Here, I post my reviews and document my love of opera. I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to comment on any of my posts or contact me if you wish to.
Have a nice stay!
David Buchler
All tagged Lise Davidsen
Whilst the first of three versions of Fidelio was premiered in Vienna in 1805, it wasn’t until 1814 that the final version titled Fidelio – as opposed to Leonore for the previous two – was itself premiered to critical acclaim, with the original three Act version now reduced to two Acts. This was Beethoven’s only opera and he best described it in a letter to one of his Librettists, Georg Friedrich Treitschke, that his ‘Cooperation had saved what is best from the shipwreck’.
In a remarkable career spanning six decades, Giuseppe Verdi 1813-1901, composed nearly 30 operas, at least half of which are at the core of today’s repertoire. His Requiem, premiered in 1874, stands as a unique testimony to his artistic and human vision and is a setting of the text for the Roman Catholic mass for the dead as it existed until its revision in 1970.
Götterdämmerung, the last of the four operas making up Wagner’s Ring Cycle, held our breath throughout the six and a half hours of operatic intensity. Keith Warner’s production comes to its sizzling end as the ring and the gold is once more returned to its home with the rhinemaidens, beautifully, and finally fleshily, played by Lauren Fagan, Christina Bock and Angela Simkin.
Rheingold is the first of four operas that constitute Wagner’s der Ring Des Nibelungen and was premiered in Munich in 1869. Wagner wrote the Ring librettos in reverse order, with Rheingold last but the first to be set to music. The premiere of the whole Ring Cycle was at the Bayreuth in 1876.
