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Edward Johnson (opera Singer)
Edward Patrick Johnson, CBE (22 August 187820 April 1959) was a Canadian operatic tenor who was billed outside North America as Edoardo Di Giovanni. He became general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan, New York City from 1935 to 1950. Early life Born in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, Johnson was the son of James Johnson and the former Margaret Jane Brown. The young tenor sang in his local church choir and at events in the Guelph area. At a concert in Stratford, Ontario in 1897, contralto Edith Miller encouraged him to move to New York and pursue a singing career. He sang as a soloist with several church choirs in the New York area. After this period he did much concert work, touring through the Mid-West with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and singing in many Music Festivals throughout the country.Harriette Brower (1917) ''Vocal Mastery: Talks with Master Singers and Teachers'/ref> After a peripatetic existence for some years, working in a variety of venues and training ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Guelph
Guelph ( ; 2021 Canadian Census population 143,740) is a city in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Known as "The Royal City", Guelph is roughly east of Kitchener and west of Downtown Toronto, at the intersection of Highway 6, Highway 7 and Wellington County Road 124. It is the seat of Wellington County, but is politically independent of it. Guelph began as a settlement in the 1820s, established by Scotsman John Galt, who was in Upper Canada as the first Superintendent of the Canada Company. He based the headquarters, and his home, in the community. The area – much of which became Wellington County – had been part of the Halton Block, a Crown Reserve for the Six Nations Iroquois. Galt would later be considered as the founder of Guelph. For many years, Guelph ranked at or near the bottom of Canada's crime severity list. However, the 2017 Crime Severity Index showed a 15% increase from 2016. Guelph has been noted as having one of the lowest unemployment rates in t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Leader Of The Opposition (Canada)
The leader of the Official Opposition (french: chef de l'Opposition officielle), formally known as the leader of Majesty's Loyal Opposition (french: chef de la loyale opposition de Sa Majesté, links=no), is the politician who leads the Official Opposition in Canada, typically the leader of the party possessing the most seats in the House of Commons that is not the governing party or part of the governing coalition. Pierre Poilievre has been the leader of the Opposition since September 10, 2022, when he was elected as the Conservative leader following the 2022 leadership election. He succeeded Candice Bergen, who had served as her party's interim leader from February 2, 2022. Though the leader of the Opposition must be a member of the House of Commons, the office should not be confused with Opposition House leader, who is a frontbencher charged with managing the business of the Opposition in the House of Commons, and is formally titled ''Leader of the Opposition in the Hous ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Umberto Giordano
Umberto Menotti Maria Giordano (28 August 186712 November 1948) was an Italian composer, mainly of operas. He was born in Foggia in Apulia, southern Italy, and studied under Paolo Serrao at the Conservatoire of Naples. His first opera, ''Marina'', was written for a competition promoted by the music publishers Casa Sonzogno for the best one-act opera, remembered today because it marked the beginning of Italian ''verismo''. The winner was Mascagni's ''Cavalleria rusticana''. Giordano, the youngest contestant, was placed sixth among seventy-three entries with his ''Marina'', a work which generated enough interest for Sonzogno to commission the staging of an opera based on it in the 1891–92 season. The result was ''Mala vita'', a gritty ''verismo'' opera about a labourer who vows to reform a prostitute if he is cured of his tuberculosis. This work caused something of a scandal when performed at the Teatro Argentina, Rome, in February 1892. It played successfully in Vienna, Pragu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nellie Melba
Dame Nellie Melba (born Helen Porter Mitchell; 19 May 186123 February 1931) was an Australian operatic dramatic coloratura soprano (three octaves). She became one of the most famous singers of the late Victorian era and the early 20th century, and was the first Australian to achieve international recognition as a classical musician. She took the pseudonym "Melba" from Melbourne, her home town. Melba studied singing in Melbourne and made a modest success in performances there. After a brief and unsuccessful marriage, she moved to Europe in search of a singing career. Failing to find engagements in London in 1886, she studied in Paris and soon made a great success there and in Brussels. Returning to London she quickly established herself as the leading lyric soprano at Royal Opera House, Covent Garden from 1888. She soon achieved further success in Paris and elsewhere in Europe, and later at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, debuting there in 1893. Her repertoire was small; in ... [...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] |
Charles Gounod
Charles-François Gounod (; ; 17 June 181818 October 1893), usually known as Charles Gounod, was a French composer. He wrote twelve operas, of which the most popular has always been ''Faust (opera), Faust'' (1859); his ''Roméo et Juliette'' (1867) also remains in the international repertory. He composed a large amount of church music, many songs, and popular short pieces including his Ave Maria (Bach/Gounod), Ave Maria (an elaboration of a Johann Sebastian Bach, Bach piece), and ''Funeral March of a Marionette''. Born in Paris into an artistic and musical family Gounod was a student at the Conservatoire de Paris and won France's most prestigious musical prize, the Prix de Rome. His studies took him to Italy, Austria and then Prussia, where he met Felix Mendelssohn, whose advocacy of the music of Bach was an early influence on him. He was deeply religious, and after his return to Paris, he briefly considered becoming a priest. He composed prolifically, writing church music, songs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eric Blom
Eric Walter Blom (20 August 188811 April 1959) was a Swiss-born British-naturalised music lexicographer, music critic and writer. He is best known as the editor of the 5th edition of ''Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' (1954). Biography Blom was born in Bern, Switzerland. His father was of Danish and British descent, and his mother was Swiss. He was educated in German-speaking Switzerland,Frank Howes, "Blom, Eric (Walter)" in ''Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', 5th edition, Supplementary Volume, 1961 and later in England. He was largely self-taught in music. He started in music journalism by assisting Rosa Newmarch in writing program notes for Sir Henry J. Wood's Prom Concerts, which were notable for their abundance of accurate information. From 1923 to 1931 he was the London music correspondent for the ''Manchester Guardian''. He then went to the ''Birmingham Post'' (1931–46, succeeding A J Sheldon), and returned to London in 1949, as music critic ... [...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] |
Parsifal
''Parsifal'' ( WWV 111) is an opera or a music drama in three acts by the German composer Richard Wagner and his last composition. Wagner's own libretto for the work is loosely based on the 13th-century Middle High German epic poem ''Parzival'' of the ''Minnesänger'' Wolfram von Eschenbach, recounting the story of the Arthurian knight Parzival (Percival) and his quest for the Holy Grail. Wagner conceived the work in April 1857, but did not finish it until 25 years later. In composing it he took advantage of the particular acoustics of his Bayreuth Festspielhaus. ''Parsifal'' was first produced at the second Bayreuth Festival in 1882. The Bayreuth Festival maintained a monopoly on ''Parsifal'' productions until 1903, when the opera was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Wagner described ''Parsifal'' not as an opera, but as (a festival play for the consecration of the stage). At Bayreuth a tradition has arisen that audiences do not applaud at the end of the first ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the ''Gesamtkunstwerk'' ("total work of art"), by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle ''Der Ring des Nibelungen'' (''The Ring of the Nibelung''). His compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex textures, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Il Trittico
''Il trittico'' (''The Triptych'') is the title of a collection of three one-act operas, ''Il tabarro'', ''Suor Angelica'', and ''Gianni Schicchi'', by Giacomo Puccini. The work received its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera on 14 December 1918. Background Around 1904, Puccini first began planning a set of one-act operas, largely because of the success of Pietro Mascagni's ''Cavalleria rusticana''. Originally, he planned to write each opera to reflect one of the parts of Dante's ''Divine Comedy''. However, he eventually based only ''Gianni Schicchi'' on Dante's epic poem. The link in the final work is that each opera deals with the concealment of a death. Puccini also intended that the three should be performed as a set, and wrote to Casa Ricordi to complain about their giving permission in 1920 to The Royal Opera, London, "for ''Tabarro'' and ''Schicchi'' without ''Angelica''". He reluctantly agreed that the two operas could be given in a programme with Serge Diaghilev's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Teatro Dell'Opera Di Roma
The Teatro dell'Opera di Roma (Rome Opera House) is an opera house in Rome, Italy. Originally opened in November 1880 as the 2,212 seat ''Costanzi Theatre'', it has undergone several changes of name as well modifications and improvements. The present house seats 1,600. Original Teatro Costanzi: 1880 to 1926 The Teatro dell'Opera was originally known as the ''Teatro Costanzi'' after the contractor who built it, (1819–1898). It was financed by Costanzi, who commissioned the Milanese architect Achille Sfondrini (1836–1900), a specialist in the building and renovation of theatres. The opera house was built in eighteen months, on the site where the house of Heliogabalus stood in ancient times, and was inaugurated on 27 November 1880 with a performance of ''Semiramide'' by Gioachino Rossini. Designing the theatre, Sfondrini paid particular attention to the acoustics, conceiving the interior structure as a "resonance chamber", as is evident from the horseshoe shape in particular. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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