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Rosalind Plowright
Rosalind Anne Plowright (born 21 May 1949) is an English opera singer who spent much of her career as a soprano but in 1999 changed to the mezzo-soprano range. Life and career Rosalind Plowright was born in Worksop and studied at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and at the London Opera Centre. Early career Plowright made her professional debut with Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Glyndebourne Touring Opera in 1975 as Agathe in ''Der Freischütz''. She sang Donna Elvira in ''Don Giovanni'' and the Countess in ''The Marriage of Figaro'' with the Glyndebourne Touring Opera in 1976 and 1977. Also in 1975, she appeared with both Welsh National Opera and Kent Opera before making her debut with English National Opera as the Page in ''Salome (opera), Salome'' in 1976. She earned good notices in 1979 for her Fennimore in Frederick Delius's ''Fennimore and Gerda'' at London's Camden Festival. She then appeared with ENO in the roles of Miss Jessel in ''The Turn of the Sc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Worksop
Worksop ( ) is a market town in the Bassetlaw District in Nottinghamshire, England. It is located east-south-east of Sheffield, close to Nottinghamshire's borders with South Yorkshire and Derbyshire, on the River Ryton and not far from the northern edge of Sherwood Forest. Other nearby towns include Chesterfield, Doncaster, Retford, Gainsborough and Mansfield. Worksop had a population of 41,820 as of the 2011 Census and it is twinned with the German town Garbsen. History Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman history Worksop was part of what was called Bernetseatte (burnt lands) in Anglo-Saxon times. The name Worksop is likely of Anglo Saxon origin, deriving from a personal name 'We(o)rc' plus the Anglo-Saxon placename element 'hop' (valley). The first element is interesting because while the masculine name Weorc is unrecorded, the feminine name Werca (Verca) is found in Bede's ''Life of St Cuthbert''. A number of other recorded place names contain this same personal name element. In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frederick Delius
Delius, photographed in 1907 Frederick Theodore Albert Delius ( 29 January 1862 – 10 June 1934), originally Fritz Delius, was an English composer. Born in Bradford in the north of England to a prosperous mercantile family, he resisted attempts to recruit him to commerce. He was sent to Florida in the United States in 1884 to manage an orange plantation. He soon neglected his managerial duties and in 1886 returned to Europe. Having been influenced by African-American music during his short stay in Florida, he began composing. After a brief period of formal musical study in Germany beginning in 1886, he embarked on a full-time career as a composer in Paris and then in nearby Grez-sur-Loing, where he and his wife Jelka lived for the rest of their lives, except during the First World War. Delius's first successes came in Germany, where Hans Haym and other conductors promoted his music from the late 1890s. In Delius's native Britain, his music did not make regular appearances ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frankfurt
Frankfurt, officially Frankfurt am Main (; Hessian: , "Frank ford on the Main"), is the most populous city in the German state of Hesse. Its 791,000 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located on its namesake Main River, it forms a continuous conurbation with the neighboring city of Offenbach am Main and its urban area has a population of over 2.3 million. The city is the heart of the larger Rhine-Main metropolitan region, which has a population of more than 5.6 million and is Germany's second-largest metropolitan region after the Rhine-Ruhr region. Frankfurt's central business district, the Bankenviertel, lies about northwest of the geographic center of the EU at Gadheim, Lower Franconia. Like France and Franconia, the city is named after the Franks. Frankfurt is the largest city in the Rhine Franconian dialect area. Frankfurt was a city state, the Free City of Frankfurt, for nearly five centuries, and was one of the most import ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Festival Puccini
The ''Festival Puccini'' (Puccini Festival) is an annual summer opera festival held in July and August to present the operas of the famous Italian composer Giacomo Puccini. The Festival is located in Torre del Lago, Italy, a town located between Lago di Massaciuccoli and the Tyrrhenian Sea, from the beaches of Viareggio on the Tuscan Riviera and from Pisa and Lucca, Puccini's birthplace. In presenting four or five performances of up to four operatic productions each season, the Festival attracts about forty thousand spectators to its open-air theatre, the ''Teatro dei Quattromila'' (so named for its seating capacity, although 3,200 seats were actually installed), located very close to the "Villa Puccini," the house which the composer had built in 1900 and in which he lived and worked on his major operas until pollution from the lake forced him to settle in Viareggio in 1921. Along with other members of his family who died later, Puccini is buried in a small chapel inside the Vill ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mary, Queen Of Scots
Mary, Queen of Scots (8 December 1542 – 8 February 1587), also known as Mary Stuart or Mary I of Scotland, was Queen of Scotland from 14 December 1542 until her forced abdication in 1567. The only surviving legitimate child of James V of Scotland, Mary was six days old when her father died and she inherited the throne. During her childhood, Scotland was governed by regents, first by the heir to the throne, James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, and then by her mother, Mary of Guise. In 1548, she was betrothed to Francis, the Dauphin of France, and was sent to be brought up in France, where she would be safe from invading English forces during the Rough Wooing. Mary married Francis in 1558, becoming queen consort of France from his accession in 1559 until his death in December 1560. Widowed, Mary returned to Scotland in August 1561. Following the Scottish Reformation, the tense religious and political climate that Mary encountered on her return to Scotland was further agitated by pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Janet Baker
Dame Janet Abbott Baker (born 21 August 1933) is an English mezzo-soprano best known as an opera, concert, and lieder singer.Blyth, Alan, "Baker, Dame Janet (Abbott)" in Sadie, Stanley, ed.; John Tyrell; exec. ed. (2001). ''New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', 2nd ed. London: Macmillan; (hardcover) (eBook). Baker was particularly closely associated with baroque and early Italian opera and the works of Benjamin Britten. During her career, which spanned the 1950s to the 1980s, she was considered an outstanding singing actress and widely admired for her dramatic intensity, perhaps best represented in her famous portrayal as Dido, the tragic heroine of Berlioz's magnum opus, ''Les Troyens''. As a concert performer, Dame Janet was noted for her interpretations of the music of Gustav Mahler and Edward Elgar. David Gutman, writing in ''Gramophone'', described her performance of Mahler's ''Kindertotenlieder'' as "intimate, almost self-communing." Biography and career Ea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I (7 September 153324 March 1603) was Queen of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death in 1603. Elizabeth was the last of the five House of Tudor monarchs and is sometimes referred to as the "Virgin Queen". Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, his second wife, who was executed when Elizabeth was two years old. Anne's marriage to Henry was annulled, and Elizabeth was for a time declared illegitimate. Her half-brother Edward VI ruled until his death in 1553, bequeathing the crown to Lady Jane Grey and ignoring the claims of his two half-sisters, the Catholic Mary and the younger Elizabeth, in spite of statute law to the contrary. Edward's will was set aside and Mary became queen, deposing Lady Jane Grey. During Mary's reign, Elizabeth was imprisoned for nearly a year on suspicion of supporting Protestant rebels. Upon her half-sister's death in 1558, Elizabeth succeeded to the throne and set out to rule by good counsel. She ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tosca
''Tosca'' is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. It premiered at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 14 January 1900. The work, based on Victorien Sardou's 1887 French-language dramatic play, ''La Tosca'', is a melodramatic piece set in Rome in June 1800, with the Kingdom of Naples's control of Rome threatened by Napoleon's Campaigns of 1800 in the French Revolutionary Wars#Italy, invasion of Italy. It contains depictions of torture, murder, and suicide, as well as some of Puccini's best-known lyrical arias. Puccini saw Sardou's play when it was touring Italy in 1889 and, after some vacillation, obtained the rights to turn the work into an opera in 1895. Turning the wordy French play into a succinct Italian opera took four years, during which the composer repeatedly argued with his librettists and publisher. ''Tosca'' premiered at a time of unrest in Rome, and its first performance was delayed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Don Carlos
''Don Carlos'' is a five-act grand opera composed by Giuseppe Verdi to a French-language libretto by Joseph Méry and Camille du Locle, based on the dramatic play '' Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien'' (''Don Carlos, Infante of Spain'') by Friedrich Schiller. In addition, several incidents, of which the Forest of Fontainebleau scene and ''auto-da-fé'' were the most substantial, were borrowed from Eugène Cormon's 1846 play ''Philippe II, Roi d'Espagne''. The opera is most often performed in Italian translation, usually under the title ''Don Carlo''. The opera's story is based on conflicts in the life of Carlos, Prince of Asturias (1545–1568). Though he was betrothed to Elisabeth of Valois, part of the peace treaty ending the Italian War of 1551–59 between the Houses of Habsburg and Valois demanded that she be married instead to his father Philip II of Spain. It was commissioned and produced by the Théâtre Impérial de l'Opéra ( Paris Opera) and given its premiere at the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Les Vêpres Siciliennes
''Les vêpres siciliennes'' (''The Sicilian Vespers'') is a grand opera in five acts by the Italian romantic composer Giuseppe Verdi set to a French libretto by Eugène Scribe and Charles Duveyrier from their work ''Le duc d'Albe'' of 1838. ''Les vêpres'' followed immediately after Verdi's three great mid-career masterpieces, ''Rigoletto'', ''Il trovatore'' and '' La traviata'' of 1850 to 1853 and was first performed at the Paris Opéra on 13 June 1855. Today the opera is performed both in the original French and (rather more frequently) in its post-1861 Italian version as ''I vespri siciliani''. The story is based on a historical event, the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, using material drawn from the medieval Sicilian tract '' Lu rebellamentu di Sichilia''. Composition history After Verdi's first grand opera for the Paris Opéra—that being his adaptation of ''I Lombardi'' in 1847 given under the title of ''Jérusalem'' - the composer had wanted to write a completely new gran ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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] |
Maria Stuarda
''Maria Stuarda'' (Mary Stuart) is a tragic opera (''tragedia lirica''), in two acts, by Gaetano Donizetti, to a libretto by Giuseppe Bardari, based on Andrea Maffei's translation of Friedrich Schiller's 1800 play '' Maria Stuart''. The opera is one of a number of operas by Donizetti which deal with the Tudor period in English history, including ''Anna Bolena'' (named for Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn), ''Roberto Devereux'' (named for a putative lover of Queen Elizabeth I of England) and ''Il castello di Kenilworth''. The lead female characters of the operas ''Anna Bolena'', ''Maria Stuarda'', and ''Roberto Devereux'' are often referred to as the "Three Donizetti Queens". The story is loosely based on the lives of Mary, Queen of Scots (Mary Stuart) and her cousin Elizabeth I of England, Queen Elizabeth I. Schiller had invented the confrontation of the two Queens, who in fact never met.Ashbrook 1972, pp. 17 to 30. After a series of problems surrounding its presentation in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
