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Beno Blachut
Beno Blachut (14 June 1913 – 10 January 1985) was a lauded Czech operatic tenor. An icon in his own nation, Blachut drew international acclaim through his many commercial recordings of Czech music. He was an instrumental part of the post-World War II school of Czech opera singers that were responsible for popularizing Czech opera internationally. He was highly regarded for his interpretations of roles in operas by Leoš Janáček, Antonín Dvořák, and Bedřich Smetana. Biography Born in Ostrava-Vítkovice, Blachut grew up in a poor family of miners. Blachut was highly involved in his church's music program which provided him with his initial musical training as a child and teenager. In 1927, at the age of 14, he began working at an iron factory and from all appearances it seemed he was destined to live a life similar to that of his parents. In the year 1935 he started to study singing at the Prague conservatory. At the conservatory, Blachut studied under Luis Kadeřábek ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Beno Blachut
Beno Blachut (14 June 1913 – 10 January 1985) was a lauded Czech operatic tenor. An icon in his own nation, Blachut drew international acclaim through his many commercial recordings of Czech music. He was an instrumental part of the post-World War II school of Czech opera singers that were responsible for popularizing Czech opera internationally. He was highly regarded for his interpretations of roles in operas by Leoš Janáček, Antonín Dvořák, and Bedřich Smetana. Biography Born in Ostrava-Vítkovice, Blachut grew up in a poor family of miners. Blachut was highly involved in his church's music program which provided him with his initial musical training as a child and teenager. In 1927, at the age of 14, he began working at an iron factory and from all appearances it seemed he was destined to live a life similar to that of his parents. In the year 1935 he started to study singing at the Prague conservatory. At the conservatory, Blachut studied under Luis Kadeřábek ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
La Traviata
''La traviata'' (; ''The Fallen Woman'') is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi set to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave. It is based on ''La Dame aux camélias'' (1852), a play by Alexandre Dumas ''fils'' adapted from his own 1848 novel. The opera was originally titled ''Violetta'', after the main character. It was first performed on 6 March 1853 at La Fenice opera house in Venice. Piave and Verdi wanted to follow Dumas in giving the opera a contemporary setting, but the authorities at La Fenice insisted that it be set in the past, "c. 1700". It was not until the 1880s that the composer's and librettist's original wishes were carried out and " realistic" productions were staged. ''La traviata'' has become immensely popular and is among the most frequently performed of all operas. Composition history For Verdi, the years 1851 to 1853 were filled with operatic activity. First, he had agreed with the librettist Salvadore Cammarano on a subject for what would ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edinburgh Festival
__NOTOC__ This is a list of arts and cultural festivals regularly taking place in Edinburgh, Scotland. The city has become known for its festivals since the establishment in 1947 of the Edinburgh International Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe which runs alongside it. The latter is the largest event of its kind in the world. The term ''Edinburgh Festival'' is commonly used, but there is no single festival; the various festivals are put on by separate, unrelated organisations. However they are widely regarded as part of the same event, particularly the various festivals that take place simultaneously in August each year. The term ''Edinburgh Festival'' is often used to refer more specifically to the Fringe, being the largest of the festivals; or sometimes to the International Festival, being the original "official" arts festival. Within the industry, people refer to all the festivals collectively as the ''Edinburgh Festivals'' (plural). The festivals Listed in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
500 Kc 2013 Blachut
5 (five) is a number, numeral and digit. It is the natural number, and cardinal number, following 4 and preceding 6, and is a prime number. It has attained significance throughout history in part because typical humans have five digits on each hand. In mathematics 5 is the third smallest prime number, and the second super-prime. It is the first safe prime, the first good prime, the first balanced prime, and the first of three known Wilson primes. Five is the second Fermat prime and the third Mersenne prime exponent, as well as the third Catalan number, and the third Sophie Germain prime. Notably, 5 is equal to the sum of the ''only'' consecutive primes, 2 + 3, and is the only number that is part of more than one pair of twin primes, ( 3, 5) and (5, 7). It is also a sexy prime with the fifth prime number and first prime repunit, 11. Five is the third factorial prime, an alternating factorial, and an Eisenstein prime with no imaginary part and real part of the form 3p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Otello
''Otello'' () is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Arrigo Boito, based on Shakespeare's play ''Othello''. It was Verdi's penultimate opera, first performed at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan, on 5 February 1887. The composer was reluctant to write anything new after the success of ''Aida'' in 1871, and he retreated into retirement. It took his Milan publisher Giulio Ricordi the next ten years, first to encourage the revision of Verdi's 1857 ''Simon Boccanegra'' by introducing Boito as librettist and then 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. It wasn't 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 premiere ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Faust (opera)
''Faust'' is an opera in five acts by Charles Gounod to a French libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré from Carré's play ''Faust et Marguerite'', in turn loosely based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's ''Faust, Part One''. It debuted at the Théâtre Lyrique on the Boulevard du Temple in Paris on 19 March 1859, with influential sets designed by Charles-Antoine Cambon and Joseph Thierry, Jean Émile Daran, Édouard Desplechin, and Philippe Chaperon. Performance history The original version of Faust employed spoken dialogue, and it was in this form that the work was first performed. The manager of the Théâtre Lyrique, Léon Carvalho cast his wife Caroline Miolan-Carvalho as Marguerite and there were various changes during production, including the removal and contraction of several numbers. The tenor Hector Gruyer was originally cast as Faust but was found to be inadequate during rehearsals, being eventually replaced by a principal of the Opéra-Comique, Joseph-Théodore ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Die Meistersinger Von Nürnberg
(; "The Master-Singers of Nuremberg"), WWV 96, is a music drama, or opera, in three acts, by Richard Wagner. It is the longest opera commonly performed, taking nearly four and a half hours, not counting two breaks between acts, and is traditionally not cut. With Hans von Bülow conducting, it was first performed on 21 June 1868 at the National Theatre Munich, National Theater in Munich, today home of Bavarian State Opera. The story is set in Nuremberg in the mid-16th century. At the time, Nuremberg was a free imperial city and one of the centers of the Renaissance in Northern Europe. The story revolves around the city's guild of ''Meistersinger'' (Master Singers), an association of amateur poets and musicians who were primarily Master craftsman, master craftsmen of various trades. The master singers had developed a craftsmanlike approach to music-making, with an intricate system of rules for composing and performing songs. The work draws much of its atmosphere from its depictio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aida
''Aida'' (or ''Aïda'', ) is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni. Set in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, it was commissioned by Cairo's Khedivial Opera House and had its première there on 24 December 1871, in a performance conducted by Giovanni Bottesini. Today the work holds a central place in the operatic canon, receiving performances every year around the world; at New York's Metropolitan Opera alone, ''Aida'' has been sung more than 1,100 times since 1886. Ghislanzoni's scheme follows a scenario often attributed to the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, but Verdi biographer Mary Jane Phillips-Matz argues that the source is actually Temistocle Solera. Elements of the opera's genesis and sources Isma'il Pasha, Khedive of Egypt, commissioned Verdi to write an opera to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal, but Verdi declined. However, Auguste Mariette, a French Egyptologist, proposed to Khedive Pasha a plot for a celebratory ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
War And Peace (Prokofiev)
''War and Peace'' (Op. 91) (russian: Война и мир, ''Voyna i mir'') is a 1946 230-minute opera in 13 scenes, plus an overture and an epigraph, by Sergei Prokofiev. Based on the 1869 novel ''War and Peace'' by Leo Tolstoy, its Russian libretto was prepared by the composer and Mira Mendelson. The first seven scenes are devoted to peace, the latter six, after the epigraph, to war. Although Tolstoy's work is classified as a novel, the 1812 invasion of Russia by the French was a historical event, and some real-life people appear as characters in both the novel and the opera, e.g. Prince Mikhail Kutuzov and Napoleon Bonaparte. Composition history Mendelson and Prokofiev's original scheme for the libretto of the opera envisaged 11 scenes, and Prokofiev began composing the music in the summer of 1942, spurred on by the German invasion of the Soviet Union which began on June 22, 1941. The description "lyric-dramatic scenes" in the libretto accurately suggests both a homage to Tch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eugene Onegin (opera)
''Eugene Onegin'' ( rus, Евгений Онегин, italic=yes, Yevgény Onégin, jɪvˈɡʲenʲɪj ɐˈnʲeɡʲɪn, Ru-Evgeny_Onegin.ogg), Opus number, Op. 24, is an opera ("lyrical scenes") in 3 acts (7 scenes), composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The libretto, organised by the composer himself, very closely follows certain passages in Alexander Pushkin's 1825-1832 Eugene Onegin, novel in verse, retaining much of his poetry. Tchaikovsky's friend Konstantin Shilovsky contributed M. Triquet's verses in Act 2, Scene 1, while Tchaikovsky himself arranged the text for Lensky's arioso in Act 1, Scene 1, and almost all of Prince Gremin's aria in Act 3, Scene 1. ''Eugene Onegin'' is a well-known example of lyric opera, to which Tchaikovsky added music of a dramatic nature. The story concerns a selfish hero who lives to regret his blasé rejection of a young woman's love and his careless incitement of a fatal duel with his best friend. The opera was first performed in Moscow in 1879. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Queen Of Spades (opera)
''The Queen of Spades'' or ''Pique Dame'', Op. 68 (russian: Пиковая дама, ''Pikovaya dama'' , french: La Dame de Pique) is an opera in three acts (seven scenes) by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to a Russian libretto by the composer's brother Modest Tchaikovsky, based on the 1834 novella of the same name by Alexander Pushkin, but with a dramatically altered plot. The premiere took place in 1890 at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Composition history The Imperial Theatre offered Tchaikovsky a commission to write an opera based on the plot sketch by Ivan Vsevolozhsky in 1887/88. After first turning it down, Tchaikovsky accepted it in 1889. Toward the end of that year, he met with the theatre's managers to discuss the material and sketch out some of the scenes. He completed the full score in Florence in only 44 days. Later, working with the tenor who was to perform the lead character, he created two versions of Herman's aria in the seventh scene, using diff ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fidelio
''Fidelio'' (; ), originally titled ' (''Leonore, or The Triumph of Marital Love''), Op. 72, is Ludwig van Beethoven's only opera. The German libretto was originally prepared by Joseph Sonnleithner from the French of Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, with the work premiering at Vienna's Theater an der Wien on 20 November 1805. The following year, Stephan von Breuning helped shorten the work from three acts to two. After further work on the libretto by Georg Friedrich Treitschke, a final version was performed at the Kärntnertortheater on 23 May 1814. By convention, both of the first two versions are referred to as ''Leonore''. The libretto, with some spoken dialogue, tells how Leonore, disguised as a prison guard named "Fidelio", rescues her husband Florestan from death in a political prison. Bouilly's scenario fits Beethoven's aesthetic and political outlook: a story of personal sacrifice, heroism, and eventual triumph. With its underlying struggle for liberty and justice mirroring con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
