Portal:Opera/Selected biography

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Selected biographies list

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/1

Dmitri Shostakovich

Anti-Formalist Rayok
, which ridiculed the "anti-formalism" campaign in Soviet arts and was known only to his closest friends until after his death.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/2

Strubenholm, the home of the SA College of Music

Professor Erik William Chisholm (4 January 1904 – 8 June 1965) was a Scottish composer and conductor often known as "Scotland’s forgotten composer". According to his biographer, Chisholm "was the first composer to absorb Celtic idioms into his music in form as well as content, his achievement paralleling that of Bartók in its depth of understanding and its daring", which led to his nickname of "MacBartók". He was also a founder of the Celtic Ballet and, together with Margaret Morris, created the first full-length Scottish ballet, The Forsaken Mermaid. He was also the dean and director of the South African College of Music at the University of Cape Town for 19 years. Chisholm founded the South African College of Music opera company in Cape Town and was a vital force in bringing new operas to Scotland, England and South Africa. By the time of his death in 1965, he had composed over a hundred works.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/3

Éva Gauthier

patrons, she initially trained and performed in Europe. She then travelled to Java and for four years immersed herself in its native music, which she introduced to North American audiences on her return. She retired from performing in 1937, and opened a voice studio in New York, where she became a founding member of the American Guild of Musical Artists
and served on its board of governors. Gauthier was praised for the many qualities her singing brought to music. The citation from the Campion Society of San Francisco, which she received in 1949, said: "...her rare open-mindedness and unorthodox enthusiasm having been initially responsible for the recognition of many vital and important modern composers"

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/4

Barrington as Pooh Bah in The Mikado, 1895

Rutland Barrington (15 January 1853 – 31 May 1922) was an English singer, actor, comedian, and Edwardian musical comedy star. Best remembered for originating the lyric baritone roles in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas from 1877 to 1896, his performing career spanned more than four decades. He also wrote at least a dozen works for the stage. After two years with a comic touring company, Barrington joined Richard D'Oyly Carte's opera company and, over the next two decades, created a number of memorable comic opera roles, including Captain Corcoran in H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), the Sergeant of Police in The Pirates of Penzance (1880), and Pooh Bah in The Mikado (1885), among many others. Failing in an 1888 attempt to become a theatrical manager, Barrington refocused his energies on acting and occasional playwriting. Beginning in 1896 and continuing for ten years, Barrington played in a series of very successful musical comedies under the management of George Edwardes at Daly's Theatre. After leaving Daly's he continued to appear in musical comedy roles and performed in music hall. His career ended in 1918, after which he suffered a stroke and lived the last few years of his life in poverty.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/5

Plaque outside the Albert Hall Mansions

Sir

Savoy Operas
. Sargent toured widely throughout the world and was noted for his skill as a conductor, his debonair appearance, and his championship of British composers.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/6

Jessie Bond

Jessie Bond (10 January 1853 – 17 June 1942) was an English singer and actress best known for creating the mezzo-soprano soubrette roles in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. She spent twenty years on the stage, the bulk of them with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. Bond began a concert singing career in Liverpool by 1870, after which, at the age of 17, she entered into a brief, unhappy marriage. After leaving her abusive husband, she continued her concert career and studied at the Royal Academy of Music. At the age of 25, Bond began her theatrical career, creating the role of Cousin Hebe in Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore. After this, she created roles of increasing importance with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in a series of successful comic operas, including the title role in Iolanthe (1882), Pitti Sing in The Mikado (1885), and others. During the 1890s, she continued performing on the West End, while being courted by Lewis Ransome, a civil engineer. In 1897, at the age of 44, Bond married Ransome and left the stage. They were happily married for 25 years; however, she survived Ransome by twenty years, living to the age of 89.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/7

George Grossmith

Edwardian musical comedies
.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/8

Arthur Sullivan

Savoy Operas, The Yeomen of the Guard. Sullivan's only grand opera, Ivanhoe
, was initially highly successful, but it has been little heard since his death.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/9

Sir William Schwenck Gilbert

repertory companies, schools and community theatre groups. Lines from these works have permanently entered the English language, including "short, sharp shock", "What never? Well, hardly ever!", and "let the punishment fit the crime". Gilbert also wrote the Bab Ballads, an extensive collection of light verse accompanied by his own comical drawings. His creative output included over 75 plays and libretti, numerous stories, poems, lyrics and various other comic and serious pieces. His plays and realistic style of stage direction inspired other dramatists, including Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw
.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/10

Modest Mussorgsky, 1870

tone poem Night on Bald Mountain, and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition
. However, while Mussorgsky's music can be vivid and nationalistic, it does not always glorify the powerful and is sometimes antimilitaristic, such as in The Field-Marshal. For many years Mussorgsky's works were mainly known in versions revised or completed by other composers. Many of his most important compositions have recently come into their own in their original forms, and some of the original scores are now also available.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/11

Stockhausen lecturing at the 12th International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, 1957

Karlheinz Stockhausen (22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Some of his notable compositions include the series of nineteen Klavierstücke (Piano Pieces), Kontra-Punkte for ten instruments, the electronic/musique-concrète Gesang der Jünglinge, Gruppen for three orchestras, the percussion solo Zyklus, Kontakte, the cantata Momente, the live-electronic Mikrophonie I, Hymnen, Stimmung for six vocalists, Aus den sieben Tagen, Mantra for two pianos and electronics, Tierkreis, Inori for soloists and orchestra, and the gigantic opera cycle Licht.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/12

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

The Tale of Tsar Saltan
).

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/13

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (7 May 1840–6 November 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic era. He wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the current classical repertoire, including the ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, his First Piano Concerto, several symphonies, and ten operas of which Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades are the most well-known. Although he enjoyed many popular successes, he was never emotionally secure, and his life was punctuated by personal crises and periods of depression. Contributory factors were his suppressed homosexuality and fear of exposure, his disastrous marriage, and the sudden collapse of the one enduring relationship of his adult life, his 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/14

Johann Strauss II

Vienna Court Opera. Strauss had two younger brothers, Josef and Eduard Strauss
, who became composers of light music as well, although they were never as well-known as their elder brother.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/15

Bedřich Smetana

The Brandenburgers in Bohemia and The Bartered Bride, were premiered at Prague's new Provisional Theatre. In that same year, Smetana became the theatre's principal conductor, but the years of his conductorship were marked by controversy. Factions within the city's musical establishment considered his identification with the progressive ideas of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner
inimical to the development of a distinctively Czech opera style. This opposition interfered with his creative work, and may have hastened the health breakdown which precipitated his resignation from the theatre in 1874.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/16

Richard Wagner

European classical music. Wagner's influence spread beyond music into philosophy, literature, the visual arts and theatre. He had his own opera house built, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, where his most important stage works continue to be performed today in an annual festival run by his descendants
.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/17

Frederick Delius, aged 45, photographed in 1907

Frederick Theodore Albert Delius CH (29 January 1862 – 10 June 1934) was an English composer. Born in Bradford, Yorkshire, to a prosperous mercantile family of German extraction, he resisted attempts to recruit him to commerce. He was sent to Florida in 1884 to manage an orange plantation, where he neglected his managerial duties. Influenced by African-American music, he began composing. After a brief period of formal musical study in Germany beginning in 1886, he embarked on a full-time career as a composer in Paris and then in nearby Grez-sur-Loing, where he and his wife Jelka lived (except during the First World War) for the rest of their lives. Delius's first successes came in Germany. In Delius's native Britain, it was 1907 before his music made regular appearances in concert programmes, after Thomas Beecham took it up. Beecham staged Delius's opera A Village Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden in 1910 and mounted a six-day Delius festival in London in 1929, as well as making gramophone recordings of many of Delius's works. After 1918 Delius began to suffer the effects of syphilis, contracted during his earlier years in Paris. He became paralysed and blind, but completed some late compositions between 1928 and 1932 with the aid of an amanuensis.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/18

Nellie Melba by Henry Walter Barnett

Melbourne Conservatorium
. Melba continued to sing until the last months of her life, and made a legendary number of "farewell" appearances. Her death, in Australia, was news across the English-speaking world, and her funeral was a major national event.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/19

Eugenia Tadolini as Adina in L'elisir d'amore

Teatro San Carlo's reigning prima donna for many years, and then in Paris, where she died of typhoid fever at the age of 63. From 1827 to 1834, she was married to the Italian composer and singing teacher, Giovanni Tadolini
.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/20

Elgar. Her death from cancer, at the height of her fame, was a shock to the musical world and particularly to the general public, which was kept in ignorance of the nature of her illness until after her death. In 1946 Ferrier made her stage debut, in the Glyndebourne Festival premiere of Benjamin Britten's opera The Rape of Lucretia. A year later she made her first appearance as Orfeo in Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, a work with which she became particularly associated. By her own choice, these were her only two operatic roles. Her final public appearance was as Orfeo, at the Royal Opera House in February 1953, eight months before her death. The Kathleen Ferrier Scholarship Fund, administered by the Royal Philharmonic Society
, has made annual awards to aspiring young professional singers since 1956.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/21

Georges Bizet

Paris Conservatoire he won many prizes, including the Prix de Rome
. He was also recognised as an outstanding pianist, though he chose not to capitalise on this skill and rarely performed in public. Returning to Paris after almost three years in Italy, he found that the main Parisian opera theatres preferred the established classical repertoire to the works of newcomers. His career stalled and he earned his living mainly by arranging and transcribing the music of others. Restless for success, he began many theatrical projects during the 1860s, most of which were abandoned. After his death his musical legacy, apart from Carmen, was generally neglected. He founded no school and had no obvious disciples or successors. After years of neglect his works began to be performed more frequently in the 20th century. Later commentators have acclaimed him as a composer of brilliance and originality whose premature death was a significant loss to French musical theatre.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/22

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (30 September 1852 – 29 March 1924) was an Irish composer, teacher and conductor. Born to a well-off and highly musical family in Dublin, Stanford was educated at the University of Cambridge before studying music in Leipzig and Berlin. In 1882, aged 29, he became one of the founding professors of the Royal College of Music, where he taught composition for the rest of his life. From 1887 he was also the professor of music at Cambridge. Stanford composed a substantial number of concert works, including seven symphonies, but his best-remembered pieces are his choral works for church performance, chiefly composed in the Anglican tradition. He was a dedicated composer of opera, but none of his nine completed operas which included The Canterbury Pilgrims and Much Ado About Nothing has endured in the general repertory. Some critics regarded Stanford, together with Hubert Parry and Alexander Mackenzie, as responsible for a renaissance in English music. However, after his conspicuous success as a composer in the last two decades of the 19th century, his music was eclipsed in the 20th century by that of Edward Elgar as well as his former pupils.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/23

Covent Garden Opera Company
in London, where in his ten-year term he raised standards to the highest international levels. Under his musical directorship the status of the company was recognised with the grant of the title "the Royal Opera". He became a British subject in 1972.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/24

Leoš Janáček

Slavic folk music to create an original, modern musical style. Until 1895 he devoted himself mainly to folkloristic research and his early musical output was influenced by contemporaries such as Antonín Dvořák. His later, mature works incorporate his earlier studies of national folk music in a modern, highly original synthesis, first evident in the opera Jenůfa, which was premiered in 1904 in Brno. The success of Jenůfa (often called the "Moravian national opera") at Prague in 1916 gave Janáček access to the world's great opera stages. Janáček's later works are his most celebrated. They include the symphonic poem Sinfonietta, the oratorio Glagolitic Mass, the rhapsody Taras Bulba, two string quartets, other chamber works and operas. Along with Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana
, he is considered one of the most important Czech composers.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/25

Giacomo Meyerbeer, Lithograph by Josef Kriehuber, 1847

Paris Opéra. They set a standard which helped to maintain Paris as the opera capital of the 19th century. Born to a very wealthy family, Meyerbeer began his musical career as a pianist, but soon decided to devote himself to opera, spending several years in Italy studying and composing. His 1824 opera Il crociato in Egitto was the first to bring him Europe-wide reputation, but it was Robert le diable (1831) which raised his status to great celebrity. His public career from 1831 until his death, during which he remained throughout a dominating figure in opera, was summarized by his contemporary Hector Berlioz, who claimed that he "has not only the luck to be talented, but the talent to be lucky." He was at his peak with his operas Les Huguenots (1836) and Le prophète (1849); his last opera (L'Africaine
) was performed posthumously.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/26

Jacques Offenbach in the 1860s

Johann Strauss, Jr. and Arthur Sullivan
. His best-known works were continually revived during the 20th century, and many of his operettas continue to be staged in the 21st. The Tales of Hoffmann remains part of the standard opera repertory.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/27

Benjamin Britten in 1968

Benjamin Britten (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976) was an English composer, conductor and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British classical music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes (1945), the War Requiem (1962) and the orchestral showpiece The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945). Born in Suffolk, the son of a dentist, Britten showed talent from an early age. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London and privately with the composer Frank Bridge. Britten first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to international fame. Over the next 28 years, he wrote 14 more operas, establishing himself as one of the leading 20th-century composers in the genre. In addition to large-scale operas for Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden, he wrote "chamber operas" for small forces, suitable for performance in venues of modest size. Among the best known of these is The Turn of the Screw (1954). Recurring themes in the operas are the struggle of an outsider against a hostile society, and the corruption of innocence.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/28
Sir Michael Kemp Tippett (2 January 1905 – 8 January 1998) was an English composer who rose to prominence during and immediately after the Second World War. In his lifetime he was considered to rank with his contemporary Benjamin Britten as one of the leading British composers of the 20th century. Among his best-known works are the opera The Midsummer Marriage and the oratorio A Child of Our Time inspired by Kristallnacht (pictured), the Nazi government's violent pogrom against its Jewish population. Having briefly embraced communism in the 1930s, Tippett avoided identifying with any political party. A pacifist after 1940, he was imprisoned in 1943 for refusing to carry out war-related duties required by his military exemption. His initial difficulties in accepting his homosexuality led him in 1939 to Jungian psychoanalysis; the Jungian dichotomy of "shadow" and "light" remained a recurring factor in Tippett's music. He was a strong advocate of music education, and was active for much of his life as a radio broadcaster and writer on music.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/29

Patrice Chéreau

Patrice Chéreau (2 November 1944 – 7 October 2013) was a French opera and theatre director, filmmaker, actor and producer. In France he is best known for his work for the theatre, internationally for his films

Staatsoper Berlin in 1994; Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at La Scala in 2007; Janáček's From the House of the Dead, shown at several festivals and the Metropolitan Opera; and, as his last staging, Elektra by Richard Strauss, first performed at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in July 2013. He was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize
in 2008.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/30

André Messager

André Charles Prosper Messager (30 December 1853 – 24 February 1929) was a French composer, organist, pianist, conductor and administrator. His stage compositions included ballets and 30

Monsieur Beaucaire also enjoying international success. Despite financial obstacles, Messager pursued studies in piano and composition, with teachers including Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré. He became a major figure in the musical life of London as well as Paris, both as a conductor and a composer. Most of his Parisian works were produced in London, where several of them had long runs and numerous revivals, and he wrote two operatic works in English. He was the only French composer to write an original Savoy opera. Towards the end of his career, he composed musical comedies for Sacha Guitry and Yvonne Printemps
.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/31

W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973), who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, born in England, later an American citizen, and is regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety in tone, form and content. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature. Auden took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings. He wrote the libretto for Britten's operetta Paul Bunyan and with Chester Kallman co-wrote the librettos for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Nicolas Nabokov's Love's Labour's Lost, and two operas by Hans Werner Henze—Elegy for Young Lovers and The Bassarids.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/32

Jules Massenet photographed by Pierre Petit, 1880

Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet 12 May 1842 – 13 August 1912) was a French composer best known for his operas, of which he wrote more than thirty. The two most frequently staged are

lyric dramas
, as well as oratorios, cantatas and ballets. Massenet had a good sense of the theatre and of what would succeed with the Parisian public. Despite some miscalculations, he produced a series of successes that made him the leading opera composer in France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/33

Francois Lays

François Lay, better known under the stage name Lays (14 February 1758 – 30 March 1831), was a French baritone and tenor opera singer. Originally destined for a career in the church, he was recruited by the Paris Opéra in 1779 and soon became a leading member of the company, in spite of quarrels with the management. Lays enthusiastically welcomed the French Revolution and became involved in politics with the encouragement of his friend Bertrand Barère. Barère's downfall led to Lays being imprisoned briefly, but he soon won back the public and secured the patronage of Napoleon, at whose coronation and second wedding he sang. His association with the Emperor caused him trouble when the Bourbon monarchy was restored and Lays's final years were darkened by disputes over his pension, mounting debts, the death of his only son and his wife's illness. After a career spanning more than four decades, he died in poverty.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/34

Carl Nielsen in 1901

Anne Marie Brodersen. His opera Maskarade
was a resounding success at its 1906 premiere is generally considered to be Denmark's national opera. Its lasting popularity there is attributable to its many strophic songs, its dances and its underlying "old Copenhagen" atmosphere.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/35

Gioachino Antonio Rossini (29 February 1792 – 13 November 1868) was an Italian composer who gained fame for his 39 operas, although he also wrote many songs, some

sacred music. He set new standards for both comic and serious opera before retiring from large-scale composition while still in his thirties, at the height of his popularity. Born in Pesaro to parents who were both musicians (his father a trumpeter, his mother a singer), Rossini began to compose by the age of 12 and was educated at music school in Bologna. His first opera was performed in Venice in 1810 when he was 18 years old. Between 1810 and 1823 he wrote 34 operas that were performed in Venice, Milan, Ferrara, Naples and elsewhere. His most popular works include the comic operas L'italiana in Algeri, The Barber of Seville and La Cenerentola, which brought to a peak the opera buffa tradition he inherited from masters such as Domenico Cimarosa. He also composed opera seria works such as Otello, Tancredi and Semiramide
. All of these attracted admiration for their innovation in melody, harmonic and instrumental colour, and dramatic form.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/36

Facade of the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, NYC

First Officer
had a history of depression, barricaded himself into the cockpit, and deliberately crashed the plane into the mountains.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/37

Ernst II in an 1848 portrait by Frederick Richard Say

German liberalism, he surprised many by switching sides and supporting the more conservative (and eventually victorious) Prussians during the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars and subsequent unification of Germany. An excellent musician and amateur composer all his life, Ernest was a great patron of the arts and sciences in Coburg. He composed songs, hymns, and cantatas, as well as musical works for opera and the stage which met with success in Germany, including Die Gräberinsel (1842), Tony, oder die Vergeltung (1849), Casilda (1851), Santa Chiara (1854), and Diana von Solange (1858). Diana von Solange prompted Franz Liszt
to compose an orchestral festival march based on the opera's musical motifs.

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/38

Maurice Ravel in 1925

Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity, incorporating elements of baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, Boléro (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. Ravel completed two operas, and worked on three others. Ravel's first completed opera was L'heure espagnole (premiered in 1911). His second was L'enfant et les sortilèges
(premiered in 1925).

Portal:Opera/Selected biography/39

Alan Bush in 1952

Second World War, and his refusal to modify his position in the Cold War era led to a more prolonged semi-ostracism of his music. As a result, the four major operas he wrote between 1950 and 1970 were all premiered in East Germany
.

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