Joan Sutherland: The leading coloratura soprano of the 20th century
Joan Sutherland (born November 7, 1926, Sydney, Australia – died October 10, 2010, Les Avants, Switzerland), was considered the leading coloratura soprano of the 20th century. A coloratura soprano has great flexibility in high-lying velocity passages, yet with great sustaining power comparable to that of a full spinto or dramatic soprano. Roles written specifically for […]
The Three Donizetti Queens: Anne Boleyn, Mary Stuart and Roberto Devereux
In the first half of the 19th century, Italy was a divided country, and it’s not a surprise that English monarch history fascinated audiences and a composer like Donizetti was attracted to stories of Tudor England. Donizetti’s trilogy of Tudor queens consists of three operas about Elizabeth I’s life and times in the bel canto […]
The Querelle des Bouffons: The controversy beetween French and Italian opera
The Querelle des Bouffons (also known as the War of the Comic Actors) was the name given to a battle of musical philosophies in France which took place between 1752 and 1754. The controversy concerned the relative merits of French and Italian opera. It is also known as the Guerre des Coins (“War of the […]
The myth of Orpheus in the opera
Orpheus was a legendary Greek musician and poet whose songs could charm gods and wild beasts, trees and rocks. The most famous Orphean story tells of his journey to the underworld to rescue his wife, Eurydice. The woman, set upon by a satyr while walking, had fallen into a nest of vipers and had been […]
Women opera composers: 10 of the greatest women in classical music
Gender equality among the opera composers has been unbalanced. This is a fact that can be demonstrated on a purely numerical basis. A number of reasons have been suggested to explain the relatively few women who have been composers of opera. Problems of access to musical education and to the male hierarchy of the musical […]
Falstaff: Verdi’s Last Opera
Falstaff is the last of Giuseppe Verdi’s 28 operas, and also his only comic opera together with his early Un Giorno di Regno. The libretto was adapted by Arrigo Boito from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and some passages from Henry IV (parts 1 and 2), the historical drama in which the figure of […]
Gianni Schicchi: Third and final instalment of Puccini’s “Il Trittico”
Gianni Schicchi is a short, one-act opera by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Giovacchino Forzano, composed in 1917–18. It is the third and final instalment of Puccini’s Il trittico (The Triptych) together with the operas Il tabarro and Suor Angelica. When Il trittico was first performed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in December […]
Il Trittico by Giacomo Puccini: Three One-Act Operas
The operatic genre of Verismo (end of the 19th century) is characterized by one-act operas, among which probably the most famous are Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (1890) and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892). Giacomo Puccini was no stranger to composing one-act operas. At the beginning of his career, after his years at the Milan Conservatory, he […]
Cav & Pag – a journey into Verismo
Pagliacci is an Italian opera with music and libretto by Ruggero Leoncavallo. Together with Cavalleria rusticana by Pietro Mascagni, it creates an inseparable duo affectionately known as Cav & Pag. Cavalleria rusticana, premiered in 1890, is the older of the two operas, predating Pagliacci by about two years. Even though these two operas weren’t originally […]
Gaetano Donizetti and the horror side of opera
A woman dressed in black appears showing five coffins for her poisoned victims. She is Lucrezia Borgia featured in Donizetti’s opera in a scene worthy of a horror film. It is not surprising that opera knows how to represent death in its most heartbreaking guise. Death intertwined with episodes of macabre madness and delirium. The […]
