Word: lovisa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...equally ancient. But last week this antique combination made the liveliest show in Sweden. II Maestro di Musica, a broadly farcical opera buffa (a pastiche partly based on a 1737 comic opera by Pietro Auletta), filled the Drottningholm Court Theater, built in 1766 during the reign of Queen Lovisa Ulrika. U.S. and European visitors to Stockholm's talent-packed summer music festival learned at first hand why the Swedes are making a new mark for themselves in opera as they already have in movies...
...minutes from downtown Stockholm, the long green lawns and fountains surrounding the theater set it centuries back in time. The building is still owned by the royal family. It has never been damaged, changed or remodeled, and some of its 400 seats still bear the name plates of Queen Lovisa's household staff (King's Great Watch in the front rows, palace kitchen wenches in the rear...
Drottningholm's theater was first the plaything of Lovisa's son Gustaf III, founder of Sweden's royal institutes (including the Swedish Academy, which serves today as jury for Nobel Prizes in literature). Gustaf filled the place with musicians, staged four performances a week, wrote many of its plays and opera librettos himself, even starred in some of its productions. Shortly after his reign, the theater was abandoned, and for 120 years, says Director Gustaf Hillestrom, it remained "a sleeping beauty...
...Maestro and II Barbiere, Conductor Bertil Bokstedt was resplendent in the silk robe of an 18th century courtier. Onstage, Sweden's gifted young singers-Soprano Karin Langebo, Tenors Carl-Axel Hallgren, Arne Ohlson, Uno Stjernquist, and Basso Arne Tyren-wore the periwigs fashionable at the time of Queen Lovisa...