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Adriana Lecouvreur
''Adriana Lecouvreur'' () is an opera in four acts by Francesco Cilea to an Italian libretto by Arturo Colautti, based on the 1849 play ''Adrienne Lecouvreur'' by Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé. It was first performed on 6 November 1902 at the Teatro Lirico in Milan. Background The same play by Scribe and Legouvé which served as a basis for Cilea's librettist was also used by at least three different librettists for operas carrying exactly the same name, ''Adriana Lecouvreur'', and created by three different composers. The first was an opera in three acts by Tomaso Benvenuti (premiered in Milan in 1857). The next two were lyric dramas in 4 acts by Edoardo Vera (to a libretto by Achille de Lauzières) which premiered in Lisbon in 1858, and by Ettore Perosio (to a libretto by his father), premiered in Genoa in 1889. After Cilea created his own ''Adriana'', however, none of those by others were performed anymore and they remain largely unknown today. The opera is based on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Francesco Cilea
Francesco Cilea (; 23 July 1866 – 20 November 1950) was an Italian composer. Today he is particularly known for his operas ''L'arlesiana'' and ''Adriana Lecouvreur''. Biography Born in Palmi near Reggio di Calabria, Cilea gave early indication of an aptitude for music when at the age of four he heard a performance of Vincenzo Bellini's ''Norma'' and was greatly affected by it. He was sent to study music at the Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella in Naples, where he quickly demonstrated his diligence and precocious talent, earning a gold medal from the Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione (Department of Education). In 1889, for his final examination at the end of his course of study, he submitted his opera ''Gina'', with a libretto by Enrico Golisciani which was adapted from the old French play ''Catherine, ou La Croix d'or'' by Baron Anne-Honoré-Joseph Duveyrier de Mélésville (1787–1865). This "melodramma idilico" was performed in the college theatre, and it attracted ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Giuseppe De Luca
Giuseppe De Luca (25 December 1876 – 26 August 1950), was an Italian baritone who achieved his greatest triumphs at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. He notably created roles in the world premieres of two operas by Giacomo Puccini: Sharpless in ''Madama Butterfly'' (at La Scala, Milan, 1904) and the title role in ''Gianni Schicchi'' (Metropolitan Opera, 1918). Biography De Luca was born on Christmas Day, 25 December 1876 in Rome, the son of a blacksmith. He sang in church choirs as a boy. After his voice broke, a wealthy patron paid for him to have singing lessons at the Rome Conservatory, where he studied with two top-class pedagogues, Venceslao Persichini (who also taught De Luca's fellow baritone stars Mattia Battistini and Titta Ruffo) and Antonio Cotogni. He made his operatic debut at Piacenza in 1897, singing Valentin in Gounod's ''Faust''. His debut proved a success and he was invited to sing at a string of more important venues. De Luca was renowned as a master ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Leyla Gencer
Ayşe Leyla Gencer (, née Çeyrekgil; 10 October 192810 May 2008) was a Turkish operatic soprano. Gencer was a notable ''bel canto'' soprano who spent most of her career in Italy, from the early 1950s through the mid-1980s, and had a repertoire encompassing more than seventy roles. She made very few commercial recordings; however, numerous bootleg recordings of her performances exist. She was particularly associated with the heroines of Donizetti. Early life Leyla Gencer was born in Polonezköy (near Istanbul) to a Turkish father and a Polish mother. Her father, Hasanzade İbrahim Bey (who took the surname ''Çeyrekgil'' under the Surname Law of 1934), was a wealthy businessman, whose family was from the city of Safranbolu. Her mother, Lexanda Angela Minakovska, was from a Roman Catholic family of the Lithuanian aristocracy (she later converted to Islam and chose the name ''Atiye'' after her husband's death.) Gencer's father died when she was very young. She grew up in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Warrack
John Hamilton Warrack (born 1928, in London) is an English music critic, writer on music, and oboist. Warrack is the son of Scottish conductor and composer Guy Warrack. He was educated at Winchester College (1941-6) and then at the Royal College of Music (1949–52). In the early 1950s he was a freelance oboist, playing mostly with the Boyd Neel Orchestra and Sadler's Wells Orchestra. From 1954 until 1961 he was music critic for ''The Daily Telegraph'', and from 1961 until 1972 he was music critic for ''The Sunday Telegraph''. From 1978 until 1983 he served as the Artistic Director of the Leeds Festival. From 1984 until 1993 he taught on the music faculty at the University of Oxford. He is the author of ''Six Great Composers'' (1955); ''Carl Maria von Weber'' ( Hamish Hamilton, 1968, 2nd ed. Cambridge UP, 1976), the standard study of Weber in English; ''German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner'' (2001) and the co-author of ''The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera'' (1964, wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Magda Olivero
Magda Olivero (née Maria Maddalena Olivero) (25 March 1910 – 8 September 2014), was an Italian operatic soprano. Her career started in 1932 when she was 22, and spanned five decades, establishing her "as an important link between the era of the verismo composers and the modern opera stage". She has been regarded as "one of the greatest singers of the twentieth century". Life and career Born as Maria Maddalena Olivero in Saluzzo, Italy, she followed complete musical studies (piano, harmony and composition), graduating in piano at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Turin. She later studied singing outside the Conservatory and made her singing debut in 1932 on radio performing Nino Cattozzo's (1886–1961) oratorio, ''I Misteri Dolorosi''. Landini, Giancarlo Olivero, Maria Maddalena, detta Magda', in ''Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (2017)''. Olivero performed widely and increasingly successfully until 1941, when she married the industrialist Aldo Busch and retired from t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Clara Petrella
Clara Petrella (28 March 1914 in Greco Milanese – 19 November 1987 in Milan) was an Italian operatic soprano, particularly associated with the Italian repertory, an outstanding singing-actress nicknamed the "Duse of Singers". Born in a musical family, she was a descendant of composer Errico Petrella, and the niece of soprano Oliva Petrella. She studied first with her sister Micaela, and later with Giannina Russ. She made her debut in Alessandria, as Liu, in 1939. She quickly sang throughout Italy, making her debut at La Scala in 1947, as Giorgetta in Il tabarro, she sang there regularly until 1962. She was particularly admired in the verismo repertory and contemporary works. She created many roles in opera by the following composers; Lodovico Rocca, Ildebrando Pizzetti, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, and Renzo Rossellini. Petrella had a beautiful spinto voice, combined with an explosive dramatic temperament, and she was compared to the great Italian actress Eleonora Duse. In th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Claudia Muzio
Claudia Muzio (7 February 1889 – 24 May 1936) was an Italian operatic soprano who enjoyed an international career during the early 20th century. Early years Claudina Emilia Maria Muzzio was born in Pavia, the daughter of Carlo Muzio, an operatic stage manager, whose engagements during her childhood took the family to opera houses around Italy as well as to Covent Garden in London and to the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Her mother was a choir singer, Giovanna Gavirati. Muzio arrived in London at the age of 2 and went to school there, becoming fluent in English, before returning to Italy at the age of 16 to study in Turin with Annetta Casaloni, a piano teacher and former operatic mezzo-soprano who had created the role of Maddalena in the world première of Verdi's ''Rigoletto''. Muzio then continued her vocal studies in Milan with Elettra Callery-Viviani. She also took the stage name of Claudia Muzio. Career Muzio made her operatic début in Arezzo (15 January 1910) in the t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tessitura
In music, tessitura (, pl. ''tessiture'', "texture"; ) is the most acceptable and comfortable vocal range for a given singer or less frequently, musical instrument, the range in which a given type of voice presents its best-sounding (or characteristic) timbre. This broad definition is often interpreted to refer specifically to the pitch range that most frequently occurs within a given part of a musical piece. Hence, in musical notation, ''tessitura'' is the ambitus, or a narrower part of it, in which that particular vocal (or less often instrumental) part lies—whether high or low, etc. However, the tessitura of a part or voice is not decided by the extremes of its range, but rather by the share of this total range which is most used. Hence, it is referred to as the "heart" of a range. For example, throughout the entirety of Wagner's ''Ring'', the music written for the tenor role of Siegfried ranges from C to C, but the tessitura is described as high because the phrases are mos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plácido Domingo
José Plácido Domingo Embil (born 21 January 1941) is a Spanish opera singer, conductor, and arts administrator. He has recorded over a hundred complete operas and is well known for his versatility, regularly performing in Italian, French, German, Spanish, English and Russian in the most prestigious opera houses in the world. Although primarily a ''lirico-spinto'' tenor for most of his career, especially popular for his Cavaradossi, Hoffmann, Don José and Canio, he quickly moved into more dramatic roles, becoming the most acclaimed Otello of his generation. In the early 2010s, he transitioned from the tenor repertory into exclusively baritone parts, most notably Simon Boccanegra. As of 2020, he has performed 151 different roles. Domingo has also achieved significant success as a crossover artist, especially in the genres of Latin and popular music. In addition to winning fourteen Grammy and Latin Grammy Awards, several of his records have gone silver, gold, platinum an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Renata Tebaldi
Renata Tebaldi ( , ; 1 February 1922 – 19 December 2004) was an Italian lirico-spinto soprano popular in the post-war period, and especially prominent as one of the stars of La Scala, San Carlo and, especially, the Metropolitan Opera. Often considered among the great opera singers of the 20th century, she focused primarily on the verismo roles of the lyric and dramatic repertoires. Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini called her voice "" ("the voice of an angel"), and La Scala music director Riccardo Muti called her "one of the greatest performers with one of the most extraordinary voices in the field of opera." Early years and education Born in Pesaro, Tebaldi was the daughter of cellist Teobaldo Tebaldi and Giuseppina Barbieri, a nurse. Her parents separated before her birth and Tebaldi grew up with her mother in her maternal grandparents' home in Langhirano. Stricken with polio at the age of three, Tebaldi became interested in music and sang with the church choir in L ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lina Cavalieri
Natalina "Lina" Cavalieri (25 December 1874 – 7 February 1944) was an Italian operatic dramatic soprano, actress, and monologist. Biography Lina Cavalieri was born on Christmas Day at Viterbo, some north of Rome. She lost her parents at the age of fifteen and became a ward of the state, sent to live in a Roman Catholic orphanage. The vivacious young girl was unhappy under the strict discipline of the nuns, and at the first opportunity she ran away with a touring theatrical group. At a young age, she made her way to Paris, France, where her appearance opened doors and she obtained work as a singer at one of the city's café-concerts. From there she performed at a variety of music halls and other such venues around Europe, while still working to develop her voice. She took voice lessons and made her opera debut in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1900 (as Nedda in ''Pagliacci''). The Russian Prince Alexander Bariatinsky was deeply in love with Lina, and they had an open affair, but never b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera (commonly known as the Met) is an American opera company based in New York City, resident at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, currently situated on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The company is operated by the non-profit Metropolitan Opera Association, with Peter Gelb as general manager. As of 2018, the company's current music director is Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The Met was founded in 1883 as an alternative to the previously established Academy of Music opera house, and debuted the same year in a new building on 39th and Broadway (now known as the "Old Met"). It moved to the new Lincoln Center location in 1966. The Metropolitan Opera is the largest classical music organization in North America. Until 2019, it presented about 27 different operas each year from late September through May. The operas are presented in a rotating repertory schedule, with up to seven performances of four different works staged each week. Performances are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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