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Royal Opera House
2017-06-28 11:26:53
Verdi and Boito: the fiery friendship that produced two great final operas
Arrigo Boito and Giuseppe Verdi, 1892. Photograph by Achille Ferrario Giuseppe Verdi ’s Otello and Falstaff are operas that might never have been. That they and Verdi’s revised version of Simon Boccanegra exist is thanks in large part to Arrigo Boito , a poet and composer nearly thirty years Verdi’s junior. Unusual among Verdi’s librettists, Boito was a major creative figure in his own right, who coaxed and cajoled the master out of retirement. Yet despite the magnificent fruits of their partnership, for most of the time the two knew each other many would have thought Boito was the last person in the world to be able to convince Verdi to do anything. Their long relationship was tempestuous and fraught – as their letters reveal. Verdi and Boito first worked together as early as 1862, more than 25 years before the premiere of Otello. Completely against type, Verdi had […]
2016-11-12 14:16:56
‘V’ is for Verdi: The Met Opera’s ‘Simon Boccanegra’ and ‘Otello’ — How the Mighty Have Fallen (Part One)
Arrigo Boito & Verdi (Photo: Achille Ferrario, Gazzetta di Parma, 1892) A Poet’s Work is Never Done Arrigo Boito would never have been Verdi’s choice for a librettist, or for anything else he might have had in mind, were it not for their mutual love of Shakespeare. The crotchety Italian master, whose initial attempt at tackling a play by the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon, the opera Macbeth (1847, revived for Paris in 1865) met with audience acclaim if not widely favorable reviews, longed to set Shakespeare’s King Lear to music. The closest he came to scaling the Elizabethan heights, however, was with Rigoletto, written in 1851 to words by the poet Francesco Maria Piave. Piave was Verdi’s most frequent collaborator. Over the course of two decades, the Venetian-born stage director and jack-of-all-trades (according to author William Berger) had supplied the cantankerous Bear of Busseto with texts to no less than […]
2013-08-15 12:06:00
Salzburg's Verdi Don Carlo will be broadcast live on Medici TV at 4.30 European time (3.30 BST) FRIDAY 16th. I hope the link will work !You might have to pay to view but that's fair enough. It's fundamentally anti-art to expect everything free or cheap. With a cast like this only a boor would quibble: Matti Salminen (Flilppo II) Jonas Kaufmann (Don Carlo) Anja Harteros (Elisabetta di Valois) Thomas Hampson (Rodrigo, Marchese di Posa) Ekaterina Semenchuk (La Principessa Eboli) Eric Halfvarson (Il Grande Inquisitore) Robert Lloyd (Un frate) Maria Celeng (Tebaldo) Sen Guo (Una voce dal cielo) Benjamin Bernheim (Il Conte di Lerma/Un Araldo reale) Members of the Young Singers Project (Sei deputatI Fiamminghi) Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus Wiener Philharmoniker. Antonio Pappano conducts
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