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Vera Little
Vera Pearl Little-Augustithis (December 10, 1928October 24, 2012) was an American contralto and mezzo-soprano opera singer who belonged to the ensemble of the Deutsche Oper Berlin for more than four decades. She performed each of the important mezzo-soprano roles of the repertoire, appearing at major international opera houses and festivals. She took part in world premieres of operas by Hans Werner Henze, in 1965 ''Der junge Lord'' in Berlin and in 1966 '' Die Bassariden'' at the Salzburg Festival. Life Little was born in Memphis, Tennessee. She won a Munich opera competition in 1950. After graduating from Talladega College in Alabama in 1952, she came to Paris to study with a Fulbright Scholarship with Georges Jouatte. She studied further in Rome, Copenhagen, and in Germany with Margarete Bärwinkel and Richard Sengeleiter. In 1958, Carl Ebert brought her to Berlin to what was then called the "Städtische Oper Berlin", later Deutsche Oper Berlin, where she remained based f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Memphis, Tennessee
Memphis is a city in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is the seat of Shelby County in the southwest part of the state; it is situated along the Mississippi River. With a population of 633,104 at the 2020 U.S. census, Memphis is the second-most populous city in Tennessee, after Nashville. Memphis is the fifth-most populous city in the Southeast, the nation's 28th-largest overall, as well as the largest city bordering the Mississippi River. The Memphis metropolitan area includes West Tennessee and the greater Mid-South region, which includes portions of neighboring Arkansas, Mississippi and the Missouri Bootheel. One of the more historic and culturally significant cities of the Southern United States, Memphis has a wide variety of landscapes and distinct neighborhoods. The first European explorer to visit the area of present-day Memphis was Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto in 1541. The high Chickasaw Bluffs protecting the location from the waters of the Mississipp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carmen
''Carmen'' () is an opera in four acts by the French composer Georges Bizet. The libretto was written by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, based on the Carmen (novella), novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée. The opera was first performed by the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 3 March 1875, where its breaking of conventions shocked and scandalised its first audiences. Bizet died suddenly after the 33rd performance, unaware that the work would achieve international acclaim within the following ten years. ''Carmen'' has since become one of the most popular and frequently performed operas in the classical Western canon, canon; the "Habanera (aria), Habanera" from act 1 and the "Toreador Song" from act 2 are among the best known of all operatic arias. The opera is written in the genre of ''opéra comique'' with musical numbers separated by dialogue. It is set in southern Spain and tells the story of the downfall of Don José, a naïve soldier who is seduced by the wiles of th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Großes Sängerlexikon
''Großes Sängerlexikon'' (''Biographical Dictionary of Singers'', literally: Large singers' lexicon) is a single-field dictionary of singers in classical music, edited by Karl-Josef Kutsch and Leo Riemens and first published in 1987. The first edition was in two volumes and contained the biographies of nearly 7000 singers from the 1590s through the 1980s. It grew out of ''Unvergängliche Stimmen. Kleines Sängerlexikon'' (Immortal voices. Small singers' lexicon), published in 1962, which covered only singers who had made recordings. A 1992 review in ''Neue Zeitschrift für Musik'' described the ''Großes Sängerlexikon'' as "indispensable in the search for concise background information about those persons who are undoubtedly the most important to the performance of opera."Arndt, Michael (1992) "Reviewed Work: ''Großes Sängerlexikon Ergänzungsband'' by Karl-Josef Kutsch, Leo Riemens" ''Neue Zeitschrift für Musik'', Vol. 153, No. 9, p. 50. Retrieved via JSTOR 26 March 2019 . ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hans Wollschläger
150px, Signature, 1988 Hans Wollschläger (17 March 1935, in Minden – 19 May 2007, in Bamberg) was a German writer, translator, historian, and editor of German literature. Biography Wollschläger is widely known as the translator of '' Ulysses'' by James Joyce. He also translated the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe (together with Arno Schmidt), and novels by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. He was vice chairman of the '' Karl-May-Gesellschaft'' (''Karl May society'') and was one of the editors of the historical critical edition of this author. He wrote several books of fiction and non-fiction, including a history of the Crusades which has a polemical aspect (at the close of the book he suggests the Catholic Church be declared a criminal organisation) but also contains excerpts from several Arabic sources never previously translated into German. Originally Hans Wollschläger had studied music. He wrote three symphonies which have never been performed in public. He als ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boris Blacher
Boris Blacher (30 January 1975) was a German composer and librettist. Life Blacher was born when his parents (of German-Estonian and Russian backgrounds) were living within a Russian-speaking community in the Manchurian town of Niuzhuang () (hence the use of the Julian calendar on his birth record). He spent his first years in China and in the Asian parts of Russia, and in 1919, he eventually came to live in Harbin. In 1922 he went to Berlin where he began to study first architecture, mathematics, and then music at the Berlin Hochschule fuer Musik. He found work arranging popular and film music. Two years later, he turned to music and studied composition with Friedrich Koch. His career was interrupted by National Socialism. He was accused of writing degenerate music and lost his teaching post at the Dresden Conservatory. His career resumed after 1945, and he later became president of the Academy of Arts, Berlin, and is today regarded as one of the most influential music ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Un Ballo In Maschera
''Un ballo in maschera'' ''(A Masked Ball)'' is an 1859 opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi. The text, by Antonio Somma, was based on Eugène Scribe's libretto for Daniel Auber's 1833 five act opera, '' Gustave III, ou Le bal masqué''. The plot concerns the assassination in 1792 of King Gustav III of Sweden who was shot, as the result of a political conspiracy, while attending a masked ball, dying of his wounds thirteen days later. It was to take over two years between the commission from Naples, planned for a production there, and its premiere performance at the Teatro Apollo in Rome on 17 February 1859. In becoming the ''Un ballo in maschera'' which we know today, Verdi's opera (and his libretto) underwent a significant series of transformations and title changes, caused by a combination of censorship regulations in both Naples and Rome, as well as by the political situation in France in January 1858. Based on the Scribe libretto and begun as ''Gustavo III'' set in Stockho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Westdeutscher Rundfunk
Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln (''West German Broadcasting Cologne''; WDR, ) is a German public-broadcasting institution based in the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia with its main office in Cologne. WDR is a constituent member of the consortium of German public-broadcasting institutions, ARD. As well as contributing to the output of the national television channel '' Das Erste'', WDR produces the regional television service WDR Fernsehen (formerly known as WDF and West3) and six regional radio networks. History Origins The Westdeutsche Funkstunde AG (WEFAG) was established on 15 September 1924. There was a substantial purge of left wing staff following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. This included Ernst Hardt, Hans Stein and Walter Stern. WDR was created in 1955, when Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) was split into Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) – covering Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, and Hamburg – and Westdeutscher Rundfunk, responsible for Nort ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alberto Erede
Alberto Erede (8 November 190912 April 2001) was an Italian conductor, particularly associated with operatic work. Born in Genoa, Erede studied there before studying at the Verdi Conservatory in Milan, then with Felix Weingartner at Basle, and after this with Fritz Busch at Dresden.Alberto Erede. ''Opera'', Vol.14 No.9 September 1963, p600-601. He made his debut in Turin in 1935, conducting ''Der Ring des Nibelungen''. He also conducted at the Salzburg Festival. Fritz Busch invited him to Glyndebourne in England in 1934, where he conducted several performances before the war. In 1937 at the Schlosstheater Schönbrunn, he led a private performance of Mozart's ''Cosi fan tutte'' where among the audience were Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, Franz Werfel, Weingartner and Oskar Kokoschka. He toured the United States in 1937 and 1938 with the Salzburg International Opera Guild, conducting ''Cosi fan tutte'', ''L'incoronazione di Poppea'' and ''La Cambiale di Matrimonio''. While in Ame ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anna Bolena
''Anna Bolena'' is a tragic opera (''tragedia lirica'') in two acts composed by Gaetano Donizetti. Felice Romani wrote the Italian libretto after Ippolito Pindemonte's ''Enrico VIII ossia Anna Bolena'' and Alessandro Pepoli's ''Anna Bolena'', both recounting the life of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of England's King Henry VIII. It is one of four operas by Donizetti dealing with the Tudor period in History of England, English history—in composition order, ''Il castello di Kenilworth'' (1829), ''Anna Bolena'' (1830), ''Maria Stuarda'' (named for Mary, Queen of Scots, it appeared in different forms in 1834 and 1835), and ''Roberto Devereux'' (1837, named for a putative lover of Queen Elizabeth I of England). The leading female characters of the latter three operas are often referred to as "the Three Donizetti Queens." ''Anna Bolena'' premiered on 26 December 1830 at the Teatro Carcano in Milan, to "overwhelming success." Weinstock notes that only after this success did Donizetti's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Salzburger Festspiele
The Salzburg Festival (german: Salzburger Festspiele) is a prominent festival of music and drama established in 1920. It is held each summer (for five weeks starting in late July) in the Austrian town of Salzburg, the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. One highlight is the annual performance of the play '' Jedermann'' (''Everyman'') by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Since 1967, an annual Salzburg Easter Festival has also been held, organized by a separate organization. History Music festivals had been held in Salzburg at irregular intervals since 1877 held by the International Mozarteum Foundation but were discontinued in 1910. Although a festival was planned for 1914, it was cancelled at the outbreak of World War I. In 1917, Friedrich Gehmacher and Heinrich Damisch formed an organization known as the ''Salzburger Festspielhaus-Gemeinde'' to establish an annual festival of drama and music, emphasizing especially the works of Mozart. At the close of the war in 1918, the festival's re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bach Cantata
The cantatas composed by Johann Sebastian Bach, known as Bach cantatas (German: ), are a body of work consisting of over 200 surviving independent works, and at least several dozen that are considered lost. As far as known, Bach's earliest cantatas date from 1707, the year he moved to Mühlhausen, although he may have begun composing them at his previous post in Arnstadt. Most of Bach's church cantatas date from his first years as and director of church music in Leipzig, a position which he took up in 1723. Working for Leipzig's and , it was part of Bach's job to perform a church cantata every Sunday and holiday, conducting soloists, the Thomanerchor and orchestra as part of the church service. In his first years in Leipzig, starting after Trinity of 1723, Bach regularly composed a new cantata every week, although some of these cantatas were adapted (at least in part) from work he had composed before his Leipzig era. Works from three annual cycles of cantatas for the lit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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