Adelaide Kemble News
British opera singer (1815-1879)
Commemorations 2025 (Birth: Adelaide Kemble)
- mezzo-soprano
- United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
- opera singer, writer
Last update
2024-04-25
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2020-10-26 08:06:29
An honourable failure or a misunderstood masterpiece? Another look at Weber's Oberon
Weber: OberonLucia Elizabeth Vestris as Fatima in an 1826 etching Carl Maria von Weber's opera Oberon is commonly regarded as an honourable failure, the German composer's surprisingly coherent attempt to triumph over an incoherent English libretto. Yet the piece contains much of Weber's finest music and if we are to understand it and, perhaps, love it, then we need to put the music into context and try and realise what the work's librettist (James Robertson Planché) and commissioner (Charles Kemble, manager of Covent Garden) were trying to achieve. In writing Oberon, Weber was attempting to follow up on the huge success of his 1821 opera, Der Freischütz (in fact the composer's 7th opera), with its combination of spoken dialogue, folk-opera and high-romantic melodrama, and the conspicuous lack of success of Euryanthe (1823), with its through-composed structure yet poorly conceived libretto. He was also trying to make money; the […]
2020-07-13 07:08:10
The Invention of English Opera: the surprising history of opera in 17th century England, part one, from masques to dramatic-opera
[…] necessary to sound well, before her gallants, or at least her envious sex."King Arthur was revived at least twice during Purcell's lifetime and continued to be performed in the later 1690s. The first major revival in the eighteenth century was staged in 1736. This production left the work unaltered, but later revivals involved varying degrees of revision. They included a performance in Dublin in 1763; David Garrick and Thomas Arne's version in 1770; and John Kemble and Thomas Linley's transformation of King Arthur into a two-act after-piece entitled Arthur and Emmeline in 1784 Dorset Gardens Theatre where Purcell's The Fairy Queen was first performed Its follow-up, The Fairy-Queen (1692) is a semi-opera with music by Henry Purcell and a libretto which is an anonymous adaptation of William Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Fairy-Queen was first performed on 2 May 1692 at the Queen's Theatre, Dorset Garden […]
2019-07-01 18:19:00
Berlioz : Symphonie fantastique and Lélio - Philippe Jordan, Cyrille Dubois
[…] execution. Getting Lélio right is tricky. I've heard the part done in English, with RADA-style self-consciousness, but that didn't work for me, at all. The Shakespeare Berlioz heard in early 19th century Paris wasn't the Shakespeare of late 19th/early 20th century London, but freer, wilder hybrid. Shakespeare carried no cultural baggage for continental European audiences in Berlioz's time. Berlioz saw Roméo et Juliette in the Garrick version of the play brought to Paris in 1827 by Charles Kemble, where Berlioz met and became infatuated with Harriet Smithson, who may represent the elusive muse that inspires the artist in Berlioz to extremes of agony and ecstasy. In an age beforeclose-ups and amplification, theatre practice would have to have been more exaggerated than we're used to now. Perhaps Berlioz, a theatre critic, intuited that good orchestral writing had the potential to express feelings in greater complexity than most actors at the time were able to project, given the […]
2016-10-05 05:45:00
[…] different exotic locales, which manifested itself in painting, literature and music. Berlioz La mort de Cléopatre, and Les Troyens, Bizet's The Pearl Fishers, Délibes Lakmé. Massenet Le roi de Lahore, and the songs of Maurce Delage and Jaubert. Ida Rubinstein's Cleopatra was part of a huge surge of public interest in things Egyptian which influenced fashion, decorative arts and popular culture, which still prevails today. The French Shakespeare tradition goes back to Charles Kemble, and carried no cultural baggage. Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette, for example, is very much an original work, not a setting of the play Thus Rubinstein's Cleopatra, via Gide, is part of a much wider cultural theme. This Antony and Cleopatra was part of a year-long celebration of Shakespeare all over Britain. Hence the high-profile production, with the BBC SO, the flagship of the BBC stable of orchestras. Schmitt probably doesn't get luxury […]
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