This review is dedicated to the memory of my favorite actress, two-time Academy Award winner Olivia de Havilland, who died last Saturday at the age of 104. I learned of her death listening to the overture of this opera while working on this review. Opera in tre atti. Running Time: 2 hours 8 minutes. The […]
Grand Opera en quatre actes. Running Time: 2 hours 46 minutes (ballet cut). Opera Scribe has already reviewed this opera, and this is essentially a response. The opera consists of an overture and seventeen musical numbers. The composer was the nephew of the last king of Poland and was himself at one time an operatic […]
Opera in three acts. Running Time: 3 hours 7 minutes. As with Die Königin von Saba, here Goldmark is moving a bit more towards Wagner, yet only slightly. The decade between his first and second opera led to a composition that, although borrowing from Wagner even more heavily, is still within the Meyerbeerian grand opera of the mid-19th century […]
Opera in four acts. Running Time: 3 hours 9 minutes. In honor of the 104th birthday of my favorite actress of all time, Olivia de Havilland, I present this new post, a work which has given me more inspiration and joy than any other German-language opera. SETTING: Jerusalem and the surrounding desert, 10th century B.C.E. […]
Opera in four minutes and nine seconds. Searching for something very short to review, I found this never published (the score that is) Guinness World Record holder for the shortest opera in the world. Written in a single evening. The Welsh composer described its relationship to opera as a miniature is to a full portrait, […]
Opera in three acts. Running Time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Following the end of composition on The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya in 1907, Rimsky-Korsakov had concluded that that would be his last work, operatic or otherwise. However, he decided to write a satire on Russian autocracy and imperialism in the aftermath […]
Opera in four acts and an epilogue. Running Time: 3 hours 30 minutes. The Death of Ivan Susanin, Mikhail Scotti, 1851. This review (another of my jumbo 2500+ word reviews), is another one of my recent rewrites, but specifically is of the 1989 Sofia, Bulgaria recording with Chris Merritt as Sobinin, Boris Martinovich in the […]
Magic Opera (!) in five acts. Running Time: 3 hours 25 minutes. Setting for the Gardens of Chernomor, Andreas Roller, 1842. This opera had a complicated genesis. Glinka composed it piecemeal and out of performance order over a period of six years, with many of the numbers composed before the scenario had even been written […]
Commedia Fantastico in tre atti. Running Time: 2 hours. SETTING: Syria, Roman Era. The nomad Nersa (soprano) is romantically pursued by the elderly but rich Vadar (baritone) but is found by the god of the sea Init (tenor) who renames her Oceàna and tries to led her to his underwater kingdom. A couple of sea […]
Opera in due atti. Running Time: 2 hours 40 minutes. Six months after Ermione , Rossini had yet another premiere, this one in a much more romantic vein. La donna del Lago plays into the earliest phase of the Italian operatic obsession with all things Scottish as its plot is derived from an 1810 poem by Sir Walter Scott. Extremely popular […]
