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 Lucy Crowe
In a joint production with Munich and four other Opera Houses the opera director Barrie Kosky has put together an interesting and illuminating up-to-date version of Handel’s earliest complete opera, which premiered in 1707 in Venice.
Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro was premiered in Vienna in 1786. It’s a 4 Act opera buffa, with the libretto written by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It was written several years after the plot of the Barber of Seville and recounts a single day of madness in the palace of Count Almaviva near Seville Spain.
If the French had anything to do with it, Rigoletto would never have been performed. Based on Victor Hugo’s play ‘Le roi s’amuse’, where Verdi described the subject matter of the play as ‘immense’, it was highly controversial as it depicted the King of France as an immoral and cynical womaniser. As a result, the opera had to undergo many changes before the censors allowed it to be performed, opening at La Fenice in Venice in 1851. Even though the King of France was deleted from the opera – he was converted to the Duke of Mantua – the opera was banned in France and not performed there until 1882.
