--
The peak of the 76th edition of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival will be the spectacular Opera Gala, held in a magnificent setting in front of the Cathedral, where one of today's biggest opera stars, soprano Nino Machaidze, Italian tenor Vittorio Grigolo and one of the most sought-after basses on the international scene, Marko Mimica, will perform. They will be joined by the Croatian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the renowned conductor, Sebastian Lang Lessing.
--
PROGRAMME:
Giuseppe Verdi: Les vêpres siciliennes / I vespri siciliani / The Sicilian Vespers – Overture
Giuseppe Verdi: Les vêpres siciliennes / I vespri siciliani / The Sicilian Vespers – Jean's aria „O tu, Palermo“
Gaetano Donizetti: L'elisir d'amore / The Elixir of Love, Nemorino's aria „Una furtiva lagrima“
Gaetano Donizetti: L'elisir d'amore /The Elixir of Love, duet of Dulcamara and Nemorino
Jules Massenet: Le Cid –Chimène's aria „Pleurez, mes yeux“
Giuseppe Verdi: La Traviata – duet of Violetta and Alfredo „Parigi, o cara“
Charles Gounod: Faust – Phryné's Dance
Charles Gounod: Faust – Marguerite's aria „Ah, je ris...“
Vincenzo Bellini: La sonnambula /The Sleepwalker – Rodolfo's aria and cabaletta „Vi ravviso... Ma fra voi...“
Giacomo Puccini: Manon Lescaut – Intermezzo
Antonín Dvořák: Rusalka – Rusalka's 'Song to the Moon' „Měsíčku na nebi“
Giacomo Puccini: La Bohème – Rodolfo's aria „Che gelida manina“
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Aleko – Aleko's aria „Ves' tabor spit“
Giacomo Puccini: Tosca – Tosca's aria „Vissi d'arte“
Giacomo Puccini: Tosca – Cavaradossi's aria „E lucevan le stelle“
--
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (Le Roncole, 1813 – Milan, 1901) composed twenty-eight Romantic operas and his name has become almost synonymous with opera. He achieved great success with operas from his middle period – Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata. Later he composed Aida, Requiem, Otello, Falstaff, etc. He was politically active, advocating for the unification of Italy, and he also initiated and financed the construction of a home for retired musicians. Verdi considered himself ‘the least learned of composers’, but the melodiousness of his arias, the expressiveness of his orchestral lines, the instrumental emphasis on atmosphere, as well as his close collaboration with librettists created a praised and distinct musical style, with vocal expressiveness and dramatic representation of characters as its most important features.
Verdi wrote Les vêpres siciliennes / The Sicilian Vespers in 1855 for the Paris Opera, and later made an Italian version. It was composed to a libretto by Eugène Scribe, who reworked his earlier libretto written for Donizetti about the Dutch revolt against Spain and set it in Sicily during a rebellion in the thirteenth century. In the aria ‘O tu, Palermo’, Giovanni da Procida (originally named Jean) sings about his beloved homeland and calls Sicilians to rise and fight for honour.
Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti (Bergamo, 1797–1848) is one of the most important Italian opera composers of the first half of the nineteenth century. He studied music in Bergamo and at the Bologna Conservatory. He often stayed in Naples, writing for local theatres, where he also served as director. He wrote operas for Rome, Florence and Paris. From 1834 he served as professor at the Naples Conservatory, later also as temporary director, but was never offered full tenure. After a series of personal tragedies, deaths of his newborn children and wife, Donizetti moved to Paris in 1838, where he achieved great success, especially with his operas La fille du régiment and La favorite. He also composed for Vienna, where he was appointed court Kapellmeister. His final days were marked by worsening symptoms of syphilis. In his lifetime, he saw sixty of his operas premiere, while some of them were discovered after his death; he also wrote sacred music and in his youth he composed string quartets, piano pieces and sinfonie. He developed dramatic weight and emotional content of the opera seria genre, as well as ways of conveying sparkling brightness and fluidity in opera buffa.
Donizetti composed the opera L’elisir d’amore / The Elixir of Love in 1832, reportedly in only thirteen days, to a libretto by ‘Bellini’s’ librettist Felice Romani based on a French libretto by Eugène Scribe. The eponymous elixir is a secret weapon that Nemorino plans to use to win Adina’s love. Although it is obvious that he was tricked and the ‘elixir’ is nothing but ordinary wine, he is convinced that it is working because he sees a ‘furtiva lagrima’, ‘a secret tear’ in her eye. In the duet ‘Obbligato, obbligato’, the travelling physician Dulcamara persuades Nemorino to take the elixir (while saying that he intends to escape before Nemorino realizes that he was tricked).
Jules Massenet (Jules-Émile-Frédéric Massenet, Montaud, 1842 – Paris, 1912) was a French opera composer, known for his lyricism and sentimentality. Like many French composers, he studied at the Paris Conservatory (under Ambroise Thomas) and received the prestigious Prix de Rome scholarship for his cantata. Massenet wrote twenty-four operas, the most performed of which are Manon and Werther.
‘Pleurez, mes yeux’ (‘Weep, my eyes’) is Chimène’s aria from Act 3 of Le Cid. Rodrigue and Chimène are in love, but Rodrigue kills her father in a duel he was forced to fight. First performed in 1885, the opera was set to a libretto by Gallet, Blau and d’Ennery, based on the play of the same name by Pierre Corneille. Rodrigue, or Rodrigo, was a real 11th-century Castilian knight who earned the Arabic honorific as-Sayyid (‘the Lord’, ‘the Master’), which became El Cid in Spanish.
Verdi’s La traviata, set to Piave’s libretto and based on The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas fils, was first performed at La Fenice in Venice in 1853. At the premiere, the audience jeered at the soloists, and it was deemed ‘morally questionable’ after it premiered in England, but it soon became popular everywhere. The opera tells the story of the unhappy love of the former courtesan Violetta and Alfredo Germont – his family demands that they end their relationship so that Alfredo’s sister can marry without shame. In the duet ‘Parigi, o cara’, Alfredo and Violetta meet again after a long time and tell each other that they will leave Paris and be together and happy, although it is clear that this is impossible because she is seriously ill.
Charles (François) Gounod (Paris, 1818 – Saint-Cloud, 1893) was a French composer, organist and conductor best known for his vocal music, especially operas, and rich, sometimes sentimental melodies and skilled orchestration. He described his music as ‘classical in expression, romantic in thought’. After completing his studies, he won the coveted Prix de Rome at his third attempt, in 1839, for the cantata Fernand, and spent three years at Villa Medici in Rome.
Gounod wrote Faust in 1859 to a libretto by Barbier and Carré, based on Goethe’s Faust. The complex opera with brilliant arias was a great success – except in Germany, where he was considered to have defiled Goethe’s original based on the legend of a man who sold his soul to the devil. Phryné is a famous Greek courtesan, and Phryné’s Dance is a wild and demonic celebration from Act 5 (ballet interlude was mandatory for operas staged at the Paris Opera).
Gounod’s Faust sells his soul to be young again, and Méphistophélès follows him as he tries to win Marguerite. In the aria ‘Ah, je ris’, she looks delightedly at how beautifully the jewels brought to her by Méphistophélès, on Faust’s behalf, look on her.
Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini (Catania, 1801 – Puteax, 1835) was an Italian opera composer renowned for melodious vocal lines and pure style. Bellini’s operas are among the finest pieces of the bel canto tradition, characterised by clarity of expression, elegant form, carefully selected librettos and emphasis on voice and dramatic expression. He started composing at the Naples Conservatory and later composed for Milan and lived in London and Paris. He wrote six operas to the librettos by Felice Romani, including I Capuleti e i Montecchi, La sonnambula and Norma. His success was interrupted by his sudden death at the age of thirty-four. Romani wrote on the occasion that none of his contemporaries understood like Bellini did, ‘the necessity of unity of music, poetry, the language of emotions and expressiveness’.
In the aria ‘Vi ravviso’, from the two-act opera La Sonnambula / The Sleepwalker, the disguised Count Rodolfo is delighted with the inn he is staying in, and especially with the beauty of young Amina. Because of her sleepwalking, everyone in the village thinks that she went to meet Rodolfo in the middle of the night, even though she is engaged to another man, but everything is resolved in a happy ending.
The last from the long line of Italian opera masters, Giacomo Puccini (Lucca, 1858 – Brussels, 1924) came from a family of church musicians and initially followed the same career path. Although he wrote some of the world’s most popular operas, which constitute the core operatic repertoire, music historians and critics did not always take him seriously, considering him commercial and prone to manipulating and shocking the audiences. His works are exceptionally dramatic and sentimental, with characters developed to detail, and characterised by skilful orchestrations and his gift for melody. Most of Puccini’s operas have a young female protagonist who sacrifices herself or is sacrificed for a cruel man.
The opera Manon Lescaut, from 1893, was Puccini’s first major success, preceding his most famous works, La Bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly and Turandot. Five librettists worked on the opera, based on Abbé Prevost’s work, in which Puccini combined Wagnerian leitmotifs and the Italian idea of dramma in musica, in a complex symphonic structure. He borrowed the first theme, which takes us to the eighteenth century, from his own string quartet, while at the end of the opera he returns to themes from previous acts, as he would also do in his later operas.
Antonín Dvořák (Nelahozeves, 1841 – Prague, 1904) left a significant mark on Czech music. He did not want to permanently leave Bohemia for his career, so he travelled often, for performances and publications, insisting that the titles and other notations in his published works were always written in Czech, in addition to German. Later he spent several years in the Unites States. A violinist, violist, organist and butcher’s apprentice in his youth, he became a versatile composer who wrote nine symphonies, one concerto for piano, violin and cello respectively, Slavonic Dances for orchestra, art songs, fourteen string quartets and other chamber works, as well as eleven operas rarely performed outside the Czech Republic, with the exception of the very popular Rusalka. Dvořák admired Brahms’s music, but he painted his late Romantic style with national, Slavic colours, while his operas were influenced by Wagner.
Dvořák based his opera Rusalka on a folk tale about a water fairy who gives up her immortality and the gift of speech to be with the prince she fell in love with (in his book about Dvořák, the author Josef Škvorecký speculates that the scene of nude Rosemary Vanderbilt on a river bank in Iowa inspired him to write about the water fairy). In the aria ‘Moon, high and deep in the sky’ (‘Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém’) the fairy is asking the Moon to tell her beloved how much she loves him.
Puccini’s opera La bohème, from 1895, portrays the bohemian world of ‘the noble and poor’ artists in Paris around Christmas. The poet Rodolfo is visited by his neighbour, seamstress Mimì, because her candle went out. They meet, recognise one another and fall in love. In the aria ‘Che gelida manina’ (‘What a cold little hand’), Rodolfo introduces himself to Mimì, and tells her that her eyes make his head spin.
The music of Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff (Semyonovo, 1873 – Beverly Hills, 1943) is characterised by broad-stroke melodies, melancholic ostinatos, ‘darker’ harmonies, and sentimental atmosphere, which made his works recognisable and popular with the audiences. As a piano virtuoso with an international career, he wrote mostly for the piano. After the failure of his Symphony No. 1 (conductor Glazunov was allegedly drunk), he was unable to compose for several years; he recovered after hypnotherapy, composing what is probably his most popular work – Piano Concerto No. 2. He also wrote three symphonies, cantatas, art songs, and three operas.
His first opera, Aleko, was his graduation work, composed in 1892 in only seventeen days, for which he received a gold medal from the Conservatory. The libretto was written by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, based on a poem by Alexander Pushkin. In its most famous part, the cavatina ‘The whole camp is asleep’ (‘Весь табор спит’), the deeply troubled Aleko is wondering what to do now that he knows that Zemfira has been unfaithful to him; the cavatina alternates between recitative, mournful sections and lyrical reminiscences of his beloved.
Puccini’s opera Tosca, written to a libretto by Illica and Giacosa based on Sardou’s play of the same name and first performed in 1900, is one of the most popular and highly regarded operas in the standard repertoire. Tosca is art that ‘talks’ about art and artists, but also about politics and love. Floria Tosca is an opera singer who is in a relationship with the painter Cavaradossi. He is helping Angelotti, who is fighting against the wicked and powerful head of the Roman police, Scarpia. Scarpia wants Tosca for himself and tries to blackmail her: he demands that she gives herself to him if she wants Cavaradossi to survive. Tosca kills Scarpia, but the painter does not survive, so she throws herself to her death.
In the aria ‘Vissi d'arte’ in Act 2, Tosca sings about how she ‘lived for art’, never harmed anyone, decorated altars – and wonders why the Lord repays her with such difficult fate.
In one of the most popular tenor arias, ‘E lucevan’ from Act 3, while awaiting execution, Cavaradossi remembers Tosca’s embrace and kisses, when ‘the stars shone brightly’; now, when he ‘loves life more than ever’, he is left with nothing but despair.
--
Please note that the Opera Gala will be broadcast live by the Croatian Radio and Television.
