Word: orfeo
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MUNICH (June 22 to Aug. 10) is one continuous Fest, starting with Karl Richter's Bach Festival (June 22-30) through chamber music at Nymphenburg Palace (July 6-25) to the Bayerische Staatsoper's ambitious selection of operas ranging from Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice to Berg's Lulu, via a sprinkling of operas by Munich's own Richard Strauss (July...
...melodic gift and a boffo theatrical sense, made the French comic opera of his time into the granddaddy of today's musical comedy. In Orpheus, his first big success, he took what were then scandalous liberties with the Greek legend in order to parody Gluck's opera Orfeo et Euridice, to spoof solemn antiquity worship, and to satirize the manners and morals of the Second Empire under Napoleon III. His fiddle-playing Orpheus is glad to be rid of the unfaithful Eurydice until a character called Public Opinion forces him to complain to Jupiter. The gods, bored with...
That abortive first rehearsal was as close as Haydn ever got to seeing a performance of Orfeo. Not until 1951, in fact, did the opera receive its first staged performance, when it was presented at Florence's Maggio Musicale. Last week there was a second: at the Vienna Festival, with a star-studded cast headed by Soprano Joan Sutherland and Tenor Nicolai Gedda...
Hailed by Vienna critics as the highlight of the festival, Haydn's Orfeo may well have as much claim to entry in the active repertory as the better-known operatic version of the story that Christoph Gluck wrote 30 years earlier. Apparently influenced by his exposure to England's oratorio tradition, Haydn composed Orfeo for a chorus and orchestra much larger than he had previously used. The heavy dose of choral music and the numerous arias in sona ta form make much of the opera sound like an oratorio. The chorus, for example, joins in a love duet...
...forgotten opera Alcina. She and her husband are also responsible for the revival of Rossini's Semiramide, which had not been staged in the U.S. for 59 years when the couple brought it to Boston in 1965. For the sake of his principals, Bonynge embellished the score of Orfeo with newly composed "decorations for the soprano and tenor, which are part of the tradition of Haydn's time." He also transferred to his wife the lyric soprano aria of the Genius who leads Orfeo down to Hell in search of his beloved. There was good musical reason...