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Erik Schmedes
Erik Anton Julius Schmedes (27 August 1868, in Gentofte, Denmark – 21 March 1931, in Vienna) was an operatic tenor, particularly known for his roles in operas by Richard Wagner. He was a brother-in-law by marriage of Vaslav Nijinsky. Career Schmedes was born into a family of musicians, the most prominent of which was his brother Hakon, a noted violinist and composer. After studying in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, he made his debut as a baritone (following encouragement from Pauline Viardot) in Wiesbaden, in 1891, as the Herald in ''Lohengrin''. He continued to sing as a baritone until 1897. However, after further study with August Iffert in Vienna, his Heldentenor emerged. He made his debut as a tenor in 1898, singing the title role in ''Siegfried'' at the Vienna State Opera. His career remained largely based at that opera house, where he was a Kammersänger and one of the most prominent tenors during the years of Gustav Mahler's direction of the company. Schmedes sang freque ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Erik Schmedes
Erik Anton Julius Schmedes (27 August 1868, in Gentofte, Denmark – 21 March 1931, in Vienna) was an operatic tenor, particularly known for his roles in operas by Richard Wagner. He was a brother-in-law by marriage of Vaslav Nijinsky. Career Schmedes was born into a family of musicians, the most prominent of which was his brother Hakon, a noted violinist and composer. After studying in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, he made his debut as a baritone (following encouragement from Pauline Viardot) in Wiesbaden, in 1891, as the Herald in ''Lohengrin''. He continued to sing as a baritone until 1897. However, after further study with August Iffert in Vienna, his Heldentenor emerged. He made his debut as a tenor in 1898, singing the title role in ''Siegfried'' at the Vienna State Opera. His career remained largely based at that opera house, where he was a Kammersänger and one of the most prominent tenors during the years of Gustav Mahler's direction of the company. Schmedes sang freque ... [...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] |
The Record Of Singing
''The Record of Singing'' is a compilation of classical-music singing from the first half of the 20th century, the era of the 78-rpm record. It was issued on LP (with accompanying books) by EMI, successor to the British company His Master's Voice (better known as HMV) — perhaps the leading organization in the early history of audio recording. The project was accompanied initially by two illustrated books, containing singers' biographies and appraisals, which were published in London, by Duckworth, in the late 1970s. It covers the period running from circa 1900, when the earliest recordings were made, through until the early 1950s, when the last 78-rpm records were produced. Singers are divided into groups arranged according to national 'schools' and ''fach'' or voice type. In practice, this means that there are separate Italian, German, French, Anglo-American and East European classifications. Rather than concentrating on famous singers whose recordings are widely available els ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pathé Records
Pathé Records was an international record company and label and producer of phonographs, based in France, and active from the 1890s through the 1930s. Early years The Pathé record business was founded by brothers Charles and Émile Pathé, then owners of a successful bistro in Paris. In the mid-1890s, they began selling Edison and Columbia phonographs and accompanying cylinder records. Shortly thereafter, the brothers designed and sold their own phonographs. These incorporated elements of other brands. Soon after, they also started marketing pre-recorded cylinder records. By 1896 the Pathé brothers had offices and recording studios not only in Paris, but also in London, Milan, and St. Petersburg. Pathé cylinders and discs In 1894, the Pathé brothers started selling their own phonographs. The earliest Pathé offerings were phonograph cylinders. Pathé manufactured cylinder records until approximately 1914. In addition to standard size cylinder records (), Pathé produc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gramophone Company
The Gramophone Company Limited (The Gramophone Co. Ltd.), based in the United Kingdom and founded by Emil Berliner, was one of the early recording companies, the parent organisation for the ''His Master's Voice (HMV)'' label, and the European affiliate of the American Victor Talking Machine Company. Although the company merged with the Columbia Graphophone Company in 1931 to form Electric and Musical Industries Limited (EMI), its name "The Gramophone Company Limited" continued in the UK into the 1970s. History The Gramophone Company was founded in April 1898 by William Barry Owen and Edmund Trevor Lloyd Wynne Williams, commissioned by Emil Berliner, in London, England. Owen was acting as agent for Emile Berliner, inventor of the gramophone record, whilst Williams provided the finances. Most of the company's early discs were made in Hanover, Germany at a plant operated by members of Berliner's family, though it had operations around the world. In 1898, Fred Gaisberg mov ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Palestrina (opera)
''Palestrina'' is an opera by the German composer Hans Pfitzner, first performed in 1917. The composer referred to it as a ''Musikalische Legende'' (musical legend), and wrote the libretto himself, based on a legend about the Renaissance musician Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, who saves the art of contrapuntal music (polyphony) for the Church in the sixteenth century through his composition of the ''Missa Papae Marcelli''. The wider context is that of the European Reformation and the role of music in relation to it. The character of Cardinal Borromeo is depicted, and a General Congress of the Council of Trent is the centrepiece of act 2. The conductor of the premiere was Bruno Walter. On 16 February 1962, the day before he died, Walter ended his last letter with: "Despite all the dark experiences of today I am still confident that ''Palestrina'' will remain. The work has all the elements of immortality". Critical appreciation Claire Taylor-Jay has discussed Pfitzner's depict ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hans Pfitzner
Hans Erich Pfitzner (5 May 1869 – 22 May 1949) was a German composer, conductor and polemicist who was a self-described anti-modernist. His best known work is the post-Romantic opera ''Palestrina'' (1917), loosely based on the life of the sixteenth-century composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and his ''Missa Papae Marcelli''. Life Pfitzner was born in Moscow where his father played cello in a theater orchestra. The family returned to his father's native town Frankfurt in 1872, when Pfitzner was two years old, he always considered Frankfurt his home town. He received early instruction in violin from his father, and his earliest compositions were composed at age 11. In 1884 he wrote his first songs. From 1886 to 1890 he studied composition with Iwan Knorr and piano with James Kwast at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. (He later married Kwast's daughter Mimi Kwast, a granddaughter of Ferdinand Hiller, after she had rejected the advances of Percy Grainger.) He taught pi ... [...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] |
Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven (baptised 17 December 177026 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. Beethoven remains one of the most admired composers in the history of Western music; his works rank amongst the most performed of the classical music repertoire and span the Transition from Classical to Romantic music, transition from the Classical period (music), Classical period to the Romantic music, Romantic era in classical music. His career has conventionally been divided into early, middle, and late periods. His early period, during which he forged his craft, is typically considered to have lasted until 1802. From 1802 to around 1812, his middle period showed an individual development from the styles of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and is sometimes characterized as heroic. During this time, he began to grow increasingly Hearing loss, deaf. In his late period, from 1812 to 1827, he extended his innovations in musical form and expression. Beethoven was born in Bo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini (; ; March 25, 1867January 16, 1957) was an Italian conductor. He was one of the most acclaimed and influential musicians of the late 19th and early 20th century, renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his eidetic memory. He was at various times the music director of La Scala in Milan and the New York Philharmonic. Later in his career he was appointed the first music director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra (1937–54), and this led to his becoming a household name (especially in the United States) through his radio and television broadcasts and many recordings of the operatic and symphonic repertoire. Biography Early years Toscanini was born in Parma, Emilia-Romagna, and won a scholarship to the local music conservatory, where he studied the cello. Living conditions at the conservatory were harsh and strict. For example, the menu at the conservatory consisted almost entirely of fish; in his later years, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Emmy Destinn
Emmy Destinn ( (); 26 February 1878 – 28 January 1930) was a Czech operatic soprano with a strong and soaring lyric-dramatic voice. She had a career both in Europe and at the New York Metropolitan Opera. Biography Destinn was born Emílie Pavlína Věnceslava Kittlová () in Prague, in what was then the Austria-Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her voice teacher since age thirteen had been Marie Maria von Dreger Loewe-Destinn, and the young singer began using her teacher's surname as a tribute. She was let go after the short engagement at the Semperoper, Dresden Opera and declined by Prague National Theatre in 1897. She debuted on 19 July 1898 at the Berlin State Opera, Berlin Court Opera as Santuzza in ''Cavalleria rusticana''. She made such progress that the intendant of the Berlin Court Opera engaged her at once when she was brought to intendant's notice. She was only nineteen at the time, but her voice and her acting soon won the Berlin public. Her engagement in Berl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Louise Homer
Louise Beatty Homer (April 30, 1871May 6, 1947) was an American operatic contralto who had an active international career in concert halls and opera houses from 1895 until her retirement in 1932. After a brief stint as a vaudeville entertainer in New England, she made her professional opera debut in France in 1898. She then became a member of the Metropolitan Opera from 1900 to 1919 and again from 1927 to 1929. She was also active as an opera singer in Boston, Chicago, and California. She recorded extensively for Victor Records and Columbia Records in the early decades of the 20th century. She was married to composer Sidney Homer for 52 years. The composer Samuel Barber was her nephew. Homer sang a broad repertoire which encompassed works from the French, German, and Italian repertoires. She enjoyed particular success in the operas of Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner. She often stated in interviews that her favorite role to perform was Amneris in Verdi's ''Aida''. At the Met sh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
