THEATER AN DER WIEN

Never before the world premiere of La traviata 1853 had been a scandal-prone, so current fabric on the Opera stage: until 1847 the courtesan of ...

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 ...

Along with his co-authors sought Claus Guth in the Handel year 2009 for its staged implementation of the Messiah to situations in which the subject ...

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 ...

A bitter intrigue overshadowed the Olympic idea and also the hoped-for victory in one of the most famous libretti by Pietro Metastasio. The supposedly Cretan ...

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 ...

Directly after Alessandro Opera seria Admeto, re di Tessaglia was very tailored to Senesino, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni. Handel adapted the musical highlights the ...

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 ...

1844 Giuseppe Verdi first wrote an Opera for the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, he offered the drama the two Foscari by Lord Byron as ...

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. ...

In 1820, Franz Schubert turned an oratorio Libretto by August Hermann Niemeyer built in 1778 to: Lazarus or the celebration of the resurrection. Called by ...

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," ...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had many suggestions on his journey to Mannheim and Paris in 1777/78 receive. He burned out from this inspiration to develop their ...

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 ...

Over sixty years after the premiere of Stravinsky's the rake's progress the young English composer Iain Bell William Hogarths another famous engraving result uses A ...

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 ...

Seit seiner Ankunft 1939 in Amerika suchte Igor Strawinski nach einem Thema für eine englischsprachige Oper. Als er 1947 im Chicago Art Institute das erste ...

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 ...

Edita Gruberova is unique in this concert with their brilliant Belcanto art the tragic finales of three famous Queens Maria Stuarda, Anna Bolena and Elisabetta ...

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 ...

Amadigi and his companion Dardano wish to escape from Melissa’s magic garden but the sorceress wants to win the Gallic knight for herself. However, Amadigi ...

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 ...

Beethoven’s only opera belongs to the genre of rescue opera which was popular around the time of the French revolution and campaigned against tyranny and ...

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 ...

The tragedy surrounding the nymph Galatea and her love for the shepherd Acis originates in ancient Greek mythology and was revised and expanded by Ovid ...

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. ...

The lecherous Count Ory is a character from troubadour’s tales. A ballad from Picardy relates how he smuggled himself into a convent with fourteen companions ...

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 ...

Nicola Porpora was the leading Italian teacher of singing in the 18th century and also composed over sixty operas. He trained the two legendary castrati ...

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 ...

Radamisto marked the sensational start of George Frideric Handel’s London opera company, the Royal Academy of Music: King George I and thePrince of Wales were ...

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 his novel Satyricon, only parts of which survive, the Roman senator Titus Petronius denounces the perverse depravity of the nouveau-riche upper classes in Rome ...

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 ...

Mathis der Maler (Matthias the Painter) was Paul Hindemith’s masterpiece and artistic manifesto. In it he uses episodes from the life of the painter Matthias ...

As an old man, Goethe expressed the wish that “Mozart should have composed Faust”. This wish did not come true, but one of his contemporaries ...

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, ...

Pietro Metastasio was the most famous librettist of his age and is still regarded as the most important opera seria author today. His textbook for ...

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. ...

IL TABARRO Following the death of their child the love between Michele, a Parisian bargeowner, and his wife Giorgetta, has died. The couple have nothing ...

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 ...

At Christmas in 1718 the imperial governor of Mantua, Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt, announced his forthcoming marriage. His maestro di cappella, Antonio Vivaldi, hastily had to ...

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 ...

The sea nymph Thetis is trying to prevent her mortal son Achille from participating in the Trojan war. She sends him to the court of ...

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 ...