It’s a nice coincidence that Saverio Mercadante’s name ends in -dante, because it was the poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) who saved Mercadante’s opera heroine Francesca da Rimini from being totally forgotten. As the dramaturge Mareike Wink writes in the Frankfurt program booklet to Mercadante’s opera, “if Dante hadn’t immortalized her Read More …
The composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950) was born in Dessau as the son of a Jewish Kantor. He is best known in Germany for The Three Penny Opera (1928) and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930) — both to texts by German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht Read More …
Ottone, Re di Germania (Otto, King of Germany) was Händel’s fifteenth opera, composed in 1722 and first performed on January 12, 1723 by the Royal Academy of Music at the King’s Theatre Haymarket in London. I saw it three centuries later, in March 2023, as part of the 45th International Read More …
The opera composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787) was 29 years younger than Händel and 42 years older than Mozart — although Mozart narrowed the age gap somewhat by starting to compose operas at age 11. Gluck tried out many different styles during his forty-year composing career, but today he is best Read More …
Despite the similarity of their names (Verdi means greens and Monteverdi means green mountain), the opera composers Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) and Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) were not related to each other. Since Monteverdi was born 256 years earlier, he could have been Verdi’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, but he wasn’t. Geographically, however, they were Read More …
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was one of the world’s first opera composers. He wrote at least eighteen operas, but most of them have been lost. His earliest surviving opera, L’Orfeo (Orpheus), was first performed in 1607 in Mantua, Italy, at the court of Duke Vincenzo I. Monteverdi was forty years old Read More …
Wagner’s operas are an acquired taste, and it took me about a decade to acquire. Not only was Wagner one of the two most influential opera composers of the nineteenth century, he was also a huge influence on Hitler and the rise of the Nazi party in the twentieth. The Read More …
After the pandemic-years 2020 and 2021, with their ever-changing rules and restrictions, the Frankfurt Chamber Opera (Kammeroper) returned to the Palmengarten and put on ten open-air performances of a staged opera in the summer of 2022. Okay, it was only a one-act opera, but they made it seem like two Read More …
To add to the excitement of an open-air performance, you never know how the weather is going to develop in this part of the world. For the summer performances of the Frankfurt Chamber Opera (Kammeroper), the bandstand of the Palmengarten is used as the stage, and it has a roof Read More …
The big open-air opera production at the St Gallen Festival in 2022 was supposed to have been Orleanskaja dewa (The Maid of Orleans) by the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893). But then, (as the general director of the St Gallen Theater explained it in the German opera magazine Das Read More …