The Apothecary (1768) was the first opera that Haydn wrote (in Italian as Lo speziale) for the court at Esterháza (inaugurating its opera house). It sets a libretto by the prominent Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni and condenses the typical elements of mid and late 18th century opera buffa to a scenario with just four characters. In …
Bampton Classical Opera – Haydn’s The Apothecary Read More »
The narrative of Vivaldi’s opera Griselda (1735) will be familiar to readers of classic literature since it appears as the story of patient Griselda in Boccaccio’s Decameron, and was used from that source by Chaucer as one of his Canterbury Tales. Although very little of Vivaldi’s operatic output is widely known today, this work contains one of his few …
Judging from the number of performances of Theodora in recent times, including staged productions, this has become one of Handel’s most respected oratorios (‘popular’ would be too glib a word for so serious a work) – probably due more to its theme of persecution and freedom of conscience and belief, than the psychology and experience …
Paris and Helen (Paride ed Elena, 1770) was the third of the ‘Reform’ operas by Gluck and his librettist Raniero da Calzabigi (after Orfeo and Alceste) but it retains some of the aspects of Baroque opera, particularly in the genre’s French form. Although written in Italian for performance in Vienna (and, unlike its operatic siblings, …
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It would be too obvious a ploy to locate Handel’s Arcadian masque Acis and Galatea in any significant way in Buxton itself, at the heart of the Peak District, one of England’s great national parks. Instead a few brief slides of its landscapes are shown at the outset to draw an appropriate connection in Martin …
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Pauline Viardot’s version of the Cinderella story (1904) is better described as a salon or drawing room opera, since it lasts for only a little over an hour (hence no interval is necessary) and its small cast is accompanied by piano alone. It is none the worse for that, but is a more or less …
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How times change! Malcolm Arnold’s opera, The Dancing Master, was intended for broadcast on BBC television in 1952 but was dropped because its adaptation of a racy Restoration play by William Wycherley was regarded as too bawdy. Needless to say, to audiences in 2021 witnessing this first professional performance in Britain, after successive waves of …
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