatre for, compose and stage his epic cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung.
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Credit: Jeses
Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes, the city's premier opera house and the home of Mexico's National Symphony Orchestra. Opera singers who have performed there include Maria Callas, Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Kathleen Battle, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Jessye Norman. Inaugurated in 1934, the building has an extravagant Beaux Arts exterior in imported Italian Carrara white marble.
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Castel Sant'Angelo, the scene of act 3 in Tosca
Credit: Andreas TilleThe Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome, a papal fortress and prison until 1901. It serves as the setting for act 3 of Puccini's opera Tosca. After murdering Rome's chief of police, the evil Baron Scarpia, Floria Tosca goes to the Castel Sant'Angelo, where her lover, Mario Cavaradossi, is to be executed. She has been led to believe that it will be a mock execution and is horrified to see him die in a hail of real bullets. As Scarpia's henchmen arrive to arrest her, she throws herself from the castle's ramparts. Famously dismissed by the musicologist Joseph Kerman as a "shabby little shocker", Tosca has become one of the most enduring works in the operatic repertoire.
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Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom
Credit: Ilya RepinIlya Repin's 1876 painting, Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom. The Russian legend of Sadko, the minstrel who charmed the Sea King and his daughter and eventually returned to Novgorod a wealthy man, was the subject of Rimsky-Korsakov's 1896 opera Sadko.
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Credit: Unknown artist
Queen Elizabeth I of England painted c.1575 by an unknown artist. Her life and loves were explored in three operas by Gaetano Donizetti – Il castello di Kenilworth, Maria Stuarda, and Roberto Devereux. She is also the subject of Rossini's Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra and Benjamin Britten's Gloriana, which was composed for the coronation of her descendant, Queen Elizabeth II.
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Credit: Gustave Doré
A Gustave Doré illustration for Chapter I of Don Quixote. The epic novel by Miguel de Cervantes has served as the inspiration for several operas including Mendelssohn's Die Hochzeit des Camacho, Massenet's Don Quichotte, and Manuel de Falla's Master Peter's Puppet Show.
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Credit: Diliff
The Sydney Opera House at night, as viewed from the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It is one of the world's most distinctive 20th century buildings, and one of the most famous performing arts centres in the world. Contrary to its name, the building houses several separate venues rather than a single opera theatre, with the two main venues, the Opera Theatre and the Concert Hall, defined by the two larger shells. The Sydney Opera House is a major performing venue for Opera Australia, The Australian Ballet, the Sydney Theatre Company and the Sydney Symphony.
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Credit: Diliff
The Royal College of Music in London. Founded by Royal Charter in 1882, its first director was Sir George Grove. Amongst the opera singers who have trained or taught there are Joan Sutherland, Thomas Allen, Gwyneth Jones, Heddle Nash, Clara Butt, and Jenny Lind. The current building was designed by Sir Arthur Blomfield in the Flemish Mannerist style and built in 1894.
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Credit: Bain News Service
Soprano Mignon Nevada as Ophelia in Ambroise Thomas's opera, Hamlet. The daughter of American soprano Emma Nevada, who was also her teacher, and the godchild of Ambroise Thomas, she was named after the title character in Thomas's opera Mignon. She appeared as Ophelia at the opening of the 1910 winter season at London's Royal Opera House and went on to sing several leading roles there. During her career she also sang at the Opéra de Paris, the Opéra-Comique, La Scala and the Teatro São Carlos in Lisbon. After her retirement from the stage, she became a voice teacher.
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Triple Portrait of Cardinal Richelieu (1585 – 1642) by Philippe de Champaigne. A great patron of the arts as well as a statesman, Richelieu built a private theatre in his palace which was to become an early home of the Paris Opera. After his death, it was known as the Théâtre du Palais-Royal and saw the premieres of many operas by Lully including Psyché and Alceste .
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Credit: Jos. Koehler
The German poet and playwright, Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805) whose plays formed the basis for many operas, including Verdi's I masnadieri, Don Carlos, and Luisa Miller; Rossini's William Tell; and Donizetti's Maria Stuarda.
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Credit: Guillaume Piolle
The Vase of Peace and western facade of the Palace of Versailles. Its permanent theatre and opera house, L'Opéra of the Palace of Versailles, was inaugurated in 1770 with a performance of Lully's Persée. The palace itself is the setting of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's opera Les plaisirs de Versailles, first performed in the private apartments of Louis XIV in 1682, and John Corigliano's 20th century opera The Ghosts of Versailles.
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The Execution of Lady Jane Grey
Credit: Paul DelarocheThe Execution of Lady Jane Grey depicted by Paul Delaroche. The tragic story of Lady Jane Grey, an English noblewoman executed for treason in 1554, was the subject of several operas, including Nicola Vaccai's Giovanna Gray which premiered at La Scala in 1836 with Maria Malibran in the title role.
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Georges Rochegrosse's poster for the first Paris production of Jules Massenet's opera Don Quichotte, a dramatized version of the story of Don Quixote. Massenet conceived and composed the title role specifically for the great Russian bass, Feodor Chaliapin who sang it in the world premiere on 19 February 1910 at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo. Don Quichotte had its Paris premiere later that year at the Théâtre de la Gaîté.
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Émile Bertrand's poster of the 1899 world premiere of Massenet's opera Cendrillon at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. A re-telling of the Cinderella fairy tale, the opera was an immediate success, with fifty performances in its first season, and is still performed today. At the premiere, the roles of Cinderella, the Fairy Godmother, and Prince Charming were all sung by sopranos.
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Poster for the world première of Massenet's opéra-comique Sapho. It was first performed on 27 November 1897 at the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris with Emma Calvé in the title role. The story, based on Alphonse Daudet's novel of the same name, concerns the beautiful Sapho, an artist's model of a certain age and notorious life, who begins an ill-fated affair with a younger man.
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Credit: François Gérard (1770–1837)
Napoleon Bonaparte depicted in 1803 as the First Consul of France. Six years later, he commissioned the opera Pimmalione to show off the talents of two of his favourite singers, his lover Giuseppina Grassini and the famous castrato Girolamo Crescentini. It was first given in a private performance at the Tuileries Palace. Napoleon was delighted with the work and offered its composer, Luigi Cherubini, a large reward and a commission for another piece. Napoleon himself appears as a character in several operas including Prokofiev's War and Peace and Giordano's Madame Sans-Gêne.
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Portrait of the English soprano, Nancy Storace, circa 1788. The role of Susanna in Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro was written for and first performed by her. Mozart also wrote the concert aria "Ch'io mi scordi di te?" for her, often considered to be one of his greatest compositions in that genre.
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Credit: The Strobridge Lithographing Co.
An early advertisement showing the Drawing Room Scene from Utopia, Limited, a Savoy opera by Gilbert and Sullivan. The opera premiered in 1893 and satirises limited liability companies, and particularly the idea that a bankrupt company could leave creditors unpaid without any liability on the part of its owners.
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Lemuel Abbott's portrait of Admiral Horatio Nelson, famous for his service in the Royal Navy, particularly during the Napoleonic Wars. He is the protagonist of Nelson, an opera in three acts by Lennox Berkeley which centres on Nelson's love affair with Emma Hamilton.
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An 1879 poster for Franz von Suppé's operetta Fatinitza. The operetta's hero, Wladimir Samoiloff, is a young Russian Lieutenant who had an adventure in which he disguised himself as a woman whom he named Fatinitza and met with the hot-tempered elderly General Kantschukoff, who fell in love with "her". Complications ensue when Wladimir and Lydia, the General's niece, fall in love.
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1896 poster for the theatrical adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's novel La Dame aux Camélias starring Sarah Bernhardt. The play was an instant success when it premiered in 1852 and formed the basis for Verdi's 1853 opera La traviata.
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Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne
Credit: TitianTitian's painting Bacchus and Ariadne (1522–23) which depicts Bacchus's arrival on the Island of Naxos. Over the centuries, the scene has formed the climax of many operas from Monteverdi's L'Arianna (1608) to Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos (1912).
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Credit: Roland zh
Zürich Opera House, originally built in 1891 and designed by the Viennese architects Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer. Renovation and restoration of the building took place between 1982 and 1984, but not without huge local opposition which erupted into street riots. The rebuilt theatre was inaugurated with performances of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and the world première of Rudolf Kelterborn's opera Der Kirschgarten.
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Wheat Field with Cypresses painted by Vincent van Gogh in 1889 while he was a patient at a mental asylum in Saint-Rémy. Van Gogh's tortured life had been the subject of several 20th-century operas, including Van Gogh by Nevit Kodallı (first performed in 1956), The Passion of Vincent van Gogh by Christopher Yavelow (first performed in 1984), and Vincent by Einojuhani Rautavaara (first performed in 1990).
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Credit: Allan Warren
Portrait of Noël Coward by the English society-photographer and former actor, Allan Warren. Coward's 1929 operetta Bitter Sweet was later made into a film starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. The score was so heavily cut that Coward vowed he would never again allow one of plays to be filmed in Hollywood.
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The Last Day of Pompeii (Bryullov)
Credit: Karl BryullovThe Last Day of Pompeii, Karl Bryullov's 1833 painting depicting the destruction of Pompeii following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The painting was inspired in part by Giovanni Pacini's opera L'ultimo giorno di Pompei which premiered in Naples in 1825 with spectacular special effects. Pacini's young daughters, Amazilia and Giovannina, served as the models for the two children sheltering in the arms of a Pompeian woman. The woman was modelled on Yuliya Samoylova who was the foster mother of Pacini's daughters and had been the lover of both Pacini and Bryullov.
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[[File:|center|500px|Jules Verne]]
Credit: Félix Nadar
Jules Verne, the French writer best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction. Operas based on his works include Offenbach's Le docteur Ox and Le voyage dans la lune, Gavin Bryars's Doctor Ox's Experiment, and Hersant's Le Château des Carpathes.
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The Fall of Phaeton (Rubens)
Credit: Peter Paul RubensThe Fall of Phaeton painted by Rubens in 1604. The myth of Phaethon, whose attempt to drive the sun god's chariot led to his death, was the basis of Lully's 1683 opera Phaëton. Lully's opera was an indirect reference to the fate of Nicolas Fouquet whose ambitions to imitate the King Louis XIV (The Sun King) brought about his downfall.
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Portrait of the Austrian composer Franz Lehár (1870–1948). He was known for his many operettas, including The Merry Widow, The Land of Smiles, and The Count of Luxembourg.
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The Theatro Municipal in São Paulo, Brazil. It is regarded as one of the landmarks of the city, significant both for its architectural value as well as its historical importance. The first production to be staged there was Ambroise Thomas's opera Hamlet with Titta Ruffo in the title role.
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The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, Joseph Noel Paton's 1849 painting which depicts a central scene from Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play has had several operatic adaptations, most notably Purcell's The Fairy-Queen and Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Britten's opera premiered in 1960 with Alfred Deller as Oberon and Jennifer Vyvyan as Titania.
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Corbet's portrait of the French tenor Louis Guéymard depicts him in the title role of Meyerbeer's opera Robert le diable. In this final scene of act 1, Robert gambles with dice, loses his entire estate, and sings the aria "L'or est une chimère" (Gold is but an illusion). After many further vicissitudes and dabbling in witchcraft, Robert finally marries his beloved Isabelle and his evil father is dragged down to hell.
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In this 1771 painting by Alexander Roslin, King Gustav III of Sweden and his Brothers, King Gustav is shown seated left with his brother Frederick standing and his brother Charles seated right. Gustav, an enlightened ruler and patron of the arts, was assassinated in 1792 at a masked ball held in Sweden's Royal Opera House. The episode is the central theme of Daniel Auber's opera Gustave III, ou Le bal masqué and Verdi's opera Un ballo in maschera.
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Kullervo Cursing
Credit: Akseli Gallen-KallelaGallen-Kallela's 1899 painting Kullervo Cursing depicts a scene from the tormented life of Kullervo, a character in the Finnish epic Kalevala and the protagonist of Aulis Sallinen's opera Kullervo. Sallinen's opera was intended for the opening of a new national opera house in Helsinki, but construction delays meant that the work was premiered in Los Angeles as part of the celebrations of the 75th anniversary of Finnish independence. The Finnish baritone Jorma Hynninen sang the title role in the 1992 premiere with Matti Salminen as his father.
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A self-portrait by Salvator Rosa, an Italian Baroque painter and poet who was described as "unorthodox and extravagant" and a "perpetual rebel". His life and adventures, along with those of Masaniello, a Neapolitan fisherman turned rebel leader, formed the basis for Antônio Carlos Gomes's 1874 opera Salvator Rosa. Its librettist, Antonio Ghislanzoni, had also written the libretto for Verdi's Aida.
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Credit: Roberto Focosi, engraved by Francesco Corbetta, and restored by Adam Cuerden
Frontispiece to the 1860 vocal score of Verdi's opera, Un ballo in maschera. Major problems with the censors beset this opera. Originally entitled Gustavo III, it was a fictionalized account of the 1792 assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden. The censors forbade the portrayal of a real monarch, let alone the assassination of the monarch on stage. Verdi had the setting moved to Germany with all the names changed and the opera retitled Una vendetta. The censors objected again. Verdi gave up, broke his contract with the Teatro San Carlo, the commissioning opera house, and returned home. The San Carlo sued. Verdi counter-sued. Once the legal issues cleared, Verdi submitted it to the Teatro Apollo. This time the setting was in Colonial America. It was finally performed in 1859 and proved a hit.
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Credit: Anonymous, restored by Adam Cuerden
Title page of the libretto for Verdi's I Lombardi alla prima crociata printed for the opera's premiere season at La Scala in 1843. Verdi dedicated the score to Maria Luigia, the Habsburg Duchess of Parma, who died a few weeks after the premiere. I Lombardi was part of a long tradition of operas set against the background of the medieval Crusades which dates from the 17th century. In 1847 the opera was significantly revised for performances in Paris with the title Jérusalem and became Verdi's first grand opera.
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Credit: Engraved by Luigi Barinetti after Girolamo Magnani; restored by Adam Cuerden
Title page of the vocal score for Verdi's 1845 opera, Giovanna d'Arco. Based on the life of Joan of Arc, the opera takes considerable liberties with history. Unlike the real Joan of Arc who was burnt at the stake, Verdi's heroine dies on the battlefield. The opera premiered at La Scala, Milan, where it was rapturously received by the audience but dismissed by the critics. For a production in Rome three months later, the Papal censors demanded that all religious connotations be removed from the story. The opera was performed as Orietta di Lesbo and set on the Isle of Lesbos with an Italian heroine leading the Lesbians into battle against the Turks.
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Credit: Antoine Barbizet; restored by Adam Cuerden
Cover of the entire vocal score to Hector Berlioz's opera Les Troyens published by the Parisian music editors Choudens et Cie in 1863. In this score, Berlioz introduced a number of optional cuts which have often been adopted in subsequent productions. He complained bitterly of the cuts that he was more-or-less forced to allow at the 1863 Théâtre Lyrique première, and his letters and memoirs are filled with the indignation that it caused him to "mutilate" his score. In the early 20th century, the lack of accurate parts led musicologists W. J. Turner and Cecil Gray to plan a raid on the Choudens office, even approaching the Parisian underworld for help.
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Credit: Antoine Barbizet; restored by Adam Cuerden
Cover of a first edition of the vocal score for La Prise de Troie (The Fall of Troy), the first two acts from Hector Berlioz's opera Les Troyens. Berlioz himself wrote the libretto based on Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid. The opera originally premiered with only its last three acts, under the title Les Troyens à Carthage (The Trojans at Carthage). The complete Les Troyens was Berlioz's most ambitious work, the summation of his entire artistic career, but he did not live to see it performed in its entirety.
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Credit: Antoine Barbizet; restored by Adam Cuerden
Cover of the 1863 vocal score for Les Troyens à Carthage (The Trojans at Carthage), the title given to last three acts from Hector Berlioz's opera Les Troyens. The opera originally premiered under this title. The first two acts were later performed under the title La prise de Troie (The Fall of Troy). The complete Les Troyens with a libretto by Berlioz himself based on Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid was his most ambitious work and the summation of his entire artistic career, but he did not live to see the opera performed in its entirety.
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Credit: Leopoldo Ratti (1821-1874); restoration by Adam Cuerden
Cover of an early vocal score for Verdi's 1853 opera La traviata. The scene depicted is from the final act where the Parisian courtesan Violetta dies in the arms of her lover Alfredo while his father looks on. The opera's story, adapted from the 1852 play La dame aux Camélias]] by Alexandre Dumas fils, was meant to set in mid-19th century France as a contemporary drama. However, the Italian censors insisted that such a scandalous story be set in the distant past. Hence, the 17th-century costumes worn in this illustration. It was not until the 1880s that the composer and librettist's original wishes for the opera's setting were carried out.
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Credit: A. Jannin; restored by Adam Cuerden
Cover to an 1867 vocal score of Jacques Offenbach's operetta Robinson Crusoé. Although loosely based on Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe, the work owes more to British pantomime than to the book itself. Célestine Galli-Marié who sang the role of Man Friday in the premiere production would later to achieve fame as the first Carmen.
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Credit: Roberto Focosi; restored by Adam Cuerden
Title page of Rigoletto, an opera by Giuseppe Verdi with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave based on Victor Hugo's play Le roi s'amuse. Despite serious initial problems with the censors, the opera had a triumphant premiere at La Fenice in Venice on 11 March 1851 and is considered by many to be the first of the operatic masterpieces of Verdi's middle-to-late career. Its tragic story revolves around the licentious Duke of Mantua, his hunch-backed court jester Rigoletto, and Rigoletto's beautiful daughter Gilda. The opera's original title, La maledizione (The Curse), refers to the curse placed on both the Duke and Rigoletto by a courtier whose daughter had been seduced by the Duke with Rigoletto's encouragement. The curse comes to fruition when Gilda likewise falls in love with the Duke and eventually sacrifices her life to save him from the assassins hired by her father.
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Front page of The Illustrated London News depicting the elopement scene from Haddon Hall, an 1892 opera by Arthur Sullivan and Sydney Grundy. The opera dramatises the legend of Dorothy Vernon's elopement with John Manners in 1563. The legend came to prominence in the 19th century and was the subject of numerous plays and novels.
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Credit: Auguste Tilly; restored by Adam Cuerden
A scene depicting the ballet of Moorish dancers in act 3 of Massenet's 1885 opera Le Cid. The story is based on the exploits of El Cid, a Castilian nobleman and military leader in medieval Spain. After the premiere, the Paris Opéra continued to revive Le Cid until 1919 reaching over 150 performances at the theatre by that date. A new production was mounted there in the 2014–15 season with Roberto Alagna in the title role.
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Credit: Artist with an illegible signature (possibly Paul Gavarni); restored by Adam Cuerden
Title page to an early vocal score of L'éclair (The Lightning Flash), an opéra comique in 3 acts by Fromental Halévy which was premièred by the Paris Opéra-Comique on 16 December 1835. It recounts the amours of the Englishman George and the American Lyonel for two sisters, Henriette and the widow Mme. Darbel, who are rather indecisive about who they should pair up with at the start. This indecisiveness is complicated further by the temporary blindness suffered by Lyonel when he is struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. The opera was well received which placed Halévy in the unusual position of having two simultaneous successes on the Paris stage (the other being his grand opera masterpiece, La Juive).
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Credit: Uncertain attribution; restoration by Adam Cuerden
Vocal score to the 1916 version of Ariadne auf Naxos (Ariadne on Naxos) an opera by Richard Strauss with a German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Bringing together slapstick comedy and consummately beautiful music, the opera's theme is the competition between high and low art for the public's attention. Music critic and author Matt Dobkin wrote that, while Ariadne auf Naxos is "not as well loved as Der Rosenkavalier or as important as Salome, it is nevertheless staged all the time, thanks in large part to sopranos' attraction to the vocal and dramatic grandeur of the title role and to the compelling spitfire Zerbinetta character."
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Credit: Philippe Chaperon, restored by Adam Cuerden
Philippe Chaperon's set design for act 4, scene 2 of Verdi's opera Aida as first performed at the Khedivial Opera House in Cairo on 24 December 1871. The costumes and accessories for the premiere were designed by Auguste Mariette, who also oversaw the design and construction of the sets, which were made in Paris by the Opéra's scene painters Auguste Rubé and Philippe Chaperon (acts 1 and 4) and Edouard Despléchin and Jean-Baptiste Lavastre (acts 2 and 3), and shipped to Cairo. Although Verdi did not attend the premiere in Cairo, he was most dissatisfied with the fact that the audience consisted of invited dignitaries, politicians and critics, but no members of the general public. He therefore considered the Italian (and European) premiere, held at La Scala, Milan, on 8 February 1872, and a performance in which he was heavily involved at every stage, to be its real premiere.
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Giuseppe Verdi conducting Aida at its first Paris Opera performance in 1880. Aida quickly rose to popularity after its première in 1871 in Cairo. Isma'il Pasha, Khedive of Egypt, commissioned Verdi to write an opera for performance to celebrate the opening of the Khedivial Opera House, paying him 150,000 francs, but the premiere was delayed because of the Siege of Paris (1870–71), during the Franco-Prussian War, when the scenery and costumes were stuck in the French capital, and Verdi's Rigoletto was performed instead for the opening ceremony. Aida eventually premièred in Cairo in late 1871. Metastasio's libretto La Nitteti (1756) was a major source of the plot.
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Credit: Giuseppe Palanti; restored by Adam Cuerden
Title page to a 1909 vocal score of Luigi Cherubini's opera Médée. Based on Euripides' tragedy Medea and Pierre Corneille's play Médée, the opera premièred on 13 March 1797, but was not a huge success. Cherubini created a shortened, Italian translation, but the never rose to popularity until around the mid-19th century. Originally with spoken dialogue between the arias, a German version of 1855 changed this dialogue into sung recitatives written by Franz Lachner. It was not until these recitatives were translated into Italian and added to Cherubini's Italian version in 1909 that the opera reached what would be its standard form throughout the 20th century, and one that remains a popular version to this day. The vocal score seen here is either the first or a very early publication of this hybrid version.
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Poster for Verdi's La forza del destino. Based on a Spanish drama, Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino (1835), by Ángel de Saavedra, 3rd Duke of Rivas, La forza del destino tells the story of two star-crossed lovers who fate turns against at every turn. The man attempting to throw a gun away as a sign of good faith causes it to shoot the woman's father. The woman's brother, having joined the army under an assumed name, gets given papers to destroy by the man, also under an assumed name – and thus learns his identity and goes on a mad quest to destroy him. And, in the end, when forced to duel the brother and winning, an attempt to save the brother's life results in the man finding the woman... and when they go to help him, the brother stabs the woman in the heart.
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Credit: Émile Desmaisons after François-Gabriel Lépaulle; restored by Adam Cuerden
Frontispiece to the first edition vocal score of Gaetano Donizetti's La favorite which premiered in 1840. The opera's story unfolds against the background of the Moorish invasions of Spain and power struggles between church and state. At its centre is a love triangle involving the King of Castile, Alfonso XI, his mistress ('the favourite') Léonor, and her lover Fernand. The frontispiece shows Rosine Stoltz and Gilbert Duprez, the original Léonor and Fernand.
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Credit: Avinoam Michaeli
The Israeli Opera performance of Aida in 2011. The Israeli Opera is the principal opera company of Israel. It was founded in 1985 after lack of Israeli government funding led to the demise of the Israel National Opera. The company also founded the Israeli Opera Festival which has performed large-scale outdoor productions, originally at Caesarea, and from 2010 in Masada, as with this production of Aida.
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Credit: Antoine Barbizet; restored by Adam Cuerden
Title page of the first edition vocal score of Hector Berlioz's 1862 opera Béatrice et Bénédict, based on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. It is the first notable version of Shakespeare's play in operatic form, and was followed by works by among others Árpád Doppler, Paul Puget and Reynaldo Hahn. Berlioz biographer David Cairns wrote: "Listening to the score's exuberant gaiety, only momentarily touched by sadness, one would never guess that its composer was in pain when he wrote it and impatient for death."
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Credit: Wilhelm Benque; restored by Adam Cuerden
Portrait of Ambroise Thomas (1811–1896). He was a French composer known for his operas Mignon (1866) and Hamlet (1868) and as Director of the Conservatoire de Paris from 1871 till his death. Emmanuel Chabrier said of him, "There is good music, there is bad music, and then there is Ambroise Thomas."
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Credit: Uncredited; Restored by Adam Cuerden
Depiction in The Illustrated London News of the final scene of Attila, an opera in a prologue and three acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Temistocle Solera, based on the 1809 play Attila, König der Hunnen (Attila, King of the Huns) by Zacharias Werner, in which Odabella, a woman who fought the Huns, and thus so impressed Attila that he wished to marry her, shows her true, hidden hatred for the man who killed her father by stabbing Attila in the heart.
Ezio's act 2 aria of heroic resolution "È gettata la mia sorte" ("My lot is cast, I am prepared for any warfare") is a fine example of a characteristic Verdian genre, and it achieved fame in its own time with audiences in the context of the adoption of a liberal constitution by Ferdinand II. Other contemporary comment praised the work as suitable for the "political education of the people", while, in contrast, others criticised the opera as "Teutonic" in nature.
Ezio's act 2 aria of heroic resolution "È gettata la mia sorte" ("My lot is cast, I am prepared for any warfare") is a fine example of a characteristic Verdian genre, and it achieved fame in its own time with audiences in the context of the adoption of a liberal constitution by Ferdinand II. Other contemporary comment praised the work as suitable for the "political education of the people", while, in contrast, others criticised the opera as "Teutonic" in nature.
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Credit: Giuseppe Barberis and Carlo Cornaglia; restored by Adam Cuerden
Poster for Verdi's opera Don Carlo from the première of the 1884 four-act Italian version at La Scala. Based on the dramatic play Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien by Friedrich Schiller, the opera's story is based on conflicts in the life of Carlos, Prince of Asturias (1545–1568), after his betrothed Elisabeth of Valois was married instead to his father Philip II of Spain as part of the peace treaty ending the Italian War of 1551–1559 between the Houses of Habsburg and Valois. It was commissioned and produced by the Théâtre Impérial de l'Opéra (Paris Opera) and given its premiere at the Salle Le Peletier as Don Carlos on 11 March 1867. Many productions after that removed the first act, however, and Verdi eventually produced an official Italian-language abridgement, which removed the ballet and the first act, at Milan in 1884 (from whence this image derives). There also exists a full five-act Italian version from 1886.
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Set design for act 1 in an 1895 Paris production of Verdi's opera Otello. With the composer's reluctance to write anything new after the success of Aida in 1871 and his retreat into retirement, it took his Milan publisher Giulio Ricordi the next ten years, first to persuade him to write anything, then to encourage the revision of Verdi's 1857 Simon Boccanegra by introducing Arrigo Boito as librettist, and finally to begin the arduous process of persuading and cajoling Verdi to see Boito's completed libretto for Otello in July/August 1881. However, the process of writing the first drafts of the libretto and the years of their revision, with Verdi all along not promising anything, dragged on, and it was not until 1884, five years after the first drafts of the libretto, that composition began, with most of the work finishing in late 1885. When it finally premièred in Milan on 5 February 1887, it proved to be a resounding success, and further stagings of Otello soon followed at leading theatres throughout Europe and America.
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Photograph of Albert Reiss at the stage entrance of the Metropolitan Opera circa 1910 . Reiss was a German operatic tenor who had a prolific career in Europe and the United States during the first third of the twentieth century. He spent much of his career performing at the Metropolitan Opera where he sang in more than 1,000 performances, including several premieres, between 1901-1919. Excelling in the tenor buffo repertoire, Reiss was particularly associated with the roles of David in Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Mime in Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, two roles he sang in numerous houses internationally.
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Credit: Alexandre Lacauchie, restored by Adam Cuerden
Gilbert Duprez as Gaston in Giuseppe Verdi's Jérusalem. A French tenor, singing teacher and minor composer who famously pioneered the delivery of the operatic high C from the chest, and who created roles for such major composers as Gaetano Donizetti, Hector Berlioz, and, as seen here, Giuseppe Verdi. Jérusalem was Verdi's first French grand opera, rearranging and heavily reworking one of his previous Italian operas, I Lombardi alla prima crociata, making the opera more coherent, tighter, and through-composed.
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Portrsit of Christoph Willibald Gluck, a composer of Italian and French opera in the early classical period. Born in the Upper Palatinate (now part of Germany) and raised in Bohemia, he gained prominence at the Habsburg court at Vienna, where he brought about the practical reform of opera's dramaturgical practices that many intellectuals had been campaigning for over the years. 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.
The strong influence of French opera in these works encouraged Gluck to move to Paris, which he did in November 1773. Fusing the traditions of Italian opera and the French national genre into a new synthesis, Gluck wrote eight operas for the Parisian stages. One of the last of these, 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, Gluck's 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.
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Credit: Pierre-Auguste Lamy (?), restored by Adam Cuerden
Illustration to Jacques Offenbach's last composition Les contes d'Hoffmann, showing the prologue. Based on the stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann, it features three doomed romances, with his friend Nicklausse – actually Hoffmann's muse in disguise – following him around, attempting to protect him, even as tragedies befall all around him. However, in the end he explains the three women he described are actually elements of his fourth love, whom he then rejects, and the muse reveals herself and embraces him.
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Les contes d'Hoffmann, Olympia act
Credit: Pierre-Auguste Lamy (?), restored by Adam CuerdenIllustration for Jacques Offenbach's last composition Les contes d'Hoffmann, showing the Olympia act. In this act, Hoffmann falls in love with an automaton, Olympia, created by the scientist Spalanzani. To warn Hoffmann, Nicklausse, who knows the truth about Olympia, sings a story of a mechanical doll who looked like a human, but Hoffmann ignores him. Coppélius, Olympia's co-creator and this act's incarnation of Nemesis, sells Hoffmann magic glasses that make Olympia appear as a real woman.
Olympia sings one of the opera's most famous arias, "Les oiseaux dans la charmille" (The birds in the arbor, nicknamed "The Doll Song"), during which she periodically runs down and needs to be wound up before she can continue. Hoffmann is tricked into believing that his affections are returned, to the bemusement of Nicklausse, who subtly tries to warn his friend. While dancing with Olympia, Hoffmann falls on the ground and his glasses break. At the same time, Coppélius appears and tears Olympia apart to retaliate against Spalanzani, who tricked him out of his fees. With the crowd laughing at him, Hoffmann realizes that he was in love with an automaton.
Olympia sings one of the opera's most famous arias, "Les oiseaux dans la charmille" (The birds in the arbor, nicknamed "The Doll Song"), during which she periodically runs down and needs to be wound up before she can continue. Hoffmann is tricked into believing that his affections are returned, to the bemusement of Nicklausse, who subtly tries to warn his friend. While dancing with Olympia, Hoffmann falls on the ground and his glasses break. At the same time, Coppélius appears and tears Olympia apart to retaliate against Spalanzani, who tricked him out of his fees. With the crowd laughing at him, Hoffmann realizes that he was in love with an automaton.
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Les contes d'Hoffmann, Giulietta act
Credit: Pierre-Auguste Lamy (?), restored by Adam CuerdenIllustration to Jacques Offenbach's last composition Les contes d'Hoffmann, showing the Giulietta act, set in Venice. In this act, Hoffmann falls in love with the courtesan Giulietta and thinks she returns his affections. Giulietta is not in love with Hoffmann but only seducing him under the orders of Captain Dapertutto, who has promised to give her a diamond if she steals Hoffmann's reflection from a mirror. The jealous Schlemil, a previous victim of Giulietta and Dapertutto (he gave Giulietta his shadow), challenges the poet to a duel, but is killed. Nicklausse wants to take Hoffmann away from Venice and goes looking for horses. Meanwhile, Hoffmann meets Giulietta and cannot resist her, giving her his reflection, only to be abandoned by the courtesan, to Dapertutto's great pleasure. Hoffmann tells Dapertutto that his friend Nicklausse will come and save him. Dapertutto prepares a poison to get rid of Nicklausse, but Giulietta drinks it by mistake and drops dead in the poet's arms.
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Credit: Max Brückner, published by Otto Henning, restored by Adam Cuerden
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Pierre Gaveaux, a French operatic tenor and composer, notable for creating the role of Jason in Cherubini's Médée and for composing Leonore ou l'amour conjugal, the first operatic version of the story that later found fame as Fidelio.
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Credit: Anonymous, restored by Adam Cuerden
English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor whose opera Thelma, long thought to have been lost, was given its posthumous premiere in 2012, the centenary year of his death
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The French composer Jules Massenet (1842 – 1912), best known for his operas, of which he wrote more than thirty. By the time of his death, Massenet was regarded by many critics as old-fashioned and unadventurous although his two best-known operas, Manon and Werther, remained popular in France and abroad. After a few decades of neglect, his works began to be favourably reassessed during the mid-20th century, and many of them have since been staged and recorded.
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The French composer, organist, pianist, and conductor, Camille Saint-Saëns (1835 – 1921). His best-known works include Danse macabre, the Organ Symphony, The Carnival of the Animals, and the opera Samson and Delilah. The composers Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Ravel were strongly influenced by Saint-Saëns, whom they revered as a genius.
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The American composer William Grant Still (1895 – 1978) whose 150 works included five symphonies and eight operas. His opera Troubled Island, set in Haiti and based on the life of Jean Jacques Dessalines, was premiered by New York City Opera in 1949 and became the first opera by an African American composer to be performed by a major company.
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The French composer Charles Gounod (1818 – 1893) whose twelve operas include Faust and Roméo et Juliette. His fourth opera, Faust, premiered in 1859 and was his first commercial success. It became one of the most frequently staged operas of all time. By 1975 it had been given no fewer than 2,000 performances at the Paris Opéra alone.
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Jacques Offenbach (1819 – 1880), a German-born French composer, cellist and impresario of the romantic period. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas and his opera The Tales of Hoffmann. His Orpheus in the Underworld, first performed in 1858, is said to be the first full-length classical operetta. Offenbach was 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 as well as The Tales of Hoffmann continue to be staged in the 21st.
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Philippe Chaperon's set design for the final act of Verdi's Rigoletto in an 1885 production at the Palais Garnier. The scene depicts the house of the assassin Sparafucile who has been paid by Rigoletto to kill the licentious Duke of Mantua who is seen sleeping in the upstairs room. In the end, it is not the Duke whom Sparafucile murders, but Rigoletto's daughter Gilda who disguised herself as a man.
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Set design and illustration credit: Philippe Chaperon; restored by Adam Cuerden
Haydée is an opéra comique by the French composer Daniel Auber, first performed by the Théâtre Royal de l'Opéra-Comique at the Salle Favart in Paris on 28 December 1847. The libretto, based on a short story by Prosper Mérimée, was written by Eugène Scribe. The plot is set during the 16th-century wars between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire, and involves a naval commander with a guilty secret, his ward, his slave girl, a handsome captain and a villainous spy. After much confusion and intrigue, everything ends happily for the main protagonists. This illustration shows Philippe Chaperon's set design for the second act of a 1891 Opéra-Comique performance of Haydée at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris.
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Credit: Jean-Baptiste Singry, restored by Adam Cuerden
The French soprano Joséphine Fodor who made her debut in 1810 in Fioravanti's, Le cantatrici villane at the Impérial Opera of Saint Petersburg singing in both Russian and French. Rossini wrote a special aria for her when she sang Rosina in The Barber of Seville at the Théâtre-Italien in Paris in 1820.
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Credit: Paul Maurou (1848–1931), restored by Adam Cuerden
Poster for the original production of Edmond Audran's opera Gillette de Narbonne. The opera recounts the tale of the beautiful but penniless Gillette and her reluctant bridegroom, the philandering Roger. At one point in the intrigue, she disguises herself as her own twin brother.
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Philippe Chaperon's set design for act 1 of Meyerbeer's grand opera Les Huguenots in a production at the Palais Garnier in 1897. Les Huguenots, which premiered in 1836, was the first opera to be performed more than 1,000 times at the Paris Opéra.
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Credit: Eugène Du Faget, restored by Adam Cuerden
Costume designs for the première of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots featuring Julie Dorus-Gras as Marguerite, Adolphe Nourrit as Raoul, and Cornélie Falcon as Valentine. Three years after the premiere, Nouritt, beset with physical and mental illness, committed suicide in Naples.
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Credit: Charles Motte, restored by Adam Cuerden
A depiction of Gioachino Rossini's meeting with King George IV at the Brighton Pavilion in 1823. George IV made much of Rossini when he arrived in England with his wife Isabella Colbran. He and Colbran had signed contracts for an opera season at the King's Theatre in London. However, Colbran's vocal shortcomings were a serious liability, and she reluctantly retired from performing. Public opinion was not improved by Rossini's failure to provide a new opera for the theatre, as promised.
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A depiction of the storm scene from the final act of Gioachino Rossini's opera The Barber of Seville in which Count Almaviva and Figaro climb through the window to foil the plans of Rosina's guardian Bartolo.
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Credit: Eugène Du Faget, restored by Adam Cuerden
Costume designs for Gioachino Rossini's opera William Tell, featuring Laure Cinti-Damoreau as Mathilde, Adolphe Nourrit as Arnold Melchtal, and Nicolas Levasseur as Walter Furst. William Tell was Rossini's last opera. Its overture has been repeatedly used in both classical music and popular media, most famously as the theme music for The Lone Ranger on radio, film, and television.
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Set design for act 3, scene 2 of Louise Bertin's 1838 opera La Esmeralda. Based on The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and with a libretto by Victor Hugo himself, it would be the last of Bertin's operas after it was hounded off stage by those that opposed Hugo's politics, and those that claimed that it was produced solely due to Bertin's family connections, in the end, causing a near-riot in the theatre on the last of its six performances, as the anti-Bertin factions succeeded in shutting it down. It would not be produced again until 2002.
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Illustration credit: Carlos Schwabe; restored by Adam Cuerden
Fervaal is an opera with a prologue and three acts by the French composer Vincent d'Indy. Fervaal is the son of a Celtic king and is destined to be the last advocate of the old gods. His mission is to save his homeland from invasion and pillage, but in doing so he must renounce love. This illustration, by the Swiss painter Carlos Schwabe, relates to the 10 May 1898 premiere of the opera at the Théâtre de l'Opéra-Comique in Paris. Here, Fervaal is depicted ascending a mountain while carrying the body of his beloved Guilhen at the end of the opera, as the pagan gods and their worshippers fade out of existence with the dawn of Christianity.
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Credit: Unknown, sometimes attributed to Rauzzini. Restoration by Adam Cuerden
A scene from Mascagni's opera Cavalleria rusticana in which Santuzza begs Turiddu not to join his lover Lola inside the village church. His angry refusal leads Santuzza betray him to Lola's husband who ultimately kills Turiddu in a knife duel. Cavalleria rusticana, which premiered in 1890, was Mascagni's first and most popular opera. There have been over 100 full-length recordings of the work since it was first recorded in Germany in 1909.
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Credit: Unknown, sometimes attributed to Rauzzini; restored by Adam Cuerden
A scene from Mascagni's opera Cavalleria rusticana in which Alfio challenges Turiddu to a duel after learning that he has seduced his wife. Following Sicilian custom, the two men embrace, and Turiddu, in a token of acceptance, bites Alfio's ear, drawing blood which signifies a fight to the death. Cavalleria rusticana, which premiered in 1890, was Mascagni's first and most popular opera. There have been over 100 full-length recordings of the work since it was first recorded in Germany in 1909.
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Credit: Artist unknown; restored by Adam Cuerden
Design for a poster for the Paris première of Massenet's opera Thérèse, showing Lucy Arbell in the title role. Set in the French Revolution, the opera concerns Thérèse, who is torn between duty and affection, between her husband André Thorel, a Girondist, and her lover, the nobleman Armand de Clerval. Although she had decided to follow her lover into exile, when her husband is being led to execution she shouts "Vive le roi!" (Long live the king!) amid the frenzied crowd and is dragged to her husband's side and marched to the guillotine.
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Credit: Henri C. R. Presseq, published by Imp. P. Dupont. Restored by Adam Cuerden.
Poster for the 1900 première of Camille Erlanger's opera Le Juif polonais starring Victor Maurel as the innkeeper Mathias. A melodramatic climax occurs in act 2 when the sound of sleigh bells at his daughter's wedding reminds Mathias of the Jew he had murdered 15 years ago.
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Credit: Reutlinger photographers. Restoration by Adam Cuerden.
Poster for Massenet's opera La Navarraise, showing Emma Calvé in the role of Anita. La Navarraise was Massenet's answer to Italian verismo and was very popular in its day, often being performed on a double bill with Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana.
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Credit: Henri Télory. Restoration by Adam Cuerden
Poster for the premiere of Meyerbeer's opera Le pardon de Ploërmel (later renamed Dinorah), presented by the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 4 April 1859. Set near the rural town of Ploërmel, the opera is based on two Breton tales by Émile Souvestre.
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Credit: Prudent-Louis Leray. Restoration by Adam Cuerden
Poster from the 1875 première of Bizet's opera Carmen. Set in southern Spain, the opera tells the story of the downfall of Don José, a naïve soldier who is seduced by the wiles of the fiery gypsy Carmen. José abandons his childhood sweetheart and deserts from his military duties, yet loses Carmen's love to the glamorous toreador, Escamillo, after which José kills her in a jealous rage. The depictions of proletarian life, immorality, and lawlessness, and the tragic death of the main character on stage, broke new ground in French opera and were highly controversial. Carmen has since become one of the most popular and frequently performed operas in the classical canon; the "Habanera" from act 1 and the "Toreador Song" from act 2 are among the best known of all operatic arias. Bizet died suddenly after the 33rd performance, unaware that the work would achieve international acclaim within the following ten years.
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Nadar's photograph of Célestine Galli-Marié (1837–1905), a French mezzo-soprano most famous for creating the title role in Bizet's opera Carmen. She is wearing Carmen's costume in Nadar's photograph. It was said that at the 33rd performance of Carmen on 2 June 1875, Galli-Marié had a premonition of Bizet's death while singing the cards scene in Act III, and fainted when she left the stage. The composer in fact died that night, and the next performance was cancelled due to her indisposition.
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Carte-de-visite of Lucy Arbell, a French mezzo-soprano who was particularly associated with the late operas of Jules Massenet. She was described as having a strong, vibrant 'mezzo-contralto' and a vivacious personality. Arbell made her stage debut as Dalila at the Paris Opéra on 23 October 1903. She had a close relationship with the late operas of Massenet, creating roles in Ariane (Perséphone), Thérèse (title role), Bacchus (Queen Amahelli), Don Quichotte (Dulcinée) in Monte-Carlo and Paris, Roma (Postumia), and Panurge (Colombe).
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Credit: Unknown artist. Restoration by Adam Cuerden
The stage setting for Part 1 of Maurice Ravel's opera, L'enfant et les sortilèges. The libretto by Colette tells the story of a rude child whose destructive behaviour is ultimately transformed when the objects and animals he has harmed come to life and reprimand him. Marie-Thérèse Gauley sang the role of the child at both the 1925 world premiere in Monte-Carlo and the opera's first performance at the Opéra-Comique in 1926.
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Credit: Unknown artist. Restoration by Adam Cuerden
The stage setting for part 2 of Maurice Ravel's opera, L'enfant et les sortilèges. The libretto by Colette tells the story of a rude child whose destructive behaviour is ultimately transformed when the objects and animals he has harmed come to life and reprimand him. In this final scene, the child wanders outside to a garden filled with singing animals and plants. After being offered the opportunity to write a musical work, Colette wrote the text of L'enfant et les sortilèges in eight days. Several composers were proposed to her but she was only excited by the prospect of Ravel.
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Poster for the world premiere of Massenet's opera Le Mage on 16 March 1891 at the Paris Opéra. The libretto by Jean Richepin recounts the fraught love story of Zarastra, a Persian general and magus, and Anahita, a captive Touranian queen. The French tenor Edmond Vergnet sang the title role at the premiere.
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Poster for the world premiere of Massenet's opera Don César de Bazan at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 30 November 1872. The libretto by Adolphe d'Ennery, Philippe-François Pinel, and Jules Chantepie is based on Victor Hugo's play Ruy Blas. The title role was sung at the premiere by the Belgian baritone Jacques Bouhy, who created the role of the toreador Escamillo in Carmen three years later.
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Credit: Eugène Grasset. Restoration by Adam Cuerden
Poster for the Paris premiere of Massenet's opera Werther in 1893. The libretto by Édouard Blau, Paul Milliet, and Georges Hartmann is loosely based on Goethe's epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. The opera entered the permanent repertoire at the Opéra-Comique in 1903 in a production supervised by Albert Carré and over the next half-century was performed there over 1,100 times.
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Credit: Luigi Verardi after Dominico Ferri. Restoration by Adam Cuerden
The stage setting for act 2 of Gaetano Donizetti's opera Marino Faliero at its world premiere in 1835 at the Théâtre-Italien in Paris. The libretto by Giovanni Emanuele Bidera was based Casimir Delavigne's play, which was in turn inspired by Lord Byron's 1820 blank verse tragedy Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice. The opera is based on events in the life of Marino Faliero, the 55th Doge of Venice who was beheaded in 1355.
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Credit: Luigi Verardi after Dominico Ferri, restored by Adam Cuerden
The Hall of Arms (act 1, scene 3) in the original 1835 production of Vincenzo Bellini's opera I puritani. The libretto by Count Carlo Pepoli, recounts the love story of Arturo, a Royalist, and Elvira, the daughter of a Puritan. Their roles were sung at the premiere by Giovanni Battista Rubini and Giulia Grisi. Bellini took three months between the completion of the score and start of rehearsals to polish the work, which proved an immense and enduring success. I puritani was Bellini's last opera. He died nine months after its premiere at the age of 33.
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Credit: Christian Michelides
Ambrogio Maestri, an Italian operatic baritone portraying the title character in Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff (a role he is particularly known for) in the 2016 Vienna State Opera production.
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Lucy Arbell as Queen Amahelli in Massenet's opera Bacchus. The story is based on the mythology surrounding Bacchus and Ariadne (Ariane). The Gods, among them demi-god Bacchus, appear in human form in ancient India to attempt to persuade the people away from the pervading Buddhist influence. Ariane has followed them, convinced that Bacchus is in fact Theseus, her unrequited love. In the end, Ariane sacrifices herself to save humanity and in doing so, Bacchus becomes a God.
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Credit: Unknown artist, restored by Adam Cuerden
Julie d'Aubigny, (1670/1673–1707), better known as Mademoiselle Maupin or La Maupin, was a 17th-century opera singer. Little is known for certain about her life; her tumultuous career and flamboyant lifestyle were the subject of gossip, rumor, and colourful stories in her own time, and inspired numerous fictional and semi-fictional portrayals afterwards. Théophile Gautier loosely based the title character, Madeleine de Maupin, of his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) on her. The part written for her in Tancrède, Clorinde, is considered the first example of writing for the contralto voice in French opera.
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Credit: Adolf Hohenstein, restored by Adam Cuerden
Advertisement for the music score of La bohème, with artwork by the costume designer for the première. La bohème is an opera in four acts composed by Giacomo Puccini between 1893 and 1895 to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, based on Scènes de la vie de bohème (1851) by Henri Murger. The story is set in Paris around 1830, and shows the Bohemian lifestyle (known in French as la bohème) of a poor seamstress and her artist friends, with a mixture of joy and tragedy.
The world premiere of La bohème was in Turin on 1 February 1896. Since then, La bohème has become part of the standard Italian opera repertory and is one of the most frequently performed operas worldwide.
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Credit: Célestin Deshayes, restored by Adam Cuerden
Set design for act 2 of Giacomo Meyerbeer's opera Les Huguenots for its première performance in 1836. Les Huguenots tells the story of the love between a Huguenot (Protestant) man and a Catholic woman, while religious hatred sweeps across France, culminating in the historical St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, during which the woman's father, finding the Huguenots, realises only after killing them that his daughter was with them, and has now died at his hand.
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Poster for Gismonda, a 1919 French-language grand opera by Henry Février to a libretto by Henri Caïn and Louis Payen. Based on the play Gismonda by Victorien Sardou, it tells the story of the widow of the Duke of Athens, Gismonda, who has to deal with conspiracies to kill her child and the man she grows to love. The planned premiere in Paris was halted by the outbreak of World War I but the composer was given leave from the French army to premiere the opera with Mary Garden in the title role at the Chicago Opera on 14 January 1919, before being performed in Paris at the Opéra-Comique on 15 October of the same year.
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Poster for Ariane, an opera in five acts by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Catulle Mendès after the tale of Ariadne from Greek mythology. First performed at the Palais Garnier in Paris on 31 October 1906, with Lucienne Bréval in the title role, the story is based on the mythology surrounding Theseus and the sisters Ariane and Phèdre. Both sisters are in love with Theseus, yet he chooses Phèdre over Ariane. When Phèdre is killed by the toppled statue of Adonis, Ariane travels to the underworld to beg Perséphone for her sister's resurrection. Softened by Ariane's offering of roses, Perséphone complies and Phèdre returns to earth. Theseus is then made to choose among the sisters again and once more chooses Phèdre, abandoning Ariane on the banks of Naxos. Distraught, she is lured into the sea by the voices of the beckoning sirens.
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Credit: George Grantham Bain Collection; Restored by Adam Cuerden
Dame Ethel Mary Smyth, DBE 22 April 1858 – 8 May 1944) was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works and operas.
She first studied privately with Alexander Ewing when she was seventeen. He introduced her to the music of Wagner and Berlioz. After a major battle with her father about her plans to devote her life to music, Smyth was allowed to advance her musical education at the Leipzig Conservatory, where she studied composition with Carl Reinecke. She left after a year, however, disillusioned with the low standard of teaching, and continued her music studies privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg. While she was at the Leipzig Conservatory, she met Dvořák, Grieg and Tchaikovsky. Through Herzogenberg, she also met Clara Schumann and Brahms.
Smyth's extensive body of work includes the Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra and the Mass in D. Her opera The Wreckers is considered by some critics to be the "most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten." 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 in December 2016.Portal:Opera/Selected picture/126
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Set design for act 3, scene 1 of Louise Bertin's 1838 opera La Esmeralda. Based on The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and with a libretto by Victor Hugo himself, it would be the last of Bertin's operas after it was hounded off stage by those that opposed Hugo's politics, and those that claimed that it was produced solely due to Bertin's family connections, in the end, causing a near-riot in the theatre on the last of its six performances, as the anti-Bertin factions succeeded in shutting it down. It wouldn't be produced again until 2002.
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Set design for Fromental Halévy's La reine de Chypre, act 5, scene 2.
La reine de Chypre, first performed at the Salle Le Peletier of the Paris Opéra on 22 December 1841, was regarded in its time as one of the composer's greatest achievements. Joseph Mazilier was the choreographer, and the ballet starred Adéle Dumilâtre, Natalie Fitzjames, and Pauline Leroux with Marius Petipa and Auguste Mabile. The publisher Maurice Schlesinger was reputed to have paid the enormous sum of 30,000 francs for the rights to the opera.
The opera prompted an extended eulogy from Richard Wagner, who was present at the first night, in the Dresdner Abend-Zeitung, for which he was a correspondent. However, since the 19th century it has been rarely revived.Portal:Opera/Selected picture/128
The ramparts of Stirling Castle in a set design for act 3, scene 3, of Rossini's pasticcio opera, Robert Bruce.
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Nelly Martyl was a soprano who was awarded the Croix de Guerre with the carte du combattant (signifying service under particular hazard) in 1920. She created parts including Leborne's La Catalane (1907), Erlanger's La Sorcière (1912), and Massenet's Amadis (1922), but also worked as a Red Cross nurse during the First World War. She served in the Battle of Verdun in 1916, where she was called "la fée de Verdun" (the fairy of Verdun), and at the Second Battle of the Aisne in 1917, and continued to work as a nurse after the war to help fight the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic.
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The fly duet from the 1887 revival of Jacques Offenbach's Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld) with Jeanne Granier as Eurydice and Eugène Vauthier as Jupiter. In this raucous retelling of Greek myth, Orpheus and Eurydice hate each other (but the embodiment of Public Opinion will ruin Orpheus' reputation if he does not try and rescue her), Pluto is in love with Eurydice, but life in Hades is too boring for her, and Jupiter takes all the gods down below to party – and to try to seduce Eurydice. In the form of a fly.
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Set design for act 3 of the première of the French revised version of Gluck's opera Alceste, which had a largely rewritten third act. Based on the play Alcestis by Euripides, it tells the tale of a wife willing to sacrifice herself to save her husband, and her husband's unwillingness to let her die on his behalf. Hercules, wearing the Nemean lion's skin can be seen in the foreground.
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Credit: Pierre-Luc-Charles Cicéri, Eugène Cicéri, Philippe Benoist and Adolphe Jean Baptiste Bayot, restored by Adam Cuerden
Robert le diable was one of the defining works of the genre of grand opera, and helped rocket its composer, Giacomo Meyerbeer to fame. "The Ballet of the Nuns" from the third act, pictured here in an illustration of the original production, was additionally greatly influential on the development of ballet.
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Credit: Attilio Bododi, restored by Adam Cuerden
Giacomo Puccini (22 December 1858 – 29 November 1924) photographed in 1924. Called "the greatest composer of Italian opera after Verdi", his works include standards of the operatic repertoire such as La bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), Madama Butterfly (1904), and Turandot (1924, premiered 1926).
Puccini's early work was rooted in traditional late-19th-century romantic Italian opera, but he later successfully developed his work in the realistic verismo style, of which he became one of the leading exponents.
He died of smoking-related lung cancer shortly before finishing his last opera, Turandot, which was finished based on his sketches.Portal:Opera/Selected picture/134
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Rosa Raisa (30 May 1893 – 28 September 1963) was a Polish-born and Italian-trained Russian-Jewish dramatic operatic soprano who became a naturalized American. She possessed a voice of remarkable power and was the creator of the title role of Puccini's last opera, Turandot, at La Scala, Milan.
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Design for act 3 of Richard Wagner's opera Tannhäuser (1845) by Max and Otthold Brückner for the Bayreuth Festival. Tannhäuser is based on two German legends: Tannhäuser, the mythologized medieval German Minnesänger and poet, and the tale of the Wartburg Song Contest. The story centers on the struggle between sacred and profane love, and redemption through love, a theme running through much of Wagner's mature work. The opera remains a staple of major opera house repertoire in the 21st century.
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Act 1 costume for Wally as seen in the original production of Alfredo Catalani's opera La Wally (1892).
The opera is best known for its aria "Ebben? Ne andrò lontana" ("Well, then? I'll go far away") from act 1, in which Wally decides to leave her home forever).
It also features a memorable death scene in which the heroine throws herself into the avalanche that has just killed her lover after he called out to her. It is seldom performed, partly because of the difficulty of staging this scene, but Wally's principal aria is still sung frequently.Portal:Opera/Selected picture/137
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Act 3 set design for Edgar, an operatic dramma lirico in three acts (originally four acts) by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Ferdinando Fontana, freely based on the play in verse La Coupe et les lèvres by Alfred de Musset.
The first performance was given at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan on 21 April 1889. The opera was not a success. Puccini repeatedly revised it, before eventually giving up in frustration, declaring the work irredeemable.
The first performance was given at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan on 21 April 1889. The opera was not a success. Puccini repeatedly revised it, before eventually giving up in frustration, declaring the work irredeemable.
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Set design for act 1 of Madama Butterfly, an opera in three acts (originally two) by Giacomo Puccini, with an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, 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, had its premiere on 17 February 1904 at La Scala in Milan. It was poorly received, despite having such notable singers as soprano Rosina Storchio, tenor Giovanni Zenatello and baritone Giuseppe De Luca in lead roles. This was due in part to a late completion by Puccini, which gave inadequate time for rehearsals. Puccini revised the opera, splitting the second act in two, with the Humming Chorus as a bridge to what became act 3, and making other changes. Success ensued, starting with the first performance on 28 May 1904 in Brescia.
The original version of the opera, in two acts, had its premiere on 17 February 1904 at La Scala in Milan. It was poorly received, despite having such notable singers as soprano Rosina Storchio, tenor Giovanni Zenatello and baritone Giuseppe De Luca in lead roles. This was due in part to a late completion by Puccini, which gave inadequate time for rehearsals. Puccini revised the opera, splitting the second act in two, with the Humming Chorus as a bridge to what became act 3, and making other changes. Success ensued, starting with the first performance on 28 May 1904 in Brescia.
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Set design for act 1 of A basso porto ( "At the lower harbour"), a three-act opera by composer Niccola Spinelli. The opera uses an Italian language libretto by Eugene Checchi which is based on Goffredo Cognetti's 1889 play O voto. The opera premiered to critical success at the Cologne Opera on April 18, 1894, sung in a German translation by Ludwig Hartmann and Otto Hess. The work is widely considered Spinelli's greatest composition, and the prelude to the opera's third act has been programmed by numerous orchestras for performances in concert.
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Credit: Icilio Calzolari, restored by Adam Cuerden
Cabinet card of Amilcare Ponchielli, circa 1870s. Ponchielli was an Italian opera composer, best known for his opera La Gioconda and, specifically, The Dance of the Hours which forms that opera's third act finale, and is frequently performed on its own, including in Walt Disney's Fantasia. He was married to the soprano Teresina Brambilla.
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Credit: Giulio Rossi; restored by Adam Cuerden
Giuseppe Verdi depicted with his friends and family at the Villa Verdi in 1900. Standing: Teresa Stolz, Umberto Campanari (one of Verdi's estate lawyers), Giulio Ricordi, and Leopoldo Metlicovitz (a poster artist for Ricordi). Seated: Maria Carrara Verdi (Verdi's adopted daughter), Barberina Strepponi (Verdi's sister-in-law), Giuseppe Verdi, and Giuditta Ricordi (Giulio's wife).
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Credit: The U.S. Lithograph Co., Restored by Adam Cuerden
The Fortune Teller is an operetta in three acts written by Victor Herbert, with a libretto by Harry B. Smith. After a brief tryout in Toronto, it premiered on Broadway on September 26, 1898, at Wallack's Theatre and ran for 40 performances. It was revived on November 4, 1929, at Jolson's 59th Street Theatre and ran for 16 performances.
Herbert wrote his sixth operetta for prima donna Alice Nielsen and her newly formed Alice Nielsen Opera Company. Nielsen, having earned widespread praise in The Serenade, requested and received not one but three roles in The Fortune Teller. The story is set in Hungary and involves Irma, an heiress from Budapest, who is studying for the ballet. Irma is in love with a young Hussar captain but is being forced to marry the silly Count Barezowski. When a gypsy fortune teller, Musette, arrives, she is mistaken for Irma, a case of mistaken identity that fosters many complications.
Songs include the "Gypsy Love Song" ("Slumber on, my little gypsy sweetheart") and "Romany Life".Portal:Opera/Selected picture/143
Credit: Robert Jacob Hamerton, restored by Adam Cuerden
The Contrabandista, or The Law of the Ladrones, is a two-act comic opera by Arthur Sullivan and F. C. Burnand. It premiered at St. George's Hall, London, on 18 December 1867 under the management of Thomas German Reed, for a run of 72 performances. There were brief revivals in Manchester in 1874 and America in 1880. In 1894, it was revised into a new opera, The Chieftain, with a completely different second act.
The piece was the first of Sullivan's full-length operas that was produced. Although it was not a great success, it exhibits many of the qualities and techniques that Sullivan would employ in composing his twenty further comic operas, including the famous series of fourteen Gilbert and Sullivan operas produced between 1871 and 1896.
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Photograph credit: Carl Van Vechten; restored by Adam Cuerden
William Grant Still (1895–1978) was an American composer of nearly 200 works, including five symphonies and nine operas. Often referred to as the "Dean of Afro-American Composers", Still was the first American composer to have an opera produced by the New York City Opera. His first symphony, entitled Afro-American Symphony, was until 1950 the most widely performed symphony composed by an American. Born in Mississippi, he grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, attended Wilberforce University and Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and was a student of George Whitefield Chadwick and later Edgard Varèse. Still was the first African American to conduct a major American symphony orchestra and the first to have an opera performed on national television. Due to his close association and collaboration with prominent African-American literary and cultural figures, he is considered to be part of the Harlem Renaissance movement.
This picture of Still was taken by Carl Van Vechten in 1949; the photograph is in the collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
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Pénélope is an opera in three acts by Gabriel Fauré and René Fauchois based on the end of Homer's Odyssey. The premiere at Monte Carlo was not a great success, partly because the director of the theatre, Raoul Gunsbourg, was more concerned with promoting his own opera, Vénise. Fauré regarded the Monte Carlo production as "a rehearsal for Paris" where it was rapturously received at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées two months later on 10 May 1913. However, less than three weeks after the premiere of the opera the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées was the venue for the first performance of The Rite of Spring. The scandal at and after the ballet's premiere preoccupied the French press, and Fauré's opera left the discourse, followed by financial collapse and near bankruptcy of the theatre six months after the première, forcing the sets and costumes to be sold.
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Poster for the première of Claude Debussy and Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande
Credit: Georges Rochegrosse, restored by Adam CuerdenPelléas et Mélisande is an opera in five acts with music by Claude Debussy adapted from Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist play of the same name. It premiered at the Salle Favart in Paris by the Opéra-Comique on 30 April 1902. Although the only opera Debussy ever completed, it is considered a landmark in 20th-century music.
The plot concerns a love triangle. Prince Golaud finds Mélisande, a mysterious young woman, lost in a forest. He marries her and brings her back to the castle of his grandfather, King Arkel of Allemonde. Here Mélisande becomes increasingly attached to Golaud's younger half-brother Pelléas, arousing Golaud's jealousy. Golaud goes to excessive lengths to find out the truth about Pelléas and Mélisande's relationship, even forcing his own child, Yniold, to spy on the couple. Pelléas decides to leave the castle but arranges to meet Mélisande one last time and the two finally confess their love for one another. Golaud, who has been eavesdropping, rushes out and kills Pelléas. Mélisande dies shortly after, having given birth to a daughter, with Golaud still begging her to tell him “the truth.”
Despite its initial controversy, Pelléas et Mélisande has remained regularly staged and recorded throughout the 20th- and into the 21st-century.Portal:Opera/Selected picture/148
Marian Anderson (February 27, 1897 – April 8, 1993)' was an American contralto who performed a wide range of music, from opera to spirituals with renowned orchestras in major concert and recital venues throughout the United States and Europe between 1925 and 1965.
Anderson was an important figure in the struggle for African-American artists to overcome racial prejudice in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. In 1939 during the era of racial segregation, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused to allow Anderson to sing to an integrated audience in Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. The incident placed Anderson in the spotlight of the international community on a level unusual for a classical musician. With the aid of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Anderson performed a critically acclaimed open-air concert on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939, on the Lincoln Memorial steps in the capital before an integrated crowd of more than 75,000 people and a radio audience in the millions.
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Credit: Metropolitan Printing Co., restored by Adam Cuerden
Poster advertising performances by Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones (January 5, 1868 or 1869 – June 24, 1933), an African-American soprano. She sometimes was called "The Black Patti" in reference to Italian opera singer Adelina Patti. Jones' repertoire included grand opera, light opera, and popular music. Trained at the Providence Academy of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music, Jones made her New York debut in 1888 at Steinway Hall, and four years later she performed at the White House for President Benjamin Harrison. She eventually sang for four consecutive presidents and the British royal family, and met with international success. Besides the United States and the West Indies, Jones toured in South America, Australia, India, southern Africa, and Europe.
The highest-paid African-American performer of her time, later in her career she founded the Black Patti Troubadours (later renamed the Black Patti Musical Comedy Company), a musical and acrobatic act made up of 40 jugglers, comedians, dancers and a chorus of 40 trained singers. She remained the star of the Famous Troubadours for around two decades while they established their popularity in the principal cities of the United States and Canada, Jones retired from performing in 1915. In 2013, she was inducted into the Rhode Island Music Hall of Fame.
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Marguérite Priola in the role of Javotte in Leo Delibes' Le roi l'a dit
Credit: Alexandre Quinet, restored by Adam CuerdenMarguerite-Marie-Sophie Polliart or Poliart, generally known by her stage name Priola, (1849–1876) was a French operatic soprano. She made her début on 6 April 1869 in Paris as The Messenger of Peace in the first French production of Wagner's Rienzi at the Théâtre Lyrique. She enjoyed a successful career at the Opéra-Comique until 1874, performing mainly coloratura soprano roles. There she created several roles, including Princess Elsbeth in Offenbach's Fantasio, Maritana in Massenet's Don César de Bazan, and Javotte in Le Roi l'a dit by Delibes. In 1876, on joining the Opéra de Marseille, she appeared as Philine in Mignon by Ambroise Thomas although she was ill. She was booed throughout the performance, and died three weeks later.
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Roma is an opera in five acts by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Henri Cain based on the play Rome vaincue by Dominique-Alexandre Parodi. It was first performed at the Opéra de Monte Carlo on 17 February 1912.
Roma was the last opera by Massenet to premiere in his lifetime. Three operas were subsequently premiered posthumously: Panurge (1913), Cléopâtre (1914) and Amadis (1922). The piece has not survived into the modern operatic repertoire, but has been revived recently and recorded by the Teatro la Fenice in Venice.
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Scenes from Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruddygore in the Illustrated London News
Credit: Amédée Forestier, restored by Adam CuerdenIllustration of Ruddygore; or, The Witch's Curse by Gilbert and Sullivan, as first performed by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company at the Savoy Theatre in London on 22 January 1887.
Key
| "When sailing o'er life's ocean wide": Richard, Rose, and Robin |
"Sir Rupert Murgatroyd": Dame Hannah and Chorus | |||||
| Richard | Ghost scene: "Painted emblems of a race": Robin collapsed in centre, surrounded by the ghosts of his ancestors |
One of the "Bucks and Blades" | ||||
| Dame Hannah | ||||||
| Rose Maybud | Dialogue before "There grew a little flower": Hannah, Roderic, and Robin |
Ruddygore | ||||
| Margaret Act I |
Margaret and Despard Act II |
Despard Act I | ||||
| At the Savoy Theatre | ||||||
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Lilly Walleni in Daria at the Kungliga Operan, Stockholm, in 1907
Lilly Walleni, the stage name of Sanna Klara Vallentin (1875–1920), was a Swedish mezzo-soprano. Thanks to her powerful voice and her dramatic temperament, she is remembered in particular for the Wagner roles she performed in Germany's principal opera houses as well as in Stockholm. From 1911 to 1916, she was engaged by the Court Opera in Hannover where she was honoured with two Lippe awards.
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Ghost scene from Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruddigore, 1921
Credit: H. M. Brock, restored by Adam CuerdenRuddigore; or, The Witch's Curse, originally called Ruddygore, is a comic opera in two acts, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. It is one of the Savoy Operas and the tenth of fourteen comic operas written together by Gilbert and Sullivan. It was first performed by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company at the Savoy Theatre in London on 22 January 1887.
The first night was not altogether a success, as critics and the audience felt that Ruddygore (as it was originally spelled) did not measure up to its predecessor, The Mikado. After some changes, including respelling the title, it achieved a run of 288 performances. The Illustrated London News praised the work of both Gilbert and, especially, Sullivan: "Sir Arthur Sullivan has eminently succeeded alike in the expression of refined sentiment and comic humour. In the former respect, the charm of graceful melody prevails; while, in the latter, the music of the most grotesque situations is redolent of fun."
There were further changes and cuts, including a new overture, when Rupert D'Oyly Carte revived Ruddigore for the first time since its original run for a 1920 tour that turned into a London run in 1921 (pictured here). This caused the opera to enter the repertory, which it has never left since.Portal:Opera/Selected picture/155
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Louise-Rosalie Lefebvre (18 June 1755 – 22 September 1821), also known as Madame Dugazon, was a French operatic mezzo-soprano, actress and dancer.
Born in Berlin as the daughter of a dancing master at the court of Frederick II of Prussia, she returned to Paris with her parents in 1765. She made her stage debut at the age of twelve as a dancer, but it was as an actress "with songs" that she made her debut at the Comédie Italienne in 1774 in Grétry's Sylvain. She was at once admitted pensionnaire and in 1775 sociétaire. She became a star of the Comédie Italienne (which became the Opéra-Comique), where she created over 60 roles, including the title rôle of Nicolas Dalayrac's Nina, seen here, in which Nina is in love with Germeuil but her father, Count Lindoro, favours another suitor. After Germeuil and his rival fight a duel, Nina believes that Germeuil has been killed and goes mad, forgetting aspects of the traumatic incident, and sings the opera's most famous song, "Quand le bien-aimé reviendra" ("When my sweetheart returns to me"). She only regains her reason when Germeuil reappears unharmed and her father finally allows him to marry her.
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Credit: Atelier Jaeger, restored by Adam Cuerden
Magna Elvine Lykseth-Skogman (6 February 1874 – 13 November 1949), also known as Magna Lykseth-Schjerven, was a Norwegian-born Swedish operatic soprano. After making her début at the Royal Swedish Opera in 1901 as Santuzza in Cavalleria rusticana, she was engaged there until 1918 becoming the company's prima donna. She performed leading roles in a wide range of operas but is remembered in particular for her Wagnerian interpretations, creating Brünnhilde in the Swedish premières of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, and Isolde in 1909. Considered to be one of the most outstanding Swedish opera singers of her generation, she was awarded the Litteris et Artibus medal in 1907 and became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in 1912.
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Cover of Ernst Perabo's set of piano transcriptions of Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe
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Nominations
[edit]Feel free to add related featured pictures, either from here or Commons, to the above list. Other pictures may be nominated at WP:FPC. If setting the image up is too difficult, list it below, and someone should get to it shortly.