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Selected pictures list
Portal:Opera/Selected picture/1
Gilbert and Sullivan created fourteen comic operas, including H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, and The Mikado, many of which are still frequently performed today. However, events around their 1889 collaboration, The Gondoliers, led to an argument and a lawsuit dividing the two. In 1891, after many failed attempts at reconciliation by the pair and their producer, Richard D'Oyly Carte, Gilbert and Sullivan's music publisher, Tom Chappell, stepped in to mediate between two of his most profitable artists, and within two weeks he had succeeded. This cartoon in The Entr'acte expresses the magazine's pleasure at the reuniting of D'Oyly Carte (left), Gilbert (centre), and Sullivan (right).
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An engraving by D. H. Friston of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Trial by Jury, shortly after its première. A satire of courtroom antics, which invoked "almost boisterous hilarity" in its original audience, Trial by Jury remains a favourite throughout the English-speaking world, and is performed regularly to this day.
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A scene from Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin, as performed at its London première in 1875. The story, part of the Knight of the Swan tradition, is taken from medieval German romances, including a secondary plot in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and the main plot of its sequel, Lohengrin, and the epic of Garin le Loherain which inspired it. The opera was first performed on 28 August 1850 at the Staatskapelle Weimar conducted by Franz Liszt. Several excerpts have become famous, most notably "Treulich geführt" from Act III, Scene 1, commonly known as "Here Comes the Bride".
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The Palais Garnier, also known as the Opéra de Paris or Opéra Garnier, but more commonly as the Paris Opéra, is a 2,200-seat opera house on the Place de l'Opéra in Paris, France. A grand landmark designed by Charles Garnier in the Neo-Baroque style, it is regarded as one of the architectural masterpieces of its time.
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A 1908 poster for Giuseppe Verdi's opera Aida, performed by the Hippodrome Opera Company in Cleveland, Ohio. Aida was first performed at the Khedivial Opera House in Cairo on 24 December 1871.
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A poster (circa 1896) for an American production of Georges Bizet's Carmen, starring Rosabel Morrison. Set in Seville, Spain, around 1830, Bizet's opera tells the story of Carmen, a beautiful Gypsy with a fiery temper. Free with her love, she woos Don José, a young soldier. Their relationship leads to his rejection of his former sweetheart, mutiny against his superior officer, and joining a gang of smugglers. When Carmen turns from him to the bullfighter Escamillo, Don José's jealousy leads to murder.
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Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld and his wife, Malwine Schnorr von Carolsfeld, in the original production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in 1865. It was at Wagner's own request that the couple were cast in the title roles. Six weeks, and three performances later, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld died in Dresden, only days after his 29th birthday. After his death, his widow could not bring herself to continue with her career and retired from the stage.
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Valencia's Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències (City of Arts and Sciences) at night. The building to the left is the city's opera house and cultural centre, the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía. Designed by Santiago Calatrava, the Palau de les Arts was officially opened in October 2005 and staged its first opera, Beethoven's Fidelio, in October 2006. The opera house suffered a setback in December of that year when the main stage platform collapsed with the complete set of Jonathan Miller's production of Don Giovanni.
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A poster for the original production of John Philip Sousa's operetta El Capitan (1896), starring DeWolf Hopper. Don Enrico Medigua, the viceroy of Spain-occupied Peru, fears assassination by rebels. After he secretly has the rebel leader El Capitan killed, he disguises himself as El Capitan. Estrelda, the former viceroy's daughter, impressed by tales of El Capitan's daring, falls in love with the disguised Medigua, who is already married. Meanwhile, Medigua's wife and daughter search for him, and the rebels capture the Lord Chamberlain, mistaking him for the viceroy. Medigua leads the hapless rebels against the Spaniards, taking them in circles until they are too tired to fight. The Spaniards win, the mistaken identities are revealed, the love stories are untangled, and the story ends happily.
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The wedding of Don Cæsar and Maritana, in the original 1845 production of William Vincent Wallace's Maritana. Don Cæsar, facing execution, agrees to marry a mysterious woman (Maritana) in order to have what he sees as a more fitting death. However, the person who arranged this, Don José, has intercepted Don Cæsar's pardon, in order to use him as part of a scheme to change the unwitting Maritana from a mere peasant into the widow of a nobleman: the King has shown an interest in her, and he hopes that if faced with her at court every day, he will get enough evidence to convince the queen that her husband is unfaithful, and can thus convince the queen into an affair. However, a peasant boy, Lazarillo, that Don Cæsar had helped removes all the bullets from the firing squad's guns, and the plot begins to unravel, eventually resulting in a happy ending for Don Cæsar and Maritana, and the death of Don José.
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The climactic event in the first half of Jules Massenet's Le Cid: Rodrigue's father has obliged his son to defend his honour, but Rodrigue only afterwards learns that the person he has to duel is his beloved Chimène's father, the Comte de Gormas. He is honour-bound to go through with it, and wins the duel, but Chimène now both loves and hates him, and this internal conflict powers the drama of the rest of the opera. From L'Illustration's coverage of the opera's première.
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The climax of Act II in Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Princess Ida as illustrated by William Russell Flint. The opera tells the story of Princess Ida who founds a women's university and teaches that women are superior to men and should rule in their stead. The prince to whom she had been married in infancy sneaks into the university, together with two friends, with the aim of collecting his bride. They disguise themselves as women students, but are discovered, precipitating a war between the sexes. Ida sings...
Though I am but a girl,
Defiance thus I hurl
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Italian tenor Enrico Caruso was an opera singer of international renown, and one of the key pioneers of recorded music. His "Vesti la giubba" (from Ruggiero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci) was, in its various versions, the first recording to sell a million copies.
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The facade of the Concertgebouw concert hall in Amsterdam. It opened on 11 April 1888, with an inaugural concert in which an orchestra of 120 musicians and a chorus of 500 singers performed works by Wagner, Handel, Bach, and Beethoven. The hall now hosts 800 performances every year, including concert performances of opera. Its resident orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, also serves as one of the orchestras for The Netherlands Opera.
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An 1882 portrait of Oscar Wilde, the Irish playwright, poet and author. In 1905 his play Salomé was adapted into operas by two different composers – Salome by Richard Strauss and Salomé by Antoine Mariotte. Wilde himself is the protagonist of Theodore Morrison's opera Oscar which premiered in 2013 at Santa Fe Opera with David Daniels in the title role.
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The Austrian city of Salzburg, the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the home of the annual Salzburg Festival. In 2006, the festival celebrated the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth by staging all 22 of his operatic works (including two unfinished operas). All the productions were filmed and released to the general public in November 2006.
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Neuschwanstein Castle, commissioned by Ludwig II of Bavaria as a retreat and as an homage to Richard Wagner. The young king was so moved by Wagner's opera Lohengrin, based on the legend of the Swan Knight, that he named his castle "New Swan Stone," or "Neuschwanstein". It was King Ludwig's patronage that later gave Wagner the means to build a theatre for, compose and stage his epic cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung.
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Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes, the city's premier opera house and the home of Mexico's National Symphony Orchestra. Opera singers who have performed there include Maria Callas, Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Kathleen Battle, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Jessye Norman. Inaugurated in 1934, the building has an extravagant Beaux Arts exterior in imported Italian Carrara white marble.
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The Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome, a papal fortress and prison until 1901. It serves as the setting for Act III of Puccini's opera Tosca. After murdering Rome's chief of police, the evil Baron Scarpia, Floria Tosca goes to the Castel Sant' Angelo, where her lover, Mario Cavaradossi, is to be executed. She has been led to believe that it will be a mock execution and is horrified to see him die in a hail of real bullets. As Scarpia's henchmen arrive to arrest her, she throws herself from the castle's ramparts. Famously dismissed by the musicologist Joseph Kerman as a "shabby little shocker", Tosca has become one of the most enduring works in the operatic repertoire.
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Ilya Repin's 1876 painting, Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom. The Russian legend of Sadko, the minstrel who charmed the Sea King and his daughter and eventually returned to Novgorod a wealthy man, was the subject of Rimsky-Korsakov's 1896 opera Sadko.
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Queen Elizabeth I of England painted c.1575 by an unknown artist. Her life and loves were explored in three operas by Gaetano Donizetti – Il castello di Kenilworth, Maria Stuarda, and Roberto Devereux. She is also the subject of Rossini's Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra and Benjamin Britten's Gloriana, which was composed for the coronation of her descendant, Queen Elizabeth II.
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A Gustave Doré illustration for Chapter I of Don Quixote. The epic novel by Miguel de Cervantes has served as the inspiration for several operas including Mendelssohn's Die Hochzeit des Camacho, Massenet's Don Quichotte, and Manuel de Falla's Master Peter's Puppet Show.
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The Sydney Opera House at night, as viewed from the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It is one of the world's most distinctive 20th century buildings, and one of the most famous performing arts centres in the world. Contrary to its name, the building houses several separate venues rather than a single opera theatre, with the two main venues, the Opera Theatre and the Concert Hall, defined by the two larger shells. The Sydney Opera House is a major performing venue for Opera Australia, The Australian Ballet, the Sydney Theatre Company and the Sydney Symphony.
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The Royal College of Music in London. Founded by Royal Charter in 1882, its first director was Sir George Grove. Amongst the opera singers who have trained or taught there are Joan Sutherland, Thomas Allen, Gwyneth Jones, Heddle Nash, Clara Butt, and Jenny Lind. The current building was designed by Sir Arthur Blomfield in the Flemish Mannerist style and built in 1894.
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Soprano Mignon Nevada as Ophelia in Ambroise Thomas's opera, Hamlet. The daughter of American soprano Emma Nevada, who was also her teacher, and the godchild of Ambroise Thomas, she was named after the title character in Thomas's opera Mignon. She appeared as Ophelia at the opening of the 1910 winter season at London's Royal Opera House and went on to sing several leading roles there. During her career she also sang at the Opéra de Paris, the Opéra-Comique, La Scala and the Teatro São Carlos in Lisbon. After her retirement from the stage, she became a voice teacher.
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Triple Portrait of Cardinal Richelieu (1585 – 1642) by Philippe de Champaigne. A great patron of the arts as well as a statesman, Richelieu built a private theatre in his palace which was to become an early home of the Paris Opera. After his death, it was known as the Théâtre du Palais-Royal and saw the premieres of many operas by Lully including Psyché and Alceste .
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The German poet and playwright, Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805) whose plays formed the basis for many operas, including Verdi's I masnadieri, Don Carlos, and Luisa Miller; Rossini's William Tell; and Donizetti's Maria Stuarda.
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The Vase of Peace and western facade of the Palace of Versailles. Its permanent theatre and opera house, L'Opéra of the Palace of Versailles, was inaugurated in 1770 with a performance of Lully's Persée. The palace itself is the setting of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's opera Les plaisirs de Versailles, first performed in the private apartments of Louis XIV in 1682, and John Corigliano's 20th century opera The Ghosts of Versailles.
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The Execution of Lady Jane Grey depicted by Paul Delaroche. The tragic story of Lady Jane Grey, an English noblewoman executed for treason in 1554, was the subject of several operas, including Nicola Vaccai's Giovanna Gray which premiered at La Scala in 1836 with Maria Malibran in the title role.
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Georges Rochegrosse's poster for the first Paris production of Jules Massenet's opera Don Quichotte, a dramatized version of the story of Don Quixote. Massenet conceived and composed the title role specifically for the great Russian bass, Feodor Chaliapin who sang it in the world premiere on 19 February 1910 at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo. Don Quichotte had its Paris premiere later that year at the Théâtre de la Gaîté.
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Émile Bertrand's poster of the 1899 world premiere of Massenet's opera Cendrillon at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. A re-telling of the Cinderella fairy tale, the opera was an immediate success, with fifty performances in its first season, and is still performed today. At the premiere, the roles of Cinderella, the Fairy Godmother, and Prince Charming were all sung by sopranos.
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Poster for the world première of Massenet's opéra-comique Sapho. It was first performed on 27 November 1897 at the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris with Emma Calvé in the title role. The story, based on Alphonse Daudet's novel of the same name, concerns the beautiful Sapho, an artist's model of a certain age and notorious life, who begins an ill-fated affair with a younger man.
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Napoleon Bonaparte depicted in 1803 as the First Consul of France. Six years later, he commissioned the opera Pimmalione to show off the talents of two of his favourite singers, his lover Giuseppina Grassini and the famous castrato Girolamo Crescentini. It was first given in a private performance at the Tuileries Palace. Napoleon was delighted with the work and offered its composer, Luigi Cherubini, a large reward and a commission for another piece. Napoleon himself appears as a character in several operas including Prokofiev's War and Peace and Giordano's Madame Sans-Gêne.
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Portrait of the English soprano, Nancy Storace, circa 1788. The role of Susanna in Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro was written for and first performed by her. Mozart also wrote the concert aria "Ch'io mi scordi di te?" for her, often considered to be one of his greatest compositions in that genre.
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An early advertisement showing the Drawing Room Scene from Utopia, Limited, a Savoy opera by Gilbert & Sullivan. The opera premiered in 1893 and satirises limited liability companies, and particularly the idea that a bankrupt company could leave creditors unpaid without any liability on the part of its owners.
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Lemuel Abbott's portrait of Admiral Horatio Nelson, famous for his service in the Royal Navy, particularly during the Napoleonic Wars. He is the protagonist of Nelson, an opera in three acts by Lennox Berkeley which centres on Nelson's love affair with Emma Hamilton.
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An 1879 poster for Franz von Suppé's operetta Fatinitza. The operetta's hero, Wladimir Samoiloff, is a young Russian Lieutenant who had an adventure in which he disguised himself as a woman whom he named Fatinitza and met with the hot-tempered elderly General Kantschukoff, who fell in love with "her". Complications ensue when Wladimir and Lydia, the General's niece, fall in love.
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An 1896 poster for the theatrical adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's novel La Dame aux Camélias starring Sarah Bernhardt. The play was an instant success when it premiered in 1852 and formed the basis for Giuseppe Verdi's 1853 opera La Traviata.
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Titian's painting Bacchus and Ariadne which depicts Bacchus's arrival on the Island of Naxos. Over the centuries, the scene has formed the climax of many operas from Monteverdi's L'Ariana (1608) to Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos (1912).
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Zürich Opera House, originally built in 1891 and designed by the Viennese architects Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer. Renovation and restoration of the building took place between 1982 and 1984, but not without huge local opposition which erupted into street riots. The rebuilt theatre was inaugurated with performances of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and the world première of Rudolf Kelterborn's opera Der Kirschgarten.
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Wheat Field with Cypresses painted by Vincent van Gogh in 1889 while he was a patient at a mental asylum in Saint-Rémy. Van Gogh's tortured life had been the subject of several 20th-century operas, including Van Gogh by Nevit Kodallı (first performed in 1956), The Passion of Vincent van Gogh by Christopher Yavelow (first performed in 1984), and Vincent by Einojuhani Rautavaara (first performed in 1990).
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Portrait of Noël Coward by the English society-photographer and former actor, Allan Warren. Coward's 1929 operetta Bitter Sweet was later made into a film starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. The score was so heavily cut that Coward vowed he would never again allow one of plays to be filmed in Hollywood.
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The Last Day of Pompeii, Karl Briullov's 1833 painting depicting the destruction of Pompeii in 79 AD following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The painting was inspired in part by Giovanni Pacini's opera L'ultimo giorno di Pompei which premiered in Naples in 1825 with spectacular special effects. Pacini's young daughters, Amazilia and Giovannina, served as the models for the two children sheltering in the arms of a Pompeian woman. The woman was modelled on Yuliya Samoylova who was the foster mother of Pacini's daughters and had been the lover of both Pacini and Briullov.
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Jules Verne, the French writer best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction. Operas based on his works include Offenbach's Le docteur Ox and Le voyage dans la lune, Gavin Bryars's Doctor Ox's Experiment, and Hersant's Le Château des Carpathes.
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The Fall of Phaeton painted by Rubens in 1604. The myth of Phaeton, whose attempt to drive the sun god's chariot led to his death, was the basis of Lully's 1683 opera Phaëton. Lully's opera was an indirect reference to the fate of Nicolas Fouquet whose ambitions to imitate the King Louis XIV (The Sun King) brought about his downfall.
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Portrait of the Austrian composer Franz Lehár (1870–1948). He was known for his many operettas, including The Merry Widow, The Land of Smiles, and The Count of Luxembourg.
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The Theatro Municipal in São Paulo, Brazil. It is regarded as one of the landmarks of the city, significant both for its architectural value as well as its historical importance. The first production to be staged there was Ambroise Thomas's opera Hamlet with Titta Ruffo in the title role.
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The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, Joseph Noel Paton's 1849 painting which depicts a central scene from Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play has had several operatic adaptations, most notably Purcell's The Fairy-Queen and Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Britten's opera premiered in 1960 with Alfred Deller as Oberon and Jennifer Vyvyan as Titania.
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Corbet's portrait of the French tenor Louis Guéymard depicts him in the title role of Meyerbeer's opera Robert le diable. In this final scene of Act 1, Robert gambles with dice, loses his entire estate, and sings the aria "L'or est une chimère" (Gold is but an illusion). After many further vicissitudes and dabbling in witchcraft, Robert finally marries his beloved Isabelle and his evil father is dragged down to hell.
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In this 1771 painting by Alexander Roslin, King Gustav III of Sweden and his Brothers, King Gustav is shown seated left with his brother Frederick standing and his brother Charles seated right. Gustav, an enlightened ruler and patron of the arts, was assassinated in 1792 at a masked ball held in Sweden's Royal Opera House. The episode is the central theme of Daniel Auber's opera Gustave III, ou Le bal masqué and Verdi's opera Un ballo in maschera.
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Gallen-Kallela's 1899 painting Kullervo Cursing depicts a scene from the tormented life of Kullervo, a character in the Finnish epic Kalevala and the protagonist of Aulis Sallinen's opera Kullervo. Sallinen's opera was intended for the opening of a new national opera house in Helsinki, but construction delays meant that the work was premiered in Los Angeles as part of the celebrations of the 75th anniversary of Finnish independence. The Finnish baritone Jorma Hynninen sang the title role in the 1992 premiere with Matti Salminen as his father.
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A self-portrait by Salvator Rosa, an Italian Baroque painter and poet who was described as "unorthodox and extravagant" and a "perpetual rebel". His life and adventures, along with those of Masaniello, a Neapolitan fisherman turned rebel leader, formed the basis for Antônio Carlos Gomes's 1874 opera Salvator Rosa. Its librettist, Antonio Ghislanzoni, had also written the libretto for Verdi's Aida.
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Frontispiece to the 1860 vocal score of Giuseppe Verdi's opera, Un ballo in maschera. Major problems with the censors beset this opera. Originally entitled Gustavo III, it was a fictionalized account of the 1792 assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden. The censors forbade the portrayal of a real monarch, let alone the assassination of the monarch on stage. Verdi had the setting moved to Germany with all the names changed and the opera retitled Una vendetta. The censors objected again. Verdi gave up, broke his contract with the Teatro San Carlo, the commissioning opera house, and returned home. The San Carlo sued. Verdi counter-sued. Once the legal issues cleared, Verdi submitted it to the Teatro Apollo. This time the setting was in Colonial America. It was finally performed in 1859 and proved a hit.
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Title page of the libretto for Giuseppe Verdi's I Lombardi alla prima crociata printed for the opera's premiere season at La Scala in 1843. Verdi dedicated the score to Maria Luigia, the Habsburg Duchess of Parma, who died a few weeks after the premiere. I Lombardi was part of a long tradition of operas set against the background of the medieval Crusades which dates from the 17th century. In 1847 the opera was significantly revised for performances in Paris with the title Jérusalem and became Verdi's first grand opera.
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Title page of the vocal score for Giuseppe Verdi's 1845 opera, Giovanna d'Arco. Based on the life of Joan of Arc, the opera takes considerable liberties with history. Unlike the real Joan of Arc who was burnt at the stake, Verdi's heroine dies on the battlefield. The opera premiered at La Scala, Milan where it was rapturously received by the audience but dismissed by the critics. For a production in Rome three months later, the Papal censors demanded that all religious connotations be removed from the story. The opera was performed as Orietta di Lesbo and set on the Isle of Lesbos with an Italian heroine leading the Lesbians into battle against the Turks.
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Cover of the entire vocal score to Hector Berlioz's opera Les Troyens published by the Parisian music editors Choudens et Cie in 1863. In this score, Berlioz introduced a number of optional cuts which have often been adopted in subsequent productions. He complained bitterly of the cuts that he was more-or-less forced to allow at the 1863 Théâtre Lyrique première, and his letters and memoirs are filled with the indignation that it caused him to "mutilate" his score. In the early 20th century, the lack of accurate parts led musicologists W. J. Turner and Cecil Gray to plan a raid on the Choudens office, even approaching the Parisian underworld for help.
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Cover of a first edition of the vocal score for La Prise de Troie (The Fall of Troy), the first two acts from Hector Berlioz's opera Les Troyens. Berlioz himself wrote the libretto based on Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid. The opera originally premiered with only its last three acts, under the title Les Troyens à Carthage (The Trojans at Carthage). The complete Les Troyens was Berlioz's most ambitious work, the summation of his entire artistic career, but he did not live to see it performed in its entirety.
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Cover of the 1863 vocal score for Les Troyens à Carthage (The Trojans at Carthage), the title given to last three acts from Hector Berlioz's opera Les Troyens. The opera originally premiered under this title. The first two acts were later performed under the title La prise de Troie (The Fall of Troy). The complete Les Troyens with a libretto by Berlioz himself based on Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid was his most ambitious work and the summation of his entire artistic career, but he did not live to see the opera performed in its entirety.
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Cover of an early vocal score for Verdi's 1853 opera La traviata. The scene depicted is from the final act where the Parisian courtesan Violetta dies in the arms of her lover Alfredo while his father looks on. The opera's story, adapted from Alexandre Dumas's 1852 play La dame aux Camélias, was meant to set in mid-19th century France as a contemporary drama. However, the Italian censors insisted that such a scandalous story be set in the distant past. Hence, the 17th-century costumes worn in this illustration. It was not until the 1880s that the composer and librettist's original wishes for the opera's setting were carried out.
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Cover to an 1867 vocal score of Jacques Offenbach's operetta Robinson Crusoé. Although loosely based on Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe, the work owes more to British pantomime than to the book itself. Célestine Galli-Marié who sang the role of Man Friday in the premiere production would later to achieve fame as the first Carmen.
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Title page of Rigoletto, an opera by Giuseppe Verdi with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave based on Victor Hugo's play Le roi s'amuse. Despite serious initial problems with the censors, the opera had a triumphant premiere at La Fenice in Venice on 11 March 1851 and is considered by many to be the first of the operatic masterpieces of Verdi's middle-to-late career. Its tragic story revolves around the licentious Duke of Mantua, his hunch-backed court jester Rigoletto, and Rigoletto's beautiful daughter Gilda. The opera's original title, La maledizione (The Curse), refers to the curse placed on both the Duke and Rigoletto by a courtier whose daughter had been seduced by the Duke with Rigoletto's encouragement. The curse comes to fruition when Gilda likewise falls in love with the Duke and eventually sacrifices her life to save him from the assassins hired by her father.
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Front page of The Illustrated London News depicting the elopement scene from Haddon Hall, an 1892 opera by Arthur Sullivan and Sydney Grundy. The opera dramatises the legend of Dorothy Vernon's elopement with John Manners in 1563. The legend came to prominence in the 19th century and was the subject of numerous plays and novels.
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A scene depicting the ballet of Moorish dancers in Act 3 of Jules Massenet's 1885 opera Le Cid. The story is based on the exploits of El Cid, a Castilian nobleman and military leader in medieval Spain. After the premiere, the Paris Opéra continued to revive Le Cid until 1919 reaching over 150 performances at the theatre by that date. A new production was mounted there in the 2014-15 season with Roberto Alagna in the title role.
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Title page to an early vocal score of L'éclair (The Lightning Flash), an opéra comique in 3 acts by Fromental Halévy which was premièred by the Paris Opéra-Comique on 16 December 1835. It recounts the amours of the Englishman George and the American Lyonel for two sisters, Henriette and the widow Mme. Darbel, who are rather indecisive about who they should pair up with at the start. This indecisiveness is complicated further by the temporary blindness suffered by Lyonel when he is struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. The opera was well received which placed Halévy in the unusual position of having two simultaneous successes on the Paris stage (the other being his grand opera masterpiece, La juive).
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Vocal score to the 1916 version of Ariadne auf Naxos (Ariadne on Naxos) is an opera by Richard Strauss with a German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Bringing together slapstick comedy and consummately beautiful music, the opera's theme is the competition between high and low art for the public's attention. Music critic and author Matt Dobkin wrote that, while Ariadne auf Naxos is "not as well loved as Der Rosenkavalier or as important as Salome, it is nevertheless staged all the time, thanks in large part to sopranos' attraction to the vocal and dramatic grandeur of the title role and to the compelling spitfire Zerbinetta character."
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Philippe Chaperon's set design for Act 4, scene 2 of Giuseppe Verdi's opera Aida as first performed at the Cairo Opera House on 24 December 1871. The costumes and accessories for the premiere were designed by Auguste Mariette, who also oversaw the design and construction of the sets, which were made in Paris by the Opéra's scene painters Auguste Rubé and Philippe Chaperon (acts 1 and 4) and Edouard Despléchin and Jean-Baptiste Lavastre (acts 2 and 3), and shipped to Cairo. Although Verdi did not attend the premiere in Cairo, he was most dissatisfied with the fact that the audience consisted of invited dignitaries, politicians and critics, but no members of the general public. He therefore considered the Italian (and European) premiere, held at La Scala, Milan on 8 February 1872, and a performance in which he was heavily involved at every stage, to be its real premiere.
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Giuseppe Verdi conducting Aida at its first Paris Opera performance in 1880. Aida quickly rose to popularity after its première in 1871 in Cairo. Isma'il Pasha, Khedive of Egypt, commissioned Verdi to write an opera for performance to celebrate the opening of the Khedivial Opera House, paying him 150,000 francs, but the premiere was delayed because of the Siege of Paris (1870–71), during the Franco-Prussian War, when the scenery and costumes were stuck in the French capital, and Verdi's Rigoletto was performed instead for the opening ceremony. Aida eventually premièred in Cairo in late 1871. Metastasio's libretto La Nitteti (1756) was a major source of the plot.
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Title page to a 1909 vocal score of Luigi Cherubini's opera Médée. Based on Euripides' tragedy of Medea and Pierre Corneille's play Médée, the opera premièred on 13 March 1797, but was not a huge success. Cherubini created a shortened, Italian translation, but the never rose to popularity until around the mid-19th century. Originally with spoken dialogue between the arias, a German version of 1855 changed this dialogue into sung recitatives written by Franz Lachner. It wasn't until these recitatives were transalated into Italian and added to Cherubini's Italian version in 1909 that the opera reached what would be its standard form throughout the 20th century, and one that remains a popular version to this day. The vocal score seen here is either the first or a very early publication of this hybrid version.
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It also has extremely good music. This is the opening of Act 3, Scene 3 as performed by Enrico Caruso and Giuseppe De Luca.
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Poster for Giuseppe Verdi's La forza del destino. Based on a Spanish drama, Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino (1835), by Ángel de Saavedra, 3rd Duke of Rivas, La forza del destino tells the story of two star-crossed lovers who fate turns against at every turn. The man attempting to throw a gun away as a sign of good faith causes it to shoot the woman's father. The woman's brother, having joined the army under an assumed name, gets given papers to destroy by the man, also under an assumed name - and thus learns his identity and goes on a mad quest to destroy him. And, in the end, when forced to duel the brother and winning, an attempt to save the brother's life results in the man finding the woman... and when they go to help him, the brother stabs the woman in the heart.
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Frontispiece to the first edition vocal score of Gaetano Donizetti's La favorite Telling the story of Léonor de Guzman, the mistress ("favorite") of King Alfonso XI, who finds true love with another, Fernand, but is too ashamed to say what her position is, only telling him she cannot marry him. However, when, with her backing, he rises to high position in the army, and gains the king's favour, her attempt to tell him of her past with a friend's help goes awry when the friend is arrested, and the marriage takes place before he finds out. Afterwards, he rejects her, thinking she tricked him, only to learn, too late, that she truly loved him.
The frontispiece shows Rosine Stoltz and Gilbert Duprez, the original Léonor and Fernand, in the last act.
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Israeli Opera performance of Aida in 2011. The Israeli Opera is the principal opera company of Israel. It was founded in 1985 after lack of Israeli government funding led to the demise of the Israel National Opera. The company also founded the Israeli Opera Festival which has performed large-scale outdoor productions, originally at Caesarea, and from 2010 in Masada, as with this production of Aida.
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Title page of the first edition vocal score of Hector Berlioz's 1862 opera Béatrice et Bénédict, based on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. It is the first notable version of Shakespeare's play in operatic form, and was followed by works by among others Árpád Doppler, Paul Puget and Reynaldo Hahn. Berlioz biographer David Cairns has written "Listening to the score's exuberant gaiety, only momentarily touched by sadness, one would never guess that its composer was in pain when he wrote it and impatient for death".
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Ambroise Thomas (5 August 1811 – 12 February 1896) was a French composer, best known for his operas Mignon (1866) and Hamlet (1868, after Shakespeare) and as Director of the Conservatoire de Paris from 1871 till his death. Emmanuel Chabrier said of him, "There is good music, there is bad music, and then there is Ambroise Thomas."
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The Illustrated London News's depiction of the end scene of Attila, an opera in a prologue and three acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Temistocle Solera, based on the 1809 play Attila, König der Hunnen (Attila, King of the Huns) by Zacharias Werner, in which Odabella, a woman who fought the Huns, and thus so impressed Attila that he wished to marry her, shows her true, hidden hatred for the man who killed her father by stabbing Attila in the heart.
Ezio's act 2 aria of heroic resolution È gettata la mia sorte ("My lot is cast, I am prepared for any warfare") is a fine example of a characteristic Verdian genre, and it achieved fame in its own time with audiences in the context of the adoption of a liberal constitution by Ferdinand II. Other contemporary comment praised the work as suitable for the "political education of the people", while, in contrast, others criticised the opera as "Teutonic" in nature.
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Poster for Giuseppe Verdi's Don Carlo from the première of the 1884 four-act Italian version at La Scala. Based on the dramatic play Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien by Friedrich Schiller, the opera's story is based on conflicts in the life of Carlos, Prince of Asturias (1545–1568), after his betrothed Elisabeth of Valois was married instead to his father Philip II of Spain as part of the peace treaty ending the Italian War of 1551–1559 between the Houses of Habsburg and Valois. It was commissioned and produced by the Théâtre Impérial de l'Opéra (Paris Opera) and given its premiere at the Salle Le Peletier as Don Carlos on 11 March 1867. Many productions after that removed the first act, however, and Verdi eventually produced an official Italian-language abridgement, which removed the ballet and the first act, at Milan in 1884 (from whence this image derives). There also exists a full five-act Italian version from 1886.
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Set design for Act I in an 1895 Paris production of Giuseppe Verdi's Otello. With the composer's reluctance to write anything new after the success of Aida in 1871 and his retreat into retirement, it took his Milan publisher Giulio Ricordi the next ten years, first to persuade him to write anything, then to encourage the revision of Verdi's 1857 Simon Boccanegra by introducing Arrigo Boito as librettist, and finally to begin the arduous process of persuading and cajoling Verdi to see Boito's completed libretto for Otello in July/August 1881. However, the process of writing the first drafts of the libretto and the years of their revision, with Verdi all along not promising anything, dragged on, and it wasn't until 1884, five years after the first drafts of the libretto, that composition began, with most of the work finishing in late 1885. When it finally premièred in Milan on 5 February 1887, it proved to be a resounding success, and further stagings of Otello soon followed at leading theatres throughout Europe and America.
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Circa 1910 photograph of Albert Reiss at the stage entrance of the Metropolitan Opera. Albert Reiss was a German operatic tenor who had a prolific career in Europe and the United States during the first third of the twentieth century. He spent much of his career performing at the Metropolitan Opera where he sang in more than 1,000 performances, including several premieres, between 1901-1919. Excelling in the tenor buffo repertoire, Reiss was particularly associated with the roles of David in Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Mime in Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, two roles he sang in numerous houses internationally.
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Gilbert Duprez as Gaston in Giuseppe Verdi's Jérusalem. A French tenor, singing teacher and minor composer who famously pioneered the delivery of the operatic high C from the chest, and who created roles for such major composers as Gaetano Donizetti, Hector Berlioz, and, as seen here, Giuseppe Verdi. Jérusalem was Verdi's first French grand opera, rearranging and heavily reworking one of his previous Italian operas, I Lombardi alla prima crociata, making the opera more coherent, tighter, and through-composed.
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Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck was a composer of Italian and French opera in the early classical period. Born in the Upper Palatinate (now part of Germany) and raised in Bohemia, he gained prominence at the Habsburg court at Vienna, where he brought about the practical reform of opera's dramaturgical practices that many intellectuals had been campaigning for over the years. With a series of radical new works in the 1760s, among them Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste, he broke the stranglehold that Metastasian opera seria had enjoyed for much of the century.
The strong influence of French opera in these works encouraged Gluck to move to Paris, which he did in November 1773. Fusing the traditions of Italian opera and the French national genre into a new synthesis, Gluck wrote eight operas for the Parisian stages. One of the last of these, Iphigénie en Tauride, was a great success and is generally acknowledged to be his finest work. Though he was extremely popular and widely credited with bringing about a revolution in French opera, Gluck's mastery of the Parisian operatic scene was never absolute, and after the poor reception of his Echo et Narcisse he left Paris in disgust and returned to Vienna to live out the remainder of his life.
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Illustration to Jacques Offenbach's last composition Les contes d'Hoffmann, showing the prologue. Based on the stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann, it features three doomed romances, with his friend Nicklausse - actually Hoffmann's muse in disguise - following him around, attempting to protect him, even as tragedies befall all around him. However, in the end he explains the three women he described are actually elements of his fourth love, who he then rejects, and the muse reveals herself and embraces him.
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Illustration to Jacques Offenbach's last composition Les contes d'Hoffmann, showing the Olympia act. In this act, Hoffmann falls in love with an automaton, Olympia, created by the scientist Spalanzani. To warn Hoffmann, Nicklausse, who knows the truth about Olympia, sings a story of a mechanical doll who looked like a human, but Hoffmann ignores him. Coppélius, Olympia's co-creator and this act's incarnation of Nemesis, sells Hoffmann magic glasses that make Olympia appear as a real woman.
Olympia sings one of the opera's most famous arias, "Les oiseaux dans la charmille" (The birds in the arbor, nicknamed "The Doll Song"), during which she periodically runs down and needs to be wound up before she can continue. Hoffmann is tricked into believing that his affections are returned, to the bemusement of Nicklausse, who subtly tries to warn his friend. While dancing with Olympia, Hoffmann falls on the ground and his glasses break. At the same time, Coppélius appears and tears Olympia apart to retaliate against Spalanzani, who tricked him out of his fees. With the crowd laughing at him, Hoffmann realizes that he was in love with an automaton.
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Illustration to Jacques Offenbach's last composition Les contes d'Hoffmann, showing the Giulietta act, set in Venice. In this act, Hoffmann falls in love with the courtesan Giulietta and thinks she returns his affections. Giulietta is not in love with Hoffmann but only seducing him under the orders of Captain Dapertutto, who has promised to give her a diamond if she steals Hoffmann's reflection from a mirror. The jealous Schlemil, a previous victim of Giulietta and Dapertutto (he gave Giulietta his shadow), challenges the poet to a duel, but is killed. Nicklausse wants to take Hoffmann away from Venice and goes looking for horses. Meanwhile, Hoffmann meets Giulietta and cannot resist her, giving her his reflection, only to be abandoned by the courtesan, to Dapertutto's great pleasure. Hoffmann tells Dapertutto that his friend Nicklausse will come and save him. Dapertutto prepares a poison to get rid of Nicklausse, but Giulietta drinks it by mistake and drops dead in the poet's arms.
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Valhalla burns at the end of Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung, the final opera in the Ring Cycle.
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Pierre Gaveaux, a French operatic tenor and composer, notable for creating the role of Jason in Cherubini's Médée and for composing Leonore ou l'amour conjugal, the first operatic version of the story that later found fame as Fidelio.
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Nominations
Feel free to add related featured pictures, either from here or Commons, to the above list. Other pictures may be nominated at WP:FPC. If setting the image up is too difficult, list it below, and someone should get to it shortly.
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