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Dafne is the earliest known work that, by modern standards, could be considered an opera. The libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini survives complete; the mostly-lost music was completed by Jacopo Peri, but at least two of the six surviving fragments are by Jacopo Corsi. Dafne was first performed during Carnival of 1598 (1597 old style) at the Palazzo Corsi.
Dafne is scored for a much smaller ensemble than Claudio Monteverdi's slightly later operas, namely, a harpsichord, a lute, a viol, an archlute, and a triple flute. Drawing on a new development at the time, Peri established recitatives, melodic speech set to music, as a central part of opera.
The story of Apollo falling in love with the eponymous nymph, Daphne, the opera was written for an elite circle of humanists in Florence, the Florentine Camerata, between 1594 and 1597, with the support, and possibly the collaboration, of the composer and patron Jacopo Corsi. An attempt to revive Greek drama, according to modern scholarship, it was a long way off from what the ancient Greeks would have recognized, but instead it spawned a whole new form that would last for the next 400 years.
Most of Peri's music has been lost, despite its popularity and fame in Europe at the time of its composition, but the 455 line verse libretto was published and survives. Florence's ruling Medici family was sufficiently taken with Dafne to allow Peri's next work, Euridice, to be performed as part of Marie de' Medici and Henry IV's wedding celebrations in 1600.
Industry:Drama
Dalibor is a Czech opera in three acts by Bedřich Smetana. The libretto was written in German by Josef Wenzig, and translated into Czech by Ervin Špindler. It was first performed at the New Town Theatre in Prague on 16 May 1868. The opera received criticism at the time for being overly influenced by German opera, including that of Richard Wagner.
The subject of the opera is Dalibor of Kozojed (fl. c. 1490), a Czech knight who took part in an uprising in Ploskovice in support of the oppressed people and was sentenced to death in 1498, during the reign of Vladislas II. The plot bears a resemblance to that of Ludwig van Beethoven's opera Fidelio, in that the central female characters in each opera disguise themselves in male clothing to try to save the hero.
Smetana had great affection for the opera, but because of the lukewarm reception, died thinking that he had failed with this opera. The revival in 1886, however, two years after the composer's death, was a success. In the 1890s, the opera received productions in Zagreb, Munich, and Hamburg. Gustav Mahler conducted an 1892 production in Vienna.
Industry:Drama
La damnation de Faust (English: The Damnation of Faust), Op. 24 is a work for four solo voices, full seven-part chorus, large children's chorus and orchestra by the French composer Hector Berlioz. He called it a "légende dramatique" (dramatic legend). It was first performed at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 6 December 1846.
The French composer was inspired by a translation of Goethe's dramatic poem Faust and produced a musical work that, like the masterpiece it's based on, defies easy categorization. Conceived at various times as a free-form oratorio and as an opera (Berlioz ultimately called it a "légende dramatique") its travelogue form and cosmic perspective have made it an extreme challenge to stage as an opera. Berlioz himself was eager to see the work staged, but once he did, he conceded that the production techniques of his time were not up to the task of bringing the work to dramatic life. Most of the work's fame has come through concert performances.
Berlioz read Goethe's Faust Part One in 1828, in Gérard de Nerval's translation; "this marvelous book fascinated me from the first", he recalled in his Memoirs. "I could not put it down. I read it incessantly, at meals, in the theatre, in the street." He was so impressed that a suite entitled "Eight Scenes from Faust" became his Opus 1 (1829), though he later recalled all the copies of it he could find. He returned to the material in 1845, to make a larger work, with some additional text by Almire Gandonnière to Berlioz's specifications, that he first called a "concert opera", and as it expanded, finally a "dramatic legend".
He worked on the score during his concert tour of 1845, adding his own text for "Nature immense, impénétrable et fière"— Faust's climactic invocation of all nature— and incorporating the Rákóczi March, which had been a thunderous success at a concert in Pest, Hungary, 15 February 1846.
Industry:Drama
The Dangerous Liaisons is an opera in two acts and eight scenes, with music by Conrad Susa to an English libretto by Philip Littell. It is based on the novel Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. The opera received its first performance by the San Francisco Opera on 10 September 1994, with stage direction by Colin Graham and Donald Runnicles as the conductor. The world-premiere cast included Thomas Hampson as Valmont, Frederica von Stade as Merteuil, David Hobson as Chevalier de Danceny, Renée Fleming as Tourvel and Mary Mills as Cécile de Volanges. The opera was performed at Washington Opera in March 1998.
The opera has set numbers with recitative and spoken dialog. It is set in France in the 18th century and was also aired on the American PBS television network, a video recording of which was also made.
Industry:Drama
Dantons Tod (German for Danton's Death) is an opera by composer Gottfried von Einem to a libretto by Boris Blacher and Gottfried von Einem after Georg Büchner's 1835 play Danton's Death. Its first performance took place in Salzburg, August 6, 1947. It was revised in 1955.
The successful premiere of Gottfried von Einem's opera Dantons Tod at the 1947 Salzburg Festival and its quick staging by European houses were due to more than the strong drama of Einem's score. This was a first step toward the rehabilitation of German musicians after World War II; an opera by a young Austrian composer who had not collaborated in the former regime's cultural policies. Dantons Tod dramatizes legalized governmental terror, a plague which the world at the time realized had not been eradicated with the end of the war.
Industry:Drama
Daphne, Op. 82, is an opera in one act by Richard Strauss, subtitled "Bucolic Tragedy in One Act". The German libretto was by Joseph Gregor. The opera is based loosely on the mythological figure Daphne from Ovid's Metamorphoses and includes elements taken from The Bacchae by Euripides. The opera premiered at the Semperoper in Dresden on 15 October 1938, originally intended as a double bill with Strauss' Friedenstag, but as the scale of Daphne grew, that idea was abandoned. The conductor of the first performance was Karl Böhm, to whom the opera was dedicated.
Industry:Drama
Dardanus is an opera in five acts by Jean-Philippe Rameau. The French libretto was by Charles-Antoine Leclerc de La Bruère.
It was first performed by the Académie de musique at its theatre in the Palais-Royal in Paris on November 19, 1739. It received 26 performances, mainly because of the support from Rameau's followers in the dispute between the styles of Rameau and Lully.
Critics accused Rameau's original opera of lacking a coherent plot. The inclusion of the sea monster also violated the French operatic convention of having a clear purpose for encounters with supernatural beings.
In 1744 (with help from Simon-Joseph Pellegrin), and again in 1760, Dardanus was revised extensively in an attempt to correct its shortcomings. Large portions of the score were sacrificed in favour of plot but some scenes as arresting as the "Prison scene" (1744) were added in the process.
Dardanus was produced three times in the 20th century: in 1907 at Dijon, in 1979 at the Opéra de Paris, and finally in 1998, in a concert version, at the time of a recording (below) by Marc Minkowski.
The American professional premier, by the Wolf Trap Opera Company, opened on July 2003, in a suburb of Washington, D.C. The opera was also produced in Sydney in November-December 2005, by Pinchgut Opera and the Orchestra of the Antipodes, The Royal Academy of Music also staged Dardanus in London in 2006. In France it was revived again in October-November 2009, at Lille, Caen and Dijon, conducted by Emmanuelle Haïm and staged by Claude Buchvald.
Industry:Drama
La fille du régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment) is an opéra comique in two acts by Gaetano Donizetti. It was written while the composer was living in Paris, with a French libretto by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Jean-François Bayard.
La figlia del reggimento, a slightly different Italian-language version (in translation by Callisto Bassi), was adapted to the tastes of the Italian public.
La fille du régiment was first performed on 11 February 1840 by the Paris Opéra-Comique at the Salle de la Bourse. The opening night was "a barely averted disaster." Apparently the lead tenor was frequently off pitch. The noted French tenor Gilbert Duprez, who was present, later observed in his Souvenirs d'un chanteur: "Donizetti often swore to me how his self-esteem as a composer had suffered in Paris. He was never treated there according to his merits. I myself saw the unsuccess, almost the collapse, of La fille du régiment."
It received a highly negative review from the French critic and composer Hector Berlioz (Journal des Débats, 16 February 1840), who claimed it could not be taken seriously by either the public or its composer, although Berlioz did concede that some of the music, "the little waltz that serves as the entr'acte and the trio dialogué ... lack neither vivacity nor freshness." The source of Berlioz's hostility is revealed later in his review: "What, two major scores for the Opéra, Les martyrs and Le duc d'Albe, two others at the Renaissance, Lucie de Lammermoor and L'ange de Nisida, two at the Opéra-Comique, La fille du régiment and another whose title is still unknown, and yet another for the Théâtre-Italien, will have been written or transcribed in one year by the same composer! M Donizetti seems to treat us like a conquered country; it is a veritable invasion. One can no longer speak of the opera houses of Paris, but only of the opera houses of M Donizetti." The critic and poet Théophile Gautier, who was not a rival composer, had a somewhat different point of view: "M Donizetti is capable of paying with music that is beautiful and worthy for the cordial hospitality which France offers him in all her theaters, subsidized or not."
Despite its bumpy start, the opera soon became hugely popular at the Opéra-Comique. During its first 80 years, it reached its 500th performance at the theatre in 1871 and its 1,000th in 1908.
Industry:Drama
Dead Man Walking is the first opera by Jake Heggie, with a libretto (based on the book of the same name by Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ) by Terrence McNally; it premiered on October 7, 2000 at the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Opera.
Critical reaction to the opera was generally favorable; in particular, critics praised the sharp, finely delineated performances by the principals and the simple yet effective production. "It was a triumph beyond what even its most optimistic boosters could have predicted" wrote the San Francisco Chronicle's critic. "The reason for the work's appeal lies in its almost perfect fusion of ideas and emotions," wrote The Australian in 2007.
Many also found that McNally's libretto to be among the most finely crafted in recent memory: "…the splendid libretto —by turns plainspoken and eloquent, with wonderful splashes of wry humor to lighten the tone when it most needs it— creates the structural backbone of this wrenching drama". Although not all of it has been set to music, McNally gave the libretto to Heggie with the express instructions to use whatever portions of it he felt necessary, and to discard the rest.
The opera has since been performed numerous times across the United States and had its Australian premiere in 2002, with Teddy Tahu Rhodes as Joseph De Rocher. In 2007, it played in Sydney for a limited season produced by Nicole Alexander Productions at the State Theatre. It was nominated for six Helpmann Awards and won two (Best Set Design and Best Male in an Operatic Performance). The Canadian premiere was in January 2006 in Calgary, Alberta, with Daniel Okulitch in the role of Joseph De Rocher. The European premiere was in May 2006 in the Semperoper in Dresden, Germany. The same production had its opening night on September 26, 2007, at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. The opera also played at the Malmö Opera och Musikteater in Malmö, Sweden.
Industry:Drama
Death in Venice is an opera in two acts by Benjamin Britten, his last. The opera is based on the novella Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. Myfanwy Piper wrote the English libretto. It was first performed at Snape Maltings, near Aldeburgh, England, on 16 June 1973.
The astringent score is marked by some haunting soundscapes of "ambiguous Venice". The boy Tadzio is portrayed by a silent dancer, to gamelan-like percussion accompaniment. The music of the opera is precise, direct and movingly understated.
Britten had been contemplating the novella for many years and began work in September 1970 with approaches to Piper and to Golo Mann, son of the author. Because of agreements between Warner Brothers and the estate of Thomas Mann for the production of Luchino Visconti's 1971 film, Britten was advised not to see the movie when it was released. According to Colin Graham, director of the first production of the opera, some colleagues of the composer who did see the film found the relationship between Tadzio and Aschenbach "too sentimental and salacious". This contributed to the decision that Tadzio and his family and friends would be portrayed by non-speaking dancers. Ian Bostridge has noted themes in the work of "formalism in art and the perilous dignity of the acclaimed artist".
Industry:Drama
