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Herbert Janssen
Herbert Janssen (22 September 1892 in Cologne – 3 June 1965 in New York) was a leading German operatic baritone of the 20th century who had a career in Europe and the United States. Biography The son of a wealthy coal merchant of Swedish origin, he claimed to be related to the painter Victor Emil Janssen and the writer Werner Hasenclever. After serving as an officer in the German army between 1914-1918, Janssen initially took up studying law in Berlin. He then took vocal instruction from Oscar Daniel and made his debut at the Berlin State Opera on 5 May 1922 in Schreker's ''Schatzgräber'', and became a member of the regular opera company there. Initially focusing on Italian roles in Berlin, he began expanding into Wagnerian roles during the 1923–1924 season in Berlin, singing Wolfram in Richard Wagner's ''Tannhäuser''. In 1925 he made a career breakthrough, again singing Wolfram, this time at the Waldoper in Zoppot (now Sopot, Poland). Between 1925 and 1937, Janssen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cologne
Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western States of Germany, state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the List of cities in Germany by population, fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 million inhabitants in the city proper and 3.6 million people in the Cologne Bonn Region, urban region. Centered on the left bank of the Rhine, left (west) bank of the Rhine, Cologne is about southeast of NRW's state capital Düsseldorf and northwest of Bonn, the former capital of West Germany. The city's medieval Catholic Cologne Cathedral (), the third-tallest church and tallest cathedral in the world, constructed to house the Shrine of the Three Kings, is a globally recognized landmark and one of the most visited sights and pilgrimage destinations in Europe. The cityscape is further shaped by the Twelve Romanesque churches of Cologne, and Cologne is famous for Eau de Cologne, that has been produced in the city since 1709, and "col ... [...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] |
Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (; 9 or 10 October 1813 – 27 January 1901) was an Italian composer best known for his operas. He was born near Busseto to a provincial family of moderate means, receiving a musical education with the help of a local patron. Verdi came to dominate the Italian opera scene after the era of Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Vincenzo Bellini, whose works significantly influenced him. In his early operas, Verdi demonstrated a sympathy with the Risorgimento movement which sought the unification of Italy. He also participated briefly as an elected politician. The chorus "Va, pensiero" from his early opera ''Nabucco'' (1842), and similar choruses in later operas, were much in the spirit of the unification movement, and the composer himself became esteemed as a representative of these ideals. An intensely private person, Verdi did not seek to ingratiate himself with popular movements. As he became professionally successful, he was able ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zar Und Zimmermann
''Zar und Zimmermann'' (''Tsar and Carpenter'') is a comic opera in three acts, music by Albert Lortzing, libretto by the composer after Georg Christian Römer's ''Der Bürgermeister von Saardam, oder Die zwei Peter'', itself based on the French play ''Le Bourgmestre de Saardam, ou Les deux Pierre'' by Mélésville, Jean-Toussaint Merle, and Eugène Centiran de Boirie. Ultimately, it goes back to the historical Grand Embassy of Peter the Great. Gaetano Donizetti had set the same story in his 1827 opera '' Il borgomastro di Saardam''. Performance history The opera was first performed at the Stadttheater in Leipzig, on 22 December 1837. Lortzing's most successful and enduring work, it is still regularly performed in German-speaking countries. Roles Synopsis The action takes place in Saardam, Holland, in 1698. Peter the Great of Russia, disguised as Peter Michaelov, a common laborer, is working in a shipyard in the Dutch town of Saardam, to learn shipbuilding techniques for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Albert Lortzing
Gustav Albert Lortzing (23 October 1801 – 21 January 1851) was a German composer, librettist, actor and singer. He is considered to be the main representative of the German ''Spieloper'', a form similar to the French '' opéra comique'', which grew out of the '' Singspiel''. Life and career Lortzing was born in Berlin to Johann Gottlieb and Charlotte Sophie Lortzing. They had abandoned their leather shop and travelled through Germany as itinerant actors, founding the Berlin theatre company ''Urania'', and turning their amateur passion into a profession. The young Lortzing's first stage appearance was at the age of 12, entertaining the audience with comic poems during the interval in the ''Kornhaus'' at the Freiburg Münster. From 1817, the Lortzing family were part of Josef Derossi ensemble in the Rhineland, treading the boards at Bonn, Düsseldorf, Barmen and Aachen. Albert Lortzing became an audience favourite, playing the roles of a youthful lover, a country boy and bon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Le Nozze Di Figaro
''The Marriage of Figaro'' ( it, Le nozze di Figaro, links=no, ), K. 492, is a ''commedia per musica'' (opera buffa) in four acts composed in 1786 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with an Italian libretto written by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 1 May 1786. The opera's libretto is based on the 1784 stage comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, '' La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro'' ("The Mad Day, or The Marriage of Figaro"). It tells how the servants Figaro and Susanna succeed in getting married, foiling the efforts of their philandering employer Count Almaviva to seduce Susanna and teaching him a lesson in fidelity. Considered one of the greatest operas ever written, it is a cornerstone of the repertoire and appears consistently among the top ten in the Operabase list of most frequently performed operas. In 2017, BBC News Magazine asked 172 opera singers to vote for the best operas ever written. ''The Marriage of Figaro'' came in first out of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 17565 December 1791), baptised as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition resulted in more than 800 works of virtually every genre of his time. Many of these compositions are acknowledged as pinnacles of the symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral repertoire. Mozart is widely regarded as among the greatest composers in the history of Western music, with his music admired for its "melodic beauty, its formal elegance and its richness of harmony and texture". Born in Salzburg, in the Holy Roman Empire, Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. His father took him on a grand tour of Europe and then three trips to Italy. At 17, he was a musician at the Salzburg court b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Friedelind Wagner
Friedelind Wagner (29 March 1918 – 8 May 1991) was the elder daughter of German opera composer Siegfried Wagner and his English wife, Winifred Williams and the granddaughter of the composer Richard Wagner. She was also the great-granddaughter of the composer Franz Liszt. Born in Bayreuth, she was known by the nickname "Die Maus" or "Mausi". Along with other members of her family, from early in life Friedelind Wagner was involved with the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. In 1936, Friedelind Wagner began work as an assistant to Heinz Tietjen but her outspoken criticism of close family friend Adolf Hitler — her mother, the English-born Winifred Williams, was a fanatical admirer of Hitler — and the policies of the Third Reich led to her leaving Germany in 1939. She lived for a short time in Switzerland before emigrating first to England, where she was interned on the Isle of Man from 27 May 1940 till 15 February 1941. Later she began writing anti-Nazi columns for the ''Daily Sketch'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Friedrich Schorr
Friedrich Schorr (September 2, 1888 – August 14, 1953), was a renowned Austrian- Hungarian bass-baritone opera singer of Jewish origin. He later became a naturalized American. Schorr was particularly famous for his profound portrayals of Wotan in ''Der Ring des Nibelungen'' and Hans Sachs in '' Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg''. He was celebrated, too, for his appearances as Don Pizarro in Beethoven's ''Fidelio''. His voice was powerful, steady, and rich-toned, with a beautiful ''mezza voce''. He placed a special emphasis on maintaining a smooth, ''legato'' line in his singing, with no trace of Sprechgesang. Towards the end of Schorr's career, his extreme top notes became somewhat 'wooden', however, as the result of many years of strenuous usage. Biography The son of a cantor ( hazzan) Mayer Schorr, who reportedly had a fine voice himself, Schorr was born in Oradea 'Nagyvarad'' at the time He studied in Brno and Vienna with Adolf Robinson. He made his stage debut ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Der Ring Des Nibelungen
(''The Ring of the Nibelung''), WWV 86, is a cycle of four German-language epic music dramas composed by Richard Wagner. The works are based loosely on characters from Germanic heroic legend, namely Norse legendary sagas and the '' Nibelungenlied''. The composer termed the cycle a "Bühnenfestspiel" (stage festival play), structured in three days preceded by a ("preliminary evening"). It is often referred to as the ''Ring'' cycle, Wagner's ''Ring'', or simply ''The Ring''. Wagner wrote the libretto and music over the course of about twenty-six years, from 1848 to 1874. The four parts that constitute the ''Ring'' cycle are, in sequence: * ''Das Rheingold'' (''The Rhinegold'') * '' Die Walküre'' (''The Valkyrie'') * '' Siegfried'' * '' Götterdämmerung'' (''Twilight of the Gods'') Individual works of the sequence are often performed separately, and indeed the operas contain dialogues that mention events in the previous operas, so that a viewer could watch any of them wi ... [...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] |
Die Zauberflöte
''The Magic Flute'' (German: , ), K. 620, is an opera in two acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. The work is in the form of a ''Singspiel'', a popular form during the time it was written that included both singing and spoken dialogue. The work premiered on 30 September 1791 at Schikaneder's theatre, the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, just two months before the composer's premature death. Still a staple of the opera repertory, its popularity was reflected by two immediate sequels, Peter Winter's ''Das Labyrinth oder Der Kampf mit den Elementen. Der Zauberflöte zweyter Theil'' (1798) and a fragmentary libretto by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe titled ''The Magic Flute Part Two''. The allegorical plot was influenced by Schikaneder and Mozart's interest in Freemasonry and concerns the initiation of Prince Tamino. Enlisted by the Queen of the Night to rescue her daughter Pamina from the high priest Sarastro, Tamino comes to a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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