THEATER AN DER WIEN

The Lady of the camellias by Alexandre Dumas in 1848 appeared as the younger, was the theme for the time Ballet uninteresting: this story of...

Although Rimsky-Korsakov wrote fifteen operas, his name outside of Russia is known almost only on the basis of his orchestral works. In his homeland, his...

Antonio Salieri rejected supposedly the composition of Così fan tutte, because the text "is unworthy to be used in music". Beethoven was the cloth to...

In March 1745 Platée was created for the wedding of the heir to the French throne in Versailles, one of the last major celebrations of...

Fausto Romitelli (born 1963) was one of the most radical composers of his generation. He settled by the inspired by Anglo-American subculture, loved the archaic...

The 1691 premiered semi-Opera King Arthur of the "Orpheus britannicus" Henry Purcell, John Dryden wrote the libretto to which, combines drama, music, dance and spectacle....

Handel's reputation was preceded him across the English channel. "The news of his uncommon ability were, even before his arrival in England, there spread out,"...

Während Christoph Willibald Gluck Anfang 1779 in Paris die Uraufführung seiner Iphigénie en Tauride vorbereitete, schlug ihm sein Librettist Ranieri de’Calzabigi für eine neue Oper...

In November 1941, the Nazis converted the garrison town and fortress Terezin, a concentration camp which they euphemistically referred to as a "Ghetto". Theresienstadt should...

Alexander the great was a popular opera character, his success as a King and military commander in the 17th and 18th century served as comparison...

Ludwig van Beethoven was one composer who had already considered taking Zacharias Werner’s drama Attila, König der Hunnen (1807) as the basis for an opera....

Hector Berlioz loved Shakespeare’s dramas and always wanted to write an opera to a text by the great English playwright. As early as 1833 he...

Henry Purcell was revered as “Orpheus britannicus” during his lifetime and was a sought-after composer of music for the theatre. With Nahum Tate, who also...

Handel used the summer months of 1748 to write oratorios for the coming season and composed the two distinct works Solomon and Susanna. It remains...

In his settings of mythological themes, George Frideric Handel also portrayed the power of the supernatural which had otherwise disappeared from opera in his days....

Gioachino Rossini, court composer to Ferdinand IV, King of the Two Sicilies, wrote the one-act cantata Le nozze di Teti, e di Peleo on the...

A woman’s last telephone call with her lover was set to music in 1959 by Francis Poulenc in his lyrical tragedy La voix humaine after...

Bellezza, an allegorical personification of beauty, fears change when she looks at herself in the mirror: “You will always stay as you are. But I,...

In November 1862 Richard Wagner came to Vienna to supervise rehearsals for the scheduled premiere of Tristan and Isolde at the Court Opera. But after...

Christoph Willibald Gluck was already sixty years old when he followed his pupil Maria Antonia, who by that time had become the Dauphine Marie Antoinette,...

In the 18th century, women in serious opera, the opere serie, were not the meek and gentle victims found in the bourgeois era that followed....

WIEN MODERN, the festival of contemporary music, opens its 25th season on 22 October at the Theater an der Wien with two works by Olga...

On 27 October, 1972 the Arnold Schoenberg Chor was born. The choir is celebrating this anniversary with a four-part spectacular at the Theater an der...

Iolanta, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky´s final opera, and Sergei Rachmaninoff´s Francesca da Rimini are two love stories that differ not only on account of the endings...

Monsieur Des Rillettes, a professional scrounger, has received an invitation to tea from the apparently solidly middle-class couple, Monsieur and Madame Boulingrin. He is already...