Mary Bothwell News
Canadian singer and painter (1900-1985)
Commemorations 2025 (Death: Mary Bothwell)
- soprano
- Canada
- opera singer, painter, botanical illustrator, artist
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2024-04-25
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2024-01-24 07:29:00
Norfolk-based arts writer, Tony Cooper, enjoys a musical heritage tour to Leipzig, a relaxing and inviting city to visit awash with so much musical history.
[…] and Pontalba (2003). Musgrave’s starting-point - the first in which she wrote her own libretto, a practice she continued with in her later operas - was the unpublished play Moray by Peruvian-born writer, Amalia Elguera, who, in fact, wrote the libretto for Musgrave’s 1973 opera, The Voice of Ariadne. An intriguing scenario, the opera focuses upon Mary's troubled relationships with her half-brother James Stewart, Earl of Moray, her husband Lord Darnley and her seducer the Earl of Bothwell. These relationships are foreshadowed in the delightful aria of Act I - ‘The Three Stars of my Firmament’. However, the libretto took some liberties with historical facts inasmuch as the character of Lord Gordon is fictitious although partly based on Lord Huntly while the real Earl of Moray was murdered two years later than depicted in the opera. And another character, Cardinal Beaton, was already dead before the opera’s action begin in 1561. A composer I […]
2017-04-10 04:34:07
Henry Purcell (1659-1695). Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary. Céline Scheen • Hana Blazikova Alice Foccroulle • Pascal Bertin Jean-Christophe Clair • Jean-Michel Fumas Phillipe Froeliger • Thibault Lenaerts Renaud Tripathi • Jean-Claude Sarragosse Lionel Meunier • Malcolm Bothwell La Fenice Conducted by Jean Tubéry.
2017-02-18 10:00:22
I studied these pieces at one point during my degree and had a brief play through them recently. I can’t claim that they are fully polished here in the video below, it had been a while too. These three intermezzos were composed in 1892 and are among Brahms later works for the piano. The title ‘Intermezzo’ here is used to refer to character pieces. The three pieces are lyrical, melodic, and deeply emotional. At the top of the score for Brahms Intermezzo Op. 117 no. 1 is a quote from an old Scottish poem Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament: “Balow, my Babe, lie still and sleep! It grieves me sore to see thee weep.” No. 1 opens with a simple, memorable melody. A repeated bell-like e flat can be heard above and below the melody here. The middle section is a stark contrast to this, with a darker theme and ascending arpeggios […]
2016-07-23 02:31:35
Brahms: Intermezzo Op. 117 No. 1 “Sleep softly, my child, sleep softly and well! It breaks my heart to see you weep.” These lines are from “Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament” and appear at the beginning of Brahms’ score. The entire “Lament” is from the perspective of a mother singing a lullaby to her child, but as the poem gets darker we soon discover that the child’s father has abandoned them. Sound familiar? To me, the opening of the piece sounds like Fantine singing a lullaby to her beloved daughter, Cosette. But when the music turns darker in the middle, we hear her pain at the father’s desertion and the trouble she has been through as a result. She lives in poverty, sells her teeth, sells her hair, and finally resorts to prostitution to pay for the child she doesn’t even have the luxury of loving in person. When the […]
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