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John Urich

You study with Gounod; you write seven operas, one of which you expand into a more substantial piece and another of which is one of the few operas on the story of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Flora MacDonald; they have their first performances in Brussels, Bologna, Monte Carlo, Aix-les-Bains, Berlin and London; you write endless...

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Sir Donald Tovey

Sir Donald Tovey’s only opera was a disaster. He was Reid Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh for twenty-six years, and he and his friend Robert Trevelyan, a ‘rumpled, eccentric poet’ who very clearly had no idea at all about what would make an opera libretto, joined forces in the first decades of...

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Composers

Jacopo Peri

Considering that Jacopo Peri wrote the first opera that we have in complete form, words and music, it is odd that we rarely take as much trouble to look at his life story as we do for other, later composers. There is not much information to find, so we sometimes have to read between the...

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Francesco Morlacchi

A composer who wrote a version of Il Barbiere di Siviglia in the same year as Rossini, but was not trying to rival or upstage Rossini at all, deserves a closer look: Francesco Morlacchi has spent too long in the wilderness and deserves to be reinstated. Rossini wrote Il Barbiere di Siviglia – everybody knows...

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Composers

Franco Leoni

The name of the composer Franco Leoni hovers on the border of obscurity – there is one recording of his wonderful one-act opera L’Oracolo, but almost nothing else. This is a pity, because Leoni was an exciting, innovative composer and he deserves to be better known. The world of opera is full of mysteries. Not...

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Learmont Drysdale

Think of a Scottish composer who truly sounds like a Scottish composer and you will probably come up with Hamish MacCunn, a passionately committed Scottish composer whose main completed operatic works were very Scottish indeed. But MacCunn was not the only Scottish composer trying to create a national operatic tradition at the end of the...

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Albert Grisar

With almost twenty operas to his name, written over a period of thirty years and performed in the most prestigious theatres in Paris, and with titles as beguiling as The Orphan of Glencoe, A Voyage around my Room, The Gardener’s Dog and The Marvellous Cat, Albert Grisar certainly deserves a closer look. And at the...

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Frederick Corder

In general, English opera composers get scant recognition from their fellow countrymen, and Frederick Corder is a typical example. If you like to think of yourself as an opera composer, when a supposedly comprehensive book entitled A History of English Opera (by Eric Walter White, 1983) ignores you, you have a problem. And if you...

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Gustave Charpentier

There are several composers who are best known for just one of their operas: Mascagni, for example, is known principally for his first opera, Cavalleria Rusticana, and he spent the rest of his life trying to live up to its success, whereas Bizet wrote many operas before Carmen and then sadly died not knowing that...

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François Adrien Boieldieu

Musical fashions, like all fashions and tastes, change and composers disappear from view. Sometimes a tiny glimpse of them survives, and the reputation of the French composer Boieldieu now hangs rather precariously on one opera, La Dame Blanche, based more or less on several stories by Sir Walter Scott. But the story of his life...

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