United States or Republic of the Congo ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Theodore Thomas some years ago entertained the project of reviving German opera in New York, in a manner that should eclipse all previous operatic enterprises in this country. It was his intention to give in the leading American cities a series of performances of Wagner's Nibelung Tetralogy, and he looked forward to this as the crowning achievement of his busy life.
She has shown originality in other than operatic fields, and her greatest work is a Mass in D. This is a composition of decided merit, and is full of sustained dignity and breadth of style. It is intensely modern in quality, and its expressive feeling is somewhat reminiscent of Gounod, but it is not in any sense an imitation of the great Frenchman.
Johnson went to Italy in 1909, beginning at once his studies with Lombardi, in Florence. In the ten years of his absence from his home land he has built up a reputation and made a career in the great operatic centers of Italy, Spain and South America. After his début in Padua, he became leading tenor at La Scala, Milan, for five consecutive seasons.
Even at Vienna Gluck was planning the reforms in opera that were to banish the prevailing vocal inanities from the stage, and make his name immortal. He did not minimize the beauty of contemporary operatic music, but claimed that it consisted merely of a set of conventional arias and scenas, and that the music did not in any way emphasize or illustrate the meaning of the words.
The composition at times is operatic in character, while the text calls for a mode of treatment solemn and religious, as in Passion-music. If set to some other text, this work would be well nigh faultless; the recitatives are singularly good, and there is a rich orchestration. It is reminiscent of Händel and prophetic of Wagner. The Hallelujah Chorus in particular is a magnificent piece of work.
Down later, it is a duet with the Rev. Septimus Barmby. We have nothing to be ashamed of in her, before an Italian Operatic singer! Ices after the first part is over. Had Nataly and Nesta known who was outside helping Skepsey to play ball with the boys, they would not have worked through their share of the performance with so graceful a composure.
This, then, was the model gentleman to whom Skipwith made over a share in the Drury Lane patent, and through whose efforts the rival companies were united in 1708. Swiney, according to the orders of the Lord Chamberlain, was to conduct the Haymarket for operatic performances, and the players were all to act at the older house. For a time life at the theatre went as merrily as a marriage bell.
But to one who already knows the tale, a composer's overture without stage accessories or singing actors or any "operatic" devices as such furnishes in its successions and combinations of musical sound, without the use of verbal symbols, a unique pleasurable emotion which strongly and powerfully reinforces the emotions suggested by the Orpheus myth itself.
'Sapho' , an operatic version of Daudet's famous novel, and 'Cendrillon' , a charming fantasia on the old theme of Cinderella, both succeeded in hitting Parisian taste. No less fortunate was 'Grisélidis' , a quasi-mediæval musical comedy, founded upon the legend of Patient Grizel, and touching the verge of pantomime in the characters of a comic Devil and his shrewish spouse.
He might have been a Martian, when in response to her leading he discussed Paula with her; how good a musician she was; how splendidly equipped physically and temperamentally for an operatic career. "She has abandoned all that now, I suppose," he said. "Everything that goes with it. She would wish, if she ever gave us a thought, that LaChaise and I had never been born."
Word Of The Day