1.
Coloratura
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The word Coloratura is originally from Italian, literally meaning coloring, and derives from the Latin word colorare. It is also now used to refer to passages of such music, operatic roles in which such music plays a prominent part. In these early texts the term is dealt with briefly and always with reference to Italian usage, the term coloratura is most commonly applied to the elaborate and florid figuration or ornamentation in classical and romantic vocal music. In the modern musicological sense the term is used to refer to florid music from all periods of music history. Despite its derivation from Latin colorare, the term coloratura does not apply to the practice of coloring the voice, the term is not restricted to describing any one range of voice. All female and male voice types may achieve mastery of coloratura technique, there are coloratura parts for all voice types in different musical genres. Nevertheless, the coloratura, when used without further qualification. A coloratura soprano has the ability to produce notes above high C. Examples of coloratura music for different voice ranges include, Mozarts Allelujah may be arranged for and sung by a properly trained contralto, the piece was written for soprano castrato. The aria Every valley shall be exalted from Handels Messiah is an example of a piece for tenor. Each singer of a role in Rossinis operas must have a secure coloratura technique. Osmin, a character in Mozarts The Abduction from the Seraglio, is a role for a bass. A modern example is I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung, sung by the part of Jiang Qing in the John Adams opera Nixon in China. Glitter And Be Gay from Leonard Bernsteins comic operetta, Candide Agitata da due venti a coloratura mezzo-soprano aria, medieval coloration Apel, Willi, ed. Harvard Dictionary of Music, second edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, randel, Don Michael, ed. Apel, Willi, ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, the New Grove Dictionary of Opera
Coloratura
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Farinelli, a soprano
castrato famous for singing
baroque coloratura roles (
Corrado Giaquinto, c. 1755).
Coloratura
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An example of a coloratura passage from a soprano role. It includes a more difficult variant (top stave) with a leap to a high D (
D6). Final cadenza from the Valse in Ophélie's Mad Scene (Act IV) from the opera
Hamlet (1868) by Ambroise Thomas (piano-vocal score, p. 292).
2.
Soprano
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A soprano is a type of classical female singing voice and has the highest vocal range of all voice types. The sopranos vocal range is from approximately middle C =261 Hz to high A =880 Hz in choral music, in four-part chorale style harmony, the soprano takes the highest part, which usually encompasses the melody. The soprano voice type is divided into the coloratura, soubrette, lyric, spinto. The lyric soprano is the most common female singing voice, the word soprano comes from the Italian word sopra, as the soprano is the highest pitch human voice, often given to the leading female roles in operas. The term soprano is also based on the Latin word superius which, like soprano, the word superius was especially used in choral and other multi-part vocal music between the 13th and 16th centuries. The soprano has the highest vocal range of all voice types, a soprano and a mezzo-soprano have a similar range, but their tessituras will lie in different parts of that range. The low extreme for sopranos is roughly A3 or B♭3, within opera, the lowest demanded note for sopranos is F3. Often low notes in higher voices will project less, lack timbre, however, rarely is a soprano simply unable to sing a low note in a song within a soprano role. The high extreme, at a minimum, for non-coloratura sopranos is soprano C, a couple of roles have optional E♭6s, as well. In the coloratura repertoire several roles call for E♭6 on up to F6, in rare cases, some coloratura roles go as high as G6 or G♯6, such as Mozarts concert aria Popoli di Tessaglia. Or the title role of Jules Massenets opera Esclarmonde, while not necessarily within the tessitura, a good soprano will be able to sing her top notes full-throated, with timbre and dynamic control. In opera, the tessitura, vocal weight, and timbre of voices, a singers tessitura is where the voice has the best timbre, easy volume, and most comfort. Within the soprano voice type category are five generally recognized subcategories, coloratura soprano, soubrette, lyric soprano, spinto soprano, the coloratura soprano may be a lyric coloratura or a dramatic coloratura. The lyric coloratura soprano is a very agile light voice with a high upper extension capable of fast vocal coloratura, Light coloraturas have a range of approximately middle C to high F with some coloratura sopranos being able to sing somewhat higher or lower. Dramatic coloraturas have a range of approximately low B to high F with some coloratura sopranos being able to sing higher or lower. In classical music and opera, a soubrette soprano refers to both a type and a particular type of opera role. A soubrette voice is light with a bright, sweet timbre, a tessitura in the mid-range, the soubrette voice is not a weak voice, for it must carry over an orchestra without a microphone like all voices in opera. The voice, however, has a lighter weight than other soprano voices with a brighter timbre
Soprano
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Soprano voice range (C4–C6) indicated in sheet music (left) and on piano keyboard in green with dot marking middle C.
3.
Florence
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Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the Metropolitan City of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants, Florence was a centre of medieval European trade and finance and one of the wealthiest cities of the time. It is considered the birthplace of the Renaissance, and has called the Athens of the Middle Ages. A turbulent political history includes periods of rule by the powerful Medici family, from 1865 to 1871 the city was the capital of the recently established Kingdom of Italy. The Historic Centre of Florence attracts 13 million tourists each year and it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1982. The city is noted for its culture, Renaissance art and architecture, the city also contains numerous museums and art galleries, such as the Uffizi Gallery and the Palazzo Pitti, and still exerts an influence in the fields of art, culture and politics. Due to Florences artistic and architectural heritage, it has been ranked by Forbes as one of the most beautiful cities in the world, in 2008, the city had the 17th highest average income in Italy. Florence originated as a Roman city, and later, after a period as a flourishing trading and banking medieval commune. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, it was politically, economically, and culturally one of the most important cities in Europe, the language spoken in the city during the 14th century was, and still is, accepted as the Italian language. Starting from the late Middle Ages, Florentine money—in the form of the gold florin—financed the development of all over Europe, from Britain to Bruges, to Lyon. Florentine bankers financed the English kings during the Hundred Years War and they similarly financed the papacy, including the construction of their provisional capital of Avignon and, after their return to Rome, the reconstruction and Renaissance embellishment of Rome. Florence was home to the Medici, one of European historys most important noble families, Lorenzo de Medici was considered a political and cultural mastermind of Italy in the late 15th century. Two members of the family were popes in the early 16th century, Leo X, catherine de Medici married king Henry II of France and, after his death in 1559, reigned as regent in France. Marie de Medici married Henry IV of France and gave birth to the future king Louis XIII, the Medici reigned as Grand Dukes of Tuscany, starting with Cosimo I de Medici in 1569 and ending with the death of Gian Gastone de Medici in 1737. The Etruscans initially formed in 200 BC the small settlement of Fiesole and it was built in the style of an army camp with the main streets, the cardo and the decumanus, intersecting at the present Piazza della Repubblica. Situated along the Via Cassia, the route between Rome and the north, and within the fertile valley of the Arno, the settlement quickly became an important commercial centre. Peace returned under Lombard rule in the 6th century, Florence was conquered by Charlemagne in 774 and became part of the Duchy of Tuscany, with Lucca as capital. The population began to again and commerce prospered
Florence
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A collage of Florence showing the
Galleria degli Uffizi (top left), followed by the
Palazzo Pitti, a sunset view of the city and the
Fountain of Neptune in the
Piazza della Signoria
Florence
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A wooden model of Florence as it would have probably looked during Roman times, showing the ancient amphitheatre
Florence
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The façade of the Cathedral
Florence
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Leonardo da Vinci statue outside the
Uffizi Gallery.
4.
Giacomo Meyerbeer
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Giacomo Meyerbeer was a German opera composer of Jewish birth who has been described as perhaps the most successful stage composer of the nineteenth century. With his 1831 opera Robert le diable and its successors, he gave the genre of grand opera decisive character, Meyerbeers grand opera style was achieved by his merging of German orchestra style with Italian vocal tradition. These were employed in the context of sensational and melodramatic libretti created by Eugène Scribe and were enhanced by the up-to-date theatre technology of the Paris Opéra and they set a standard which helped to maintain Paris as the opera capital of the nineteenth century. Born to a very wealthy Berlin family, Meyerbeer began his career as a pianist but soon decided to devote himself to opera. His 1824 opera Il crociato in Egitto was the first to bring him Europe-wide reputation and he was at his peak with his operas Les Huguenots and Le prophète, his last opera was performed posthumously. His operas made him the most frequently performed composer at the leading opera houses in the nineteenth century. He was a supporter of Richard Wagner, enabling the first production of the latters opera. He was commissioned to write the patriotic opera Ein Feldlager in Schlesien to celebrate the reopening of the Berlin Royal Opera House in 1844, apart from around 50 songs, Meyerbeer wrote little except for the stage. Meyerbeers works are infrequently performed today. Meyerbeers birthname was Jacob Liebmann Beer, he was born in Tasdorf, near Berlin, then the capital of Prussia, to a Jewish family. His father was the wealthy financier Judah Herz Beer and his mother, Amalia Wulff, to whom he was particularly devoted. Their other children included the astronomer Wilhelm Beer and the poet Michael Beer and he was to adopt the surname Meyerbeer on the death of his grandfather Liebmann Meyer Wulff and the first name Giacomo during his period of study in Italy, around 1817. Judah Beer was a leader of the Berlin Jewish community and maintained a synagogue in his house which leaned towards reformist views. Jacob Beer wrote a cantata for performance at this synagogue. The brothers Alexander von Humboldt, the renowned naturalist, geographer and explorer, beers first keyboard instructor was Franz Lauska, a pupil of Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and a favoured teacher at the Berlin court. Beer also became one of Muzio Clementis pupils while Clementi was in Berlin, the boy made his public debut in 1801 playing Mozarts D minor Piano Concerto in Berlin. Beer, as he named himself, studied with Antonio Salieri. Louis Spohr organised a concert for Beer at Berlin in 1804 and continued his acquaintance with the lad later in Vienna, beers first stage work, the ballet Der Fischer und das Milchmädchen was produced in March 1810 at the Court Opera in Berlin
Giacomo Meyerbeer
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Giacomo Meyerbeer, engraving from a photograph by
Pierre Petit
Giacomo Meyerbeer
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The young Jacob Beer, portrait by
Friedrich Georg Weitsch (1803)
Giacomo Meyerbeer
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Amalia Beer (de), Meyerbeer's mother, painting by Carl Kretschmar (de), c. 1803
Giacomo Meyerbeer
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Gioachino Rossini in 1820
5.
Russia
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Russia, also officially the Russian Federation, is a country in Eurasia. The European western part of the country is more populated and urbanised than the eastern. Russias capital Moscow is one of the largest cities in the world, other urban centers include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a range of environments. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, the East Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, in 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Rus ultimately disintegrated into a number of states, most of the Rus lands were overrun by the Mongol invasion. The Soviet Union played a role in the Allied victory in World War II. The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the worlds first human-made satellite and the launching of the first humans in space. By the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the second largest economy, largest standing military in the world. It is governed as a federal semi-presidential republic, the Russian economy ranks as the twelfth largest by nominal GDP and sixth largest by purchasing power parity in 2015. Russias extensive mineral and energy resources are the largest such reserves in the world, making it one of the producers of oil. The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, Russia is a great power as well as a regional power and has been characterised as a potential superpower. The name Russia is derived from Rus, a state populated mostly by the East Slavs. However, this name became more prominent in the later history, and the country typically was called by its inhabitants Русская Земля. In order to distinguish this state from other states derived from it, it is denoted as Kievan Rus by modern historiography, an old Latin version of the name Rus was Ruthenia, mostly applied to the western and southern regions of Rus that were adjacent to Catholic Europe. The current name of the country, Россия, comes from the Byzantine Greek designation of the Kievan Rus, the standard way to refer to citizens of Russia is Russians in English and rossiyane in Russian. There are two Russian words which are translated into English as Russians
Russia
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Kievan Rus' in the 11th century
Russia
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Flag
Russia
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The
Baptism of Kievans, by
Klavdy Lebedev
Russia
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Sergius of Radonezh blessing
Dmitry Donskoy in
Trinity Sergius Lavra, before the
Battle of Kulikovo, depicted in a painting by
Ernst Lissner
6.
Saint Petersburg
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Saint Petersburg is Russias second-largest city after Moscow, with five million inhabitants in 2012, and an important Russian port on the Baltic Sea. It is politically incorporated as a federal subject, situated on the Neva River, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea, it was founded by Tsar Peter the Great on May 271703. In 1914, the name was changed from Saint Petersburg to Petrograd, in 1924 to Leningrad, between 1713 and 1728 and 1732–1918, Saint Petersburg was the capital of imperial Russia. In 1918, the government bodies moved to Moscow. Saint Petersburg is one of the cities of Russia, as well as its cultural capital. The Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Saint Petersburg is home to The Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world. A large number of consulates, international corporations, banks. Swedish colonists built Nyenskans, a fortress, at the mouth of the Neva River in 1611, in a then called Ingermanland. A small town called Nyen grew up around it, Peter the Great was interested in seafaring and maritime affairs, and he intended to have Russia gain a seaport in order to be able to trade with other maritime nations. He needed a better seaport than Arkhangelsk, which was on the White Sea to the north, on May 1703121703, during the Great Northern War, Peter the Great captured Nyenskans, and soon replaced the fortress. On May 271703, closer to the estuary 5 km inland from the gulf), on Zayachy Island, he laid down the Peter and Paul Fortress, which became the first brick and stone building of the new city. The city was built by conscripted peasants from all over Russia, tens of thousands of serfs died building the city. Later, the city became the centre of the Saint Petersburg Governorate, Peter moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg in 1712,9 years before the Treaty of Nystad of 1721 ended the war, he referred to Saint Petersburg as the capital as early as 1704. During its first few years, the city developed around Trinity Square on the bank of the Neva, near the Peter. However, Saint Petersburg soon started to be built out according to a plan, by 1716 the Swiss Italian Domenico Trezzini had elaborated a project whereby the city centre would be located on Vasilyevsky Island and shaped by a rectangular grid of canals. The project was not completed, but is evident in the layout of the streets, in 1716, Peter the Great appointed French Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond as the chief architect of Saint Petersburg. In 1724 the Academy of Sciences, University and Academic Gymnasium were established in Saint Petersburg by Peter the Great, in 1725, Peter died at the age of fifty-two. His endeavours to modernize Russia had met opposition from the Russian nobility—resulting in several attempts on his life
Saint Petersburg
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Top left to bottom right:
Peter and Paul Fortress on
Zayachy Island,
Smolny Cathedral,
Moyka river with the
General Staff Building,
Trinity Cathedral,
Bronze Horseman on
Senate Square, and the
Winter Palace.
Saint Petersburg
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The
Bronze Horseman, monument to Peter the Great
Saint Petersburg
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Palace Square backed by the General Staff arch and building, as the main square of the Russian Empire it was the setting of many events of historic significance
Saint Petersburg
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Map of Saint Petersburg, 1903
7.
Spain
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By population, Spain is the sixth largest in Europe and the fifth in the European Union. Spains capital and largest city is Madrid, other urban areas include Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, Bilbao. Modern humans first arrived in the Iberian Peninsula around 35,000 years ago, in the Middle Ages, the area was conquered by Germanic tribes and later by the Moors. Spain is a democracy organised in the form of a government under a constitutional monarchy. It is a power and a major developed country with the worlds fourteenth largest economy by nominal GDP. Jesús Luis Cunchillos argues that the root of the span is the Phoenician word spy. Therefore, i-spn-ya would mean the land where metals are forged, two 15th-century Spanish Jewish scholars, Don Isaac Abravanel and Solomon ibn Verga, gave an explanation now considered folkloric. Both men wrote in two different published works that the first Jews to reach Spain were brought by ship by Phiros who was confederate with the king of Babylon when he laid siege to Jerusalem. This man was a Grecian by birth, but who had given a kingdom in Spain. He became related by marriage to Espan, the nephew of king Heracles, Heracles later renounced his throne in preference for his native Greece, leaving his kingdom to his nephew, Espan, from whom the country of España took its name. Based upon their testimonies, this eponym would have already been in use in Spain by c.350 BCE, Iberia enters written records as a land populated largely by the Iberians, Basques and Celts. Early on its coastal areas were settled by Phoenicians who founded Western Europe´s most ancient cities Cadiz, Phoenician influence expanded as much of the Peninsula was eventually incorporated into the Carthaginian Empire, becoming a major theater of the Punic Wars against the expanding Roman Empire. After an arduous conquest, the peninsula came fully under Roman Rule, during the early Middle Ages it came under Germanic rule but later, much of it was conquered by Moorish invaders from North Africa. In a process took centuries, the small Christian kingdoms in the north gradually regained control of the peninsula. The last Moorish kingdom fell in the same year Columbus reached the Americas, a global empire began which saw Spain become the strongest kingdom in Europe, the leading world power for a century and a half, and the largest overseas empire for three centuries. Continued wars and other problems led to a diminished status. The Napoleonic invasions of Spain led to chaos, triggering independence movements that tore apart most of the empire, eventually democracy was peacefully restored in the form of a parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Spain joined the European Union, experiencing a renaissance and steady economic growth
Spain
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Lady of Elche
Spain
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Flag
Spain
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Altamira Cave paintings, in
Cantabria.
Spain
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Celtic castro in
A Guarda,
Galicia.
8.
South America
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South America is a continent located in the western hemisphere, mostly in the southern hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the northern hemisphere. It may also be considered a subcontinent of the Americas, which is the used in nations that speak Romance languages. The reference to South America instead of other regions has increased in the last decades due to changing geopolitical dynamics. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east by the Atlantic Ocean, North America and it includes twelve sovereign states, a part of France, and a non-sovereign area. In addition to this, the ABC islands of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Trinidad and Tobago, South America has an area of 17,840,000 square kilometers. Its population as of 2005 has been estimated at more than 371,090,000, South America ranks fourth in area and fifth in population. Brazil is by far the most populous South American country, with more than half of the population, followed by Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela. In recent decades Brazil has also concentrated half of the regions GDP and has become a first regional power, most of the population lives near the continents western or eastern coasts while the interior and the far south are sparsely populated. Most of the continent lies in the tropics, the continents cultural and ethnic outlook has its origin with the interaction of indigenous peoples with European conquerors and immigrants and, more locally, with African slaves. Given a long history of colonialism, the majority of South Americans speak Portuguese or Spanish. South America occupies the portion of the Americas. The continent is delimited on the northwest by the Darién watershed along the Colombia–Panama border. Almost all of mainland South America sits on the South American Plate, South Americas major mineral resources are gold, silver, copper, iron ore, tin, and petroleum. These resources found in South America have brought high income to its countries especially in times of war or of rapid growth by industrialized countries elsewhere. However, the concentration in producing one major export commodity often has hindered the development of diversified economies and this is leading to efforts to diversify production to drive away from staying as economies dedicated to one major export. South America is one of the most biodiverse continents on earth, South America is home to many interesting and unique species of animals including the llama, anaconda, piranha, jaguar, vicuña, and tapir. The Amazon rainforests possess high biodiversity, containing a proportion of the Earths species. Brazil is the largest country in South America, encompassing around half of the land area
South America
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A composite relief image of South America.
South America
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South America
South America
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Cuernos del Paine in Chile (left) and
Morro do Chapéu in Brazil (right) serve to illustrate the diversity of landscapes in South America. Click to enlarge.
South America
9.
La Traviata
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La traviata is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi set to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave. It is based on La Dame aux Camélias, an adapted from the novel by Alexandre Dumas. The opera was originally titled Violetta, after the main character and it was first performed on 6 March 1853 at the La Fenice opera house in Venice. Piave and Verdi wanted to follow Dumas in giving the opera a contemporary setting and it was not until the 1880s that the composer and librettists original wishes were carried out and realistic productions were staged. For Verdi, the years 1851 to 1853 were filled with operatic activity, in addition, personal affairs in his home town limited his activities that spring, but after Rigolettos success in Venice, an additional commission was offered by Brenna, the secretary of La Fenice. After Verdis return from Paris a contract was signed in May 1852, with performances scheduled for March 1853, Verdi sees The Lady of the Camellias play Verdi and Giuseppina Strepponi had visited Paris from late 1851 and into March 1852. In February the couple attended a performance of Alexander Dumas filss The Lady of the Camellias, as a result of this, Verdi biographer Mary Jane Phillips-Matz reports, the composer immediately began to compose music for what would later become La traviata. Writing to Piave, he added that I dont want any of those subjects that one can find by the hundreds. But at the time, the composer expressed concern about censorship in Venice. As the months dragged on into October, it was agreed that Piave would come to SantAgata, one subject was chosen, Piave set to work, and then Verdi threw in another idea, which may have been La traviata. However, within a time, a synopsis was dispatched to Venice under the title of Amore e morte. However, as Budden reveals, Verdi writes to his friend De Sanctis telling him that for Venice Im doing La Dame aux camélias which will probably be called La traviata, a subject for our own age. Although still bogged down at SantAgata, Piave was sanguine, Everything will turn out fine, Verdi was filled with premonitions of disaster upon his arrival in Venice on 21 February for rehearsals and he made his unhappiness clear to the singers. 19th century The audience jeered at times during the premiere, directing some of their scorn at the casting of soprano Fanny Salvini-Donatelli in the role of Violetta. Though she was a singer, they considered her to be too old. The next day, Verdi wrote to his friend Emanuele Muzio in what has now become perhaps his most famous letter, was the fault mine or the singers. Coincidentally, as Philips-Matz points out, an Italian translation of the play La Dame aux camélias was being presented just a short distance from La Fenice. As Budden notes, it came to be Venice that made an honest woman of Violetta when Verdi allowed a performance at the Teatro San Benedetto, then it was a fiasco, now it has created a furore
La Traviata
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Maria Callas in the role of Violetta
La Traviata
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Poster for the world premiere of La traviata
La Traviata
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Felice Varesi, the first Germont pere (Litho: Josef Kriehuber)
La Traviata
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Lodovico Graziani c. 1845, the first Alfredo
10.
Mignon
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Mignon is an opéra comique in three acts by Ambroise Thomas. The original French libretto was by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, the Italian version was translated by Giuseppe Zaffira. The opera is mentioned in James Joyces The Dead and Willa Cathers The Professors House, thomass goddaughter Mignon Nevada was named after the main character. The first performance was at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 17 November 1866, the piece proved popular, more than 100 performances took place by the following July, the 1, 000th was given there on 13 May 1894, and the 1, 500th on 25 May 1919. The opera was adapted and translated into German for performance in Berlin with Madame Lucca as Mignon. This ending was an attempt to make the story of the somewhat more similar in tone to the tragic outcome of Goethes. Unsurprisingly, this Version allemande still failed to satisfy the German critics, as Henry Edward Krehbiel describes it, the Mignon of Carré and Barbier bears little more than an external resemblance to the Mignon of Goethe, and to kill her is wanton cruelty. Despite his success in Paris with the French version, Thomas was asked to revise the work for the first performance at the Drury Lane Theatre in London on 5 July 1870 and this version was given in Italian with recitatives. The role of Mignon, originally for mezzo-soprano, was sung by a soprano, the finale was also much shortened. Philines extra aria appears to have never been orchestrated, or the orchestration was lost or destroyed. The recording also includes an appendix with the original, longer version of the finale. The United States premiere was given on 9 May 1871 at the French Opera House in New Orleans and this was followed by a Maurice Strakosch production in Italian at the New York Academy of Music on 22 November 1871 with Christine Nilsson as Mignon, Mlle. Léon Duval as Philine, Victor Capoul as Wilhelm, and Mlle, the substantial success of the opera in London and New York has been attributed to the presence of Christine Nilsson in both productions. Nilsson also performed the role at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1883, more recently, in 1986, the original opéra comique version with soprano Cynthia Clarey as Mignon was revived for a production at the Wexford Festival Opera. Lily Pons was famous for singing Philine, time, End of the 18th century. In the courtyard of an inn in a small German town, the wandering minstrel Lothario sings, jarno threatens Mignon with a stick when she refuses to dance, but Lothario and Wilhelm Meister come to her aid. She thanks them and divides her bouquet of flowers between them. Wilhelm and Laerte have a drink together, Philine and Laerte leave, after he gives her his flowers from Mignon
Mignon
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Ambroise Thomas
Mignon
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Poster created by
Jules Chéret for the 1866 premiere of Mignon.
Mignon
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Célestine Galli-Marié created the role of Mignon at the première.
Mignon
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Marie Cabel as Philine
11.
Un ballo in maschera
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Un ballo in maschera is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi with text by Antonio Somma. However, Sommas libretto was based on the five act libretto which playwright Eugène Scribe had written for Daniel Aubers 1833 opera, Gustave III. Scribe wrote about the assassination in 1792 of King Gustav III of Sweden who was killed as the result of a conspiracy against him. He was shot while attending a masked dance and died 13 days later of his wounds. It was to take two years between the time of the commission from Naples and planned for a production there and its premiere performance at the Teatro Apollo in Rome on 17 February 1859. In order to become the Un ballo in maschera which we know today, Verdis opera was forced to undergo a significant series of transformations and title changes. These changes were caused by a combination of censorship regulations in both Naples and Rome, as well as by the situation in France in January 1858. It became one of the most frustrating experiences of Verdis career, from the mid-20th century, it has become more common for the setting to revert to its original 18th-century Stockholm location. A re-creation of the original Gustavo III has been staged in Sweden, when this proved to be impracticable, Verdi turned to the subject of King Gustav IIIs assassination as portrayed in Scribe and Aubers opera, albeit not an historically accurate narrative. That subject was known and had been used by other composers. Sommas new libretto, known as Gustavo III, was presented to the censors in Naples by late 1857, as had happened with Rigoletto, changes in characters names and titles were proposed and the location was moved from Stockholm to Stettin. Working together with Somma over Christmas, Verdi accommodated these changes, Somma was asked to change the names of the characters on the Gustave libretto while Verdi worked on completing sketches of the music. The name of the opera became Una vendetta in dominò, by 9 January 1858, prior to setting out for Naples, Verdi wrote from his home the San Carlo that the opera is done and even here I am working on the full score. The imposition of further, more stringent requirements by the censor incurred Verdis wrath. He broke his contract, returned to SantAgata in April, and was sued by the management of the San Carlo house and this provoked him to lodge a counter-claim against the theatre for damages and, eventually, the legal fight ended. When the legal issues were resolved within a few months, Verdi was free to present the libretto, there, the censors demanded further changes. Removing the action from Europe, the location became Boston during the British colonial period and the character became Riccardo. At this point, the opera became Un ballo in maschera set in North America, Un ballo in maschera received its premiere performance at the Teatro Apollo in Rome on 17 February 1859 and was immediately successful
Un ballo in maschera
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The final scene of the opera depicted on the piano/vocal score published in 1860
Un ballo in maschera
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Verdi and the Naples censor when preparing "Ballo", 1857-58, caricature by Delfico
Un ballo in maschera
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Tenor Gaetano Fraschini, the first Riccardo
Un ballo in maschera
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Baritone Leone Giraldoni, the first Renato (c. 1865)
12.
Rigoletto
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Rigoletto is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi. The Italian libretto was written by Francesco Maria Piave based on the play Le roi samuse by Victor Hugo. Despite serious initial problems with the Austrian censors who had control over northern Italian theatres at the time and it is considered by many to be the first of the operatic masterpieces of Verdis middle-to-late career. Its tragic story revolves around the licentious Duke of Mantua, his court jester Rigoletto. The operas original title, La maledizione, refers to the placed on both the Duke and Rigoletto by a courtier whose daughter had been seduced by the Duke with Rigolettos encouragement. The curse comes to fruition when Gilda likewise falls in love with the Duke, Verdi was commissioned to write a new opera by the La Fenice opera house in Venice in 1850. By this time he was already a composer and had a degree of freedom in choosing the works he would prefer to set to music. He then asked Francesco Maria Piave to examine the play Kean by Alexandre Dumas, père, Verdi soon stumbled upon Victor Hugos five-act play Le roi samuse. He later explained that The subject is grand, immense, and there is a character that is one of the greatest creations that the theatre can boast of, in any country and in all history. It was a controversial subject, and Hugo himself had already had trouble with censorship in France. As Austria at that time controlled much of Northern Italy. Hugos play depicted a king as an immoral and cynical womanizer, from the beginning, Verdi was aware of the risks, as was Piave. In a letter which Verdi wrote to Piave, Use four legs, run through the town, correspondence between a prudent Piave and an already committed Verdi followed, but the two underestimated the power and the intentions of Austrians and remained at risk. Even the friendly Guglielmo Brenna, secretary of La Fenice, who had promised them that they would not have problems with the censors, was wrong, at the beginning of the summer of 1850, rumours started to spread that Austrian censorship was going to forbid the production. The censors considered the Hugo work to verge on lèse majesté, in August, Verdi and Piave prudently retired to Busseto, Verdis hometown, to continue the composition and prepare a defensive scheme. They wrote to the theatre, assuring them that the doubts about the morality of the work were not justified but since very little time was left. Verdi was completely against this solution and preferred instead to have direct negotiations with censors, arguing over each. At this point, Brenna, La Fenices secretary, showed the Austrians some letters and articles depicting the bad character but the value of the artist
Rigoletto
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Set design by Philippe Chaperon.
Rigoletto
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Francesco Maria Piave, the librettist of Rigoletto
Rigoletto
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La Fenice 's poster for the world premiere of Rigoletto
Rigoletto
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Felice Varesi, the first Rigoletto
13.
Lucia di Lammermoor
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Lucia di Lammermoor is a dramma tragico in three acts by Gaetano Donizetti. Salvadore Cammarano wrote the Italian language libretto loosely based upon Sir Walter Scotts historical novel The Bride of Lammermoor, Donizetti wrote Lucia di Lammermoor in 1835, a time when several factors led to the height of his reputation as a composer of opera. Gioachino Rossini had recently retired and Vincenzo Bellini had died shortly before the premiere of Lucia leaving Donizetti as the sole reigning genius of Italian opera. Not only were conditions ripe for Donizettis success as a composer, the perceived romance of its violent wars and feuds, as well as its folklore and mythology, intrigued 19th century readers and audiences. Sir Walter Scott made use of stereotypes in his novel The Bride of Lammermoor. The story concerns the emotionally fragile Lucy Ashton who is caught in a feud between her own family and that of the Ravenswoods, the setting is the Lammermuir Hills of Scotland in the 17th century. The opera premiered on 26 September 1835 at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, london saw the opera on 5 April 1838 and, for Paris, Donizetti revised the score for a French version which debuted on 6 August 1839 at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris. It reached the United States with a production in New Orleans on 28 December 1841, the opera was never absent from the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera for more than one season at a time from 1903 until 1972. After World War II, a number of sopranos were instrumental in giving new life to the opera, including Maria Callas and it has remained a staple of the operatic repertoire and ranks 21st on Operabases list of the most-performed operas worldwide from the 2008/09 to 2012/13 seasons. Additionally an off-stage wind band is used, Donizetti did not provide instrumentation, time, Early 18th century Place, Scotland Scene 1, The gardens of Lammermoor Castle Normanno, captain of the castle guard, and other retainers are searching for an intruder. He tells Enrico that he believes that the man is Edgardo of Ravenswood, and it is confirmed that Edgardo is indeed the intruder. Enrico reaffirms his hatred for the Ravenswood family and his determination to end the relationship, Scene 2, By a fountain at the entrance to the park, beside the castle Lucia waits for Edgardo. In her famous aria Regnava nel silenzio, Lucia tells her maid Alisa that she has seen the ghost of a girl killed on the same spot by a jealous Ravenswood ancestor. Alisa tells Lucia that the apparition is a warning and that she must give up her love for Edgardo, Edgardo enters, for political reasons, he must leave immediately for France. He hopes to make his peace with Enrico and marry Lucia, Lucia tells him this is impossible, and instead they take a sworn vow of marriage and exchange rings. Scene 1, Lord Ashtons apartments in Lammermoor Castle Preparations have been made for the imminent wedding of Lucia to Arturo, Enrico worries about whether Lucia will really submit to the wedding. He shows his sister a forged letter seemingly proving that Edgardo has forgotten her, Enrico leaves Lucia to further persuasion this time by Raimondo, Lucias chaplain and tutor, that she should renounce her vow to Edgardo, for the good of the family, and marry Arturo. Scene 2, A hall in the castle Arturo arrives for the marriage, Lucia acts strangely, but Enrico explains that this is due to the death of her mother
Lucia di Lammermoor
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Gaetano Donizetti
Lucia di Lammermoor
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Fanny Tacchinardi Persiani as Lucia in the London premiere
Lucia di Lammermoor
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Set design for act 3, scene 3 by Francesco Bagnara, circa 1844 (Civica Raccolta Stampe Bertarelli Milan)
Lucia di Lammermoor
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14.
San Francisco
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San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. It is the birthplace of the United Nations, the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought rapid growth, making it the largest city on the West Coast at the time. San Francisco became a consolidated city-county in 1856, after three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later. In World War II, San Francisco was a port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater. Politically, the city votes strongly along liberal Democratic Party lines, San Francisco is also the headquarters of five major banking institutions and various other companies such as Levi Strauss & Co. Dolby, Airbnb, Weebly, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Yelp, Pinterest, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, Mozilla, Wikimedia Foundation, as of 2016, San Francisco is ranked high on world liveability rankings. The earliest archaeological evidence of habitation of the territory of the city of San Francisco dates to 3000 BC. Upon independence from Spain in 1821, the became part of Mexico. Under Mexican rule, the system gradually ended, and its lands became privatized. In 1835, Englishman William Richardson erected the first independent homestead, together with Alcalde Francisco de Haro, he laid out a street plan for the expanded settlement, and the town, named Yerba Buena, began to attract American settlers. Commodore John D. Sloat claimed California for the United States on July 7,1846, during the Mexican–American War, montgomery arrived to claim Yerba Buena two days later. Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco on January 30 of the next year, despite its attractive location as a port and naval base, San Francisco was still a small settlement with inhospitable geography. The California Gold Rush brought a flood of treasure seekers, with their sourdough bread in tow, prospectors accumulated in San Francisco over rival Benicia, raising the population from 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 by December 1849. The promise of fabulous riches was so strong that crews on arriving vessels deserted and rushed off to the gold fields, leaving behind a forest of masts in San Francisco harbor. Some of these approximately 500 abandoned ships were used at times as storeships, saloons and hotels, many were left to rot, by 1851 the harbor was extended out into the bay by wharves while buildings were erected on piles among the ships. By 1870 Yerba Buena Cove had been filled to create new land, buried ships are occasionally exposed when foundations are dug for new buildings. California was quickly granted statehood in 1850 and the U. S. military built Fort Point at the Golden Gate, silver discoveries, including the Comstock Lode in Nevada in 1859, further drove rapid population growth. With hordes of fortune seekers streaming through the city, lawlessness was common, and the Barbary Coast section of town gained notoriety as a haven for criminals, prostitution, entrepreneurs sought to capitalize on the wealth generated by the Gold Rush
San Francisco
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San Francisco and the
Golden Gate Bridge from
Marin Headlands
San Francisco
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Mission San Francisco de Asís (Mission Dolores)
San Francisco
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1853
United States Coast Survey Map
San Francisco
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Francis Samuel Marryat, Hilltop of San Francisco, California, Looking toward the Bay, 1849. M.& N. Hanhart Chromolithograph
15.
Metropolitan Opera
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The Metropolitan Opera, commonly referred to as The Met, is a company based in New York City, resident at the Metropolitan Opera House at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The company is operated by the non-profit Metropolitan Opera Association, with Peter Gelb as general manager, the music director position is in transition as of 2016. The music director designate is Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the director emeritus is James Levine. The Met was founded in 1880 as an alternative to the previously established Academy of Music opera house, the Metropolitan Opera is the largest classical music organization in North America. It presents about 27 different operas each year in a season lasts from late September through May. The operas are presented in a rotating schedule with up to seven performances of four different works staged each week. Moving to the new Lincoln Center location in 1966, performances are given in the evening Monday through Saturday with a matinée on Saturday, several operas are presented in new productions each season. Sometimes these are borrowed from or shared with other opera houses, the rest of the years operas are given in revivals of productions from previous seasons. The 2015-16 season comprised 227 performances of 25 operas, the operas in the Mets repertoire consist of a wide range of works, from 18th-century Baroque and 19th-century Bel canto to the Minimalism of the late 20th century. These operas are presented in staged productions that range in style from those with elaborate traditional decors to others that feature modern conceptual designs, the Mets performing company consists of a large symphony-sized orchestra, a chorus, childrens choir, and many supporting and leading solo singers. The company also employs numerous free-lance dancers, actors, musicians, the Mets roster of singers includes both international and American artists, some of whose careers have been developed through the Mets young artists programs. The Metropolitan Opera Company was founded in 1880 to create an alternative to New Yorks old established Academy of Music opera house, the subscribers to the Academys limited number of private boxes represented the highest stratum in New York society. By 1880, these old families were loath to admit New Yorks newly wealthy industrialists into their long-established social circle. Frustrated with being excluded, the Metropolitan Operas founding subscribers determined to build a new house that would outshine the old Academy in every way. A group of some 22 men assembled at Delmonicos restaurant on April 28,1880 and they elected officers and established subscriptions for ownership in the new company. The first Met subscribers included members of the Morgan, Roosevelt, the new Metropolitan Opera House opened on October 22,1883, and was an immediate success, both socially and artistically. The Academy of Musics opera season folded just three years after the Met opened, in its early decades the Met did not produce the opera performances itself but hired prominent manager/impresarios to stage a season of opera at the new Metropolitan Opera House. Henry Abbey served as manager for the season, 1883–84
Metropolitan Opera
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The
Metropolitan Opera House at
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, home of the Metropolitan Opera
Metropolitan Opera
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A full house at the old Metropolitan Opera House, seen from the rear of the stage, at a concert by pianist
Josef Hofmann, November 28, 1937
Metropolitan Opera
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Auditorium of the Metropolitan Opera House at
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Metropolitan Opera
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The gold curtain in the auditorium
16.
Heinrich Conried
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Heinrich Conried was a theatrical manager and director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. He was born on September 3,1855 in Bielitz, Austrian Silesia and his father was a weaver of Jewish origin. He received his education at the Realschule in Vienna, early on, he was an actor in at the Burgtheater in Vienna. Only 21 years old he became manager of the failed Bremer Stadttheater, on invitation of Neuendorff Conried moved in 1878 to New York City, where he became chief stage manager of the Germania Theatre. In 1881 he moved to the Thalia Theatre as artistic manager, in 1893 he assumed the management of the Irving Place Theatre. In 1903, he succeeded Maurice Grau as director of the Metropolitan Opera until 1908, by December 31,1913, when the copyright of Parsifal expired, the work had been represented 43 times at the Metropolitan Opera. Enrico Caruso, who then had refused all offers to come to America, was persuaded by Conried to come to New York. Soon after he had become director of the Metropolitan Opera, he conceived the New Theatre, on May 1,1908 he retired from the Metropolitan Opera House due to his poor health. Immediately afterwards he voyaged to Europe and he died on April 27,1909 in the Hotel Meranerhof in the city of Meran from an apoplectic stroke in the presence of his wife and sister. Bakers Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 4th edition, G. Schirmer,1940, the Life of Heinrich Conried, New York, Thomas Y. Bibliography of Jewish Music, Columbia University Press,1951, wininger, S. Große Jüdische National-Biographie, Vol. I,1925, p.591
Heinrich Conried
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Heinrich Conried
17.
Oscar Hammerstein I
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Oscar Hammerstein I was a German-born businessman, theater impresario, and composer in New York City. His passion for opera led him to open several opera houses and he took up the flute, piano, and violin at an early age. His mother died when he was fifteen years old, during his youth, Hammersteins father desired him to continue with his education, wanting him to specialize in topics such as algebra, but Hammerstein desired to pursue music. After Oscar went skating in a one day, his father found out and whipped him as punishment. After selling his violin, Hammerstein ran away to Liverpool, and from there, Hammerstein made ends meet initially by working at a cigar factory on Pearl Street. He worked his way up to become a cigar maker himself, Hammerstein would eventually become the owner of at least 80 patents, with most of them being related to the machines he made for the cigar-making process. The initial machine only sold for $6,000, but later reinventions would boost his machines worth to around $200,000, another invention that Hammerstein created was a more efficient plumbing system for his sink when it had leaked one night. He also moonlighted as a manager in the downtown German theaters. He became wealthy industrializing cigar manufacturing, and his tobacco fortune provided the money he used to pursue his theater interests, Hammerstein built his first theater, the Harlem Opera House, on 125th Street in 1889, along with 50 housing developments. His second theater, the Columbus Theatre, was built in 1890 on the same street and his third theater was the first Manhattan Opera House, built in 1893 on 34th Street. This failed as a house and was used, in partnership with Koster and Bial. Hammerstein was displeased with the partnership to the point that it fell into bitterness, When I get through with you, everybody will forget there ever was a Koster, I will build a house the likes of which has never been seen in the whole world. He opened a venue, the Olympia Theatre, on Longacre Square. While it was received by the New York Times, Hammersteins personal experience was less than peaceful, with the production being plagued by monetary issues with the cast. In the end, Hammerstein had profited only one-tenth of the costs that were put into the Santa Maria production, nine years later, Longacre Square was renamed Times Square, and the area had become, through his efforts, a thriving theater district. He wrote a musical called Punch, Judy & Co. in 1903, Hammerstein also opened Hammersteins Paradise Roof Garden above the Victoria and Republic theatres. In 1906, Hammerstein, dissatisfied with the Metropolitan Operas productions, opened a theater, his second Manhattan Opera House. He also opened the Philadelphia Opera House in 1908, which, however, since the star soprano Nellie Melba was disenchanted with the Metropolitan, she deserted it for Hammersteins company, rescuing it financially with a successful season
Oscar Hammerstein I
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Portrait from Who's Who on the Stage, 1906
Oscar Hammerstein I
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Oscar Hammerstein I (left) with conductor
Cleofonte Campanini in New York, 1908.
Oscar Hammerstein I
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Stella Hammerstein
18.
Christmas Eve
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Christmas Eve is the day before Christmas Day, the festival commemorating the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Christmas Day is observed around the world, and Christmas Eve is widely observed as a full or partial holiday in anticipation of Christmas Day, together, both days are considered one of the most culturally significant celebrations in Christendom and Western society. Many churches still ring their bells and hold prayers in the evening, for example. Since tradition holds that Jesus was born at night, Midnight Mass is celebrated on Christmas Eve, traditionally at midnight, roman Catholics and high church Anglicans traditionally celebrate Midnight Mass, which begins either at or sometime before midnight on Christmas Eve. This ceremony, which is held in churches throughout the world, celebrates the birth of Christ, Midnight Mass is popular in Poland. In recent years churches have scheduled their Midnight Mass as early as 7 pm. In Spanish-speaking areas, the Midnight Mass is sometimes referred to as Misa de Gallo, in the Philippines, the custom has expanded into the nine-day Simbang Gabi, when Filipinos attend dawn Masses from 16 December, continuing daily until Christmas Eve. In 2009 Vatican officials scheduled the Midnight Mass to start at 10 pm so that the 82-year-old Pope Benedict XVI would not have too late a night. Whilst it does not include any kind of Mass, the Church of Scotland has a service beginning just before midnight, the Church of Scotland no longer holds Hogmanay services on New Years Eve, however. The Christmas Eve Services are still very popular, on Christmas Eve, the Christ Candle in the center of the Advent wreath is traditionally lit in many church services. In candlelight services, while singing Silent Night, each member of the congregation receives a candle, lutherans traditionally practice Christmas Eve Eucharistic traditions typical of Germany and Scandinavia. Krippenspiele, special music for organ, vocal and brass choirs. A nativity scene may be erected indoors or outdoors, and is composed of figurines depicting the infant Jesus resting in a manger, Mary, other figures in the scene may include angels, shepherds, and various animals. The figures may be made of any material, and arranged in a stable or grotto, the Magi may also appear, and are sometimes not placed in the scene until the week following Christmas to account for their travel time to Bethlehem. While most home nativity scenes are packed away at Christmas or shortly thereafter, Christmas Vespers are popular in the early evening, and midnight services are also widespread in regions which are predominantly Lutheran. The old Lutheran tradition of a Christmas Vigil in the morning hours of Christmas Day can still be found in some regions. Methodists celebrate the evening in different ways, some, in the early evening, come to their church to celebrate Holy Communion with their families. The mood is very solemn, and the visible light is the Advent Wreath
Christmas Eve
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Julaftonen (Christmas Eve), a 1904–05
watercolor painting by
Carl Larsson
Christmas Eve
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Midnight Mass is held in many churches toward the end of Christmas Eve, often with dim lighting and traditional decorative accents such as greenery
Christmas Eve
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Advent wreath, lightning the candle
Christmas Eve
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A nativity scene
19.
La traviata
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La traviata is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi set to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave. It is based on La Dame aux Camélias, an adapted from the novel by Alexandre Dumas. The opera was originally titled Violetta, after the main character and it was first performed on 6 March 1853 at the La Fenice opera house in Venice. Piave and Verdi wanted to follow Dumas in giving the opera a contemporary setting and it was not until the 1880s that the composer and librettists original wishes were carried out and realistic productions were staged. For Verdi, the years 1851 to 1853 were filled with operatic activity, in addition, personal affairs in his home town limited his activities that spring, but after Rigolettos success in Venice, an additional commission was offered by Brenna, the secretary of La Fenice. After Verdis return from Paris a contract was signed in May 1852, with performances scheduled for March 1853, Verdi sees The Lady of the Camellias play Verdi and Giuseppina Strepponi had visited Paris from late 1851 and into March 1852. In February the couple attended a performance of Alexander Dumas filss The Lady of the Camellias, as a result of this, Verdi biographer Mary Jane Phillips-Matz reports, the composer immediately began to compose music for what would later become La traviata. Writing to Piave, he added that I dont want any of those subjects that one can find by the hundreds. But at the time, the composer expressed concern about censorship in Venice. As the months dragged on into October, it was agreed that Piave would come to SantAgata, one subject was chosen, Piave set to work, and then Verdi threw in another idea, which may have been La traviata. However, within a time, a synopsis was dispatched to Venice under the title of Amore e morte. However, as Budden reveals, Verdi writes to his friend De Sanctis telling him that for Venice Im doing La Dame aux camélias which will probably be called La traviata, a subject for our own age. Although still bogged down at SantAgata, Piave was sanguine, Everything will turn out fine, Verdi was filled with premonitions of disaster upon his arrival in Venice on 21 February for rehearsals and he made his unhappiness clear to the singers. 19th century The audience jeered at times during the premiere, directing some of their scorn at the casting of soprano Fanny Salvini-Donatelli in the role of Violetta. Though she was a singer, they considered her to be too old. The next day, Verdi wrote to his friend Emanuele Muzio in what has now become perhaps his most famous letter, was the fault mine or the singers. Coincidentally, as Philips-Matz points out, an Italian translation of the play La Dame aux camélias was being presented just a short distance from La Fenice. As Budden notes, it came to be Venice that made an honest woman of Violetta when Verdi allowed a performance at the Teatro San Benedetto, then it was a fiasco, now it has created a furore
La traviata
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Maria Callas in the role of Violetta
La traviata
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Poster for the world premiere of La traviata
La traviata
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Felice Varesi, the first Germont pere (Litho: Josef Kriehuber)
La traviata
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Lodovico Graziani c. 1845, the first Alfredo
20.
Royal Opera House
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The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is referred to as simply Covent Garden. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet, originally called the Theatre Royal, it served primarily as a playhouse for the first hundred years of its history. In 1734, the first ballet was presented, a year later, Handels first season of operas began. Many of his operas and oratorios were written for Covent Garden and had their premieres there. The current building is the theatre on the site following disastrous fires in 1808 and 1856. The façade, foyer, and auditorium date from 1858, the main auditorium seats 2,256 people, making it the third largest in London, and consists of four tiers of boxes and balconies and the amphitheatre gallery. The proscenium is 12.20 m wide and 14.80 m high, the main auditorium is a Grade I listed building. The letters patent remained in the possession of the patentees heirs until the 19th century, in 1728, John Rich, actor-manager of the Dukes Company at Lincolns Inn Fields Theatre, commissioned The Beggars Opera from John Gay. In addition, a Royal Charter had created a fruit and vegetable market in the area, at its opening on 7 December 1732, Rich was carried by his actors in processional triumph into the theatre for its opening production of William Congreves The Way of the World. Despite the frequent interchangeability between the Covent Garden and Drury Lane companies, competition was intense, often presenting the plays at the same time. Rich introduced pantomime to the repertoire, himself performing and a tradition of seasonal pantomime continued at the modern theatre, in 1734, Covent Garden presented its first ballet, Pygmalion. Marie Sallé discarded tradition and her corset and danced in diaphanous robes, george Frideric Handel was named musical director of the company, at Lincolns Inn Fields, in 1719, but his first season of opera, at Covent Garden, was not presented until 1734. His first opera was Il pastor fido followed by Ariodante, the première of Alcina, there was a royal performance of Messiah in 1743, which was a success and began a tradition of Lenten oratorio performances. From 1735 until his death in 1759 he gave regular seasons there and he bequeathed his organ to John Rich, and it was placed in a prominent position on the stage, but was among many valuable items lost in a fire that destroyed the theatre on 20 September 1808. In 1792 the architect Henry Holland rebuilt the auditorium, within the shell of the building but deeper and wider than the old auditorium. Rebuilding began in December 1808, and the second Theatre Royal, the Old Price Riots lasted over two months, and the management was finally forced to accede to the audiences demands. During this time, entertainments were varied, opera and ballet were presented, kemble engaged a variety of acts, including the child performer Master Betty, the great clown Joseph Grimaldi made his name at Covent Garden
Royal Opera House
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The Royal Opera House, Bow Street frontage with
Plazzotta 's statue, Young Dancer, in the foreground
Royal Opera House
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"Rich's Glory": John Rich takes over (seemingly invades) his new Covent Garden Theatre. (A caricature by
William Hogarth)
Royal Opera House
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A satirical drawing from 1811 of the "Pigeon Holes" that flanked the upper gallery at Covent Garden
Royal Opera House
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A picture of the first theatre drawn shortly before it burned down in 1808
21.
London
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London /ˈlʌndən/ is the capital and most populous city of England and the United Kingdom. Standing on the River Thames in the south east of the island of Great Britain and it was founded by the Romans, who named it Londinium. Londons ancient core, the City of London, largely retains its 1. 12-square-mile medieval boundaries. London is a global city in the arts, commerce, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, professional services, research and development, tourism. It is crowned as the worlds largest financial centre and has the fifth- or sixth-largest metropolitan area GDP in the world, London is a world cultural capital. It is the worlds most-visited city as measured by international arrivals and has the worlds largest city airport system measured by passenger traffic, London is the worlds leading investment destination, hosting more international retailers and ultra high-net-worth individuals than any other city. Londons universities form the largest concentration of education institutes in Europe. In 2012, London became the first city to have hosted the modern Summer Olympic Games three times, London has a diverse range of people and cultures, and more than 300 languages are spoken in the region. Its estimated mid-2015 municipal population was 8,673,713, the largest of any city in the European Union, Londons urban area is the second most populous in the EU, after Paris, with 9,787,426 inhabitants at the 2011 census. The citys metropolitan area is the most populous in the EU with 13,879,757 inhabitants, the city-region therefore has a similar land area and population to that of the New York metropolitan area. London was the worlds most populous city from around 1831 to 1925, Other famous landmarks include Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, Piccadilly Circus, St Pauls Cathedral, Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square, and The Shard. The London Underground is the oldest underground railway network in the world, the etymology of London is uncertain. It is an ancient name, found in sources from the 2nd century and it is recorded c.121 as Londinium, which points to Romano-British origin, and hand-written Roman tablets recovered in the city originating from AD 65/70-80 include the word Londinio. The earliest attempted explanation, now disregarded, is attributed to Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regum Britanniae and this had it that the name originated from a supposed King Lud, who had allegedly taken over the city and named it Kaerlud. From 1898, it was accepted that the name was of Celtic origin and meant place belonging to a man called *Londinos. The ultimate difficulty lies in reconciling the Latin form Londinium with the modern Welsh Llundain, which should demand a form *lōndinion, from earlier *loundiniom. The possibility cannot be ruled out that the Welsh name was borrowed back in from English at a later date, and thus cannot be used as a basis from which to reconstruct the original name. Until 1889, the name London officially applied only to the City of London, two recent discoveries indicate probable very early settlements near the Thames in the London area
London
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Palace of Westminster,
Buckingham Palace and
Central London skyline
London
London
London
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The name London may derive from the
River Thames
22.
New York City
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The City of New York, often called New York City or simply New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2015 population of 8,550,405 distributed over an area of about 302.6 square miles. Located at the tip of the state of New York. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has described as the cultural and financial capital of the world. Situated on one of the worlds largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, the five boroughs – Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898. In 2013, the MSA produced a gross metropolitan product of nearly US$1.39 trillion, in 2012, the CSA generated a GMP of over US$1.55 trillion. NYCs MSA and CSA GDP are higher than all but 11 and 12 countries, New York City traces its origin to its 1624 founding in Lower Manhattan as a trading post by colonists of the Dutch Republic and was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. It has been the countrys largest city since 1790, the Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the Americas by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is a symbol of the United States and its democracy. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world, the names of many of the citys bridges, tapered skyscrapers, and parks are known around the world. Manhattans real estate market is among the most expensive in the world, Manhattans Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is one of the most extensive metro systems worldwide, with 472 stations in operation. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, and Rockefeller University, during the Wisconsinan glaciation, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth. The ice sheet scraped away large amounts of soil, leaving the bedrock that serves as the foundation for much of New York City today. Later on, movement of the ice sheet would contribute to the separation of what are now Long Island and Staten Island. The first documented visit by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown and he claimed the area for France and named it Nouvelle Angoulême. Heavy ice kept him from further exploration, and he returned to Spain in August and he proceeded to sail up what the Dutch would name the North River, named first by Hudson as the Mauritius after Maurice, Prince of Orange
New York City
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Clockwise, from top:
Midtown Manhattan,
Times Square, the
Unisphere in
Queens, the
Brooklyn Bridge,
Lower Manhattan with
One World Trade Center,
Central Park, the
headquarters of the United Nations, and the
Statue of Liberty
New York City
–
New Amsterdam, centered in the eventual
Lower Manhattan, in 1664, the year
England took control and renamed it "New York".
New York City
–
The
Battle of Long Island, the largest battle of the
American Revolution, took place in
Brooklyn in 1776.
New York City
–
Broadway follows the Native American Wickquasgeck Trail through Manhattan.
23.
Boston Opera Company
–
The Boston Opera Company was an American opera company located in Boston, Massachusetts, that was active from 1909 to 1915. The company was founded in 1908 by Bostonian millionaire Eben Dyer Jordan, Jr. Jordan, an opera enthusiast and amateur singer, was the heir to a department store fortune and provided the companys financial backing for its first three seasons. He also provided the necessary to complete the Boston Opera House. Russell had worked as a talent manager and opera director in Europe and from 1906 until 1909 his touring opera company, the companys first performance was given for the opening of the Boston Opera House on November 8,1909. The company presented Amilcare Ponchiellis La Gioconda with Nordica in the title role, during its six seasons the BOC presented a wide array of works, including two contemporary operas by Boston composer Frederick Converse, The Pipe of Desire and The Sacrifice. Although the company was admired for its excellence, the organization was plagued with financial worries after the initial backing by Jordan ended. These monetary problems forced the company to declare bankruptcy on May 11,1915. The new music review and church music review
Boston Opera Company
–
The 1909 Boston Opera House, circa 1913
24.
Chicago Grand Opera Company
–
It was the first resident Chicago opera company. The company notably presented the world premieres of Victor Herberts Natoma, the company also mounted the United States premieres of Jean Nouguèss Quo vadis, Karl Goldmarks Das Heimchen am Herd, and Alberto Franchettis Cristoforo Colombo. The second Chicago Grand Opera Company was an attempt to keep going in Chicago after the collapse of the Chicago Civic Opera in 1932. It produced three seasons of opera at the Civic Opera House from 1933 to 1935 before it too succumbed to financial difficulties and it was succeeded by the Chicago City Opera Company. Opera in Chicago, Appleton, New York City,1966, marsh, Robert C. and Norman Pellegrini,150 Years of Opera in Chicago, Northern Illinois University Press, Chicago 2006
Chicago Grand Opera Company
–
The
Auditorium Building, home of the Chicago Grand Opera Company
25.
Amelita Galli-Curci
–
Amelita Galli-Curci was an Italian coloratura soprano. She was one of the most popular singers of the 20th century. She was born as Amelita Galli into a family in Milan. She was inspired to sing by her grandmother, operatic composer Pietro Mascagni also encouraged Galli-Curcis singing ambitions. By her own choice, Galli-Curcis voice was largely self-trained and she honed her technique by listening to other sopranos, reading old singing-method books, and doing piano exercises with her voice instead of using a keyboard. She was seen by critics as an antidote to the host of squally. The soprano had toured widely in Europe, Russia and South America, in 1915, she sang two performances of Lucia di Lammermoor with Enrico Caruso in Buenos Aires. These were to be her only appearances with the great tenor, though they later appeared in concert. Galli-Curci and Caruso also acted as godparents for the son of the Sicilian tenor Giulio Crimi, Galli-Curci toured extensively throughout her career, including a 1924 Great Britain concert tour, where she appeared in 20 cities and a tour of Australia a year later. Galli-Curci arrived in the United States in the autumn of 1916 as a virtual unknown, also in 1916, Galli-Curci signed a recording contract with the Victor Talking Machine Company and recorded exclusively for the company until 1930. On 14 November 1921, While still under contract with the Chicago Opera and she was one of few singers who were contracted to both opera companies simultaneously. Galli-Curci remained at the Met until her retirement from the stage nine years later. Galli-Curci built and maintained an estate called Sul Monte in Highmount, New York, in the nearby village of Margaretville a theater was erected and named in her honor. She returned the favor by performing there on its opening night, weary of opera house politics and convinced that opera was a dying art form, Galli-Curci retired from the operatic stage in January 1930 to concentrate instead on concert performances. Throat problems and the pitching of top notes had plagued her for several years. Great care was taken during her surgery, which was performed under local anesthesia, a nerve to her larynx, the external branch of the superior laryngeal nerve, is thought to have been damaged, resulting in the loss of her ability to sing high pitches. This nerve has become known as the nerve of Galli-Curci. In 1908 Galli-Curci wed an Italian nobleman, the Marchese Luigi Curci, the Marchese Curci petitioned the papal council in Rome for an annulment of the marriage in 1922
Amelita Galli-Curci
–
Amelita Galli-Curci
Amelita Galli-Curci
–
Amelita Galli-Curci typing in a
fur coat, circa 1920. Forms part of:
George Grantham Bain Collection (
Library of Congress).
26.
Nellie Melba
–
Dame Nellie Melba GBE, born Helen Porter Mitchell, was an Australian operatic soprano. She became one of the most famous singers of the late Victorian era and she was the first Australian to achieve international recognition as a classical musician. She took the pseudonym Melba from Melbourne, her home town, Melba studied singing in Melbourne and made a modest success in performances there. After a brief and unsuccessful marriage, she moved to Europe in search of a singing career, failing to find engagements in London in 1886, she studied in Paris and soon made a great success there and in Brussels. Returning to London she quickly established herself as the lyric soprano at Covent Garden from 1888. She soon achieved success in Paris and elsewhere in Europe. Her repertoire was small, in her career she sang no more than 25 roles and was closely identified with only ten. She was known for her performances in French and Italian opera, during the First World War, Melba raised large sums for war charities. She returned to Australia frequently during the 20th century, singing in opera and concerts and she was active in the teaching of singing at the Melbourne Conservatorium. Melba continued to sing until the last months of her life and her death, in Australia, was news across the English-speaking world, and her funeral was a major national event. Melba was born in Richmond, Victoria, the eldest of seven children of the builder David Mitchell, Mitchell, a Scot, had emigrated to Australia in 1852, becoming a successful builder. Melba was taught to play the piano and first sang in public around age six and she was educated at a local boarding school and then at the Presbyterian Ladies College. She studied singing with Mary Ellen Christian and Pietro Cecchi, an Italian tenor, in her teens, Melba continued to perform in amateur concerts in and around Melbourne, and she played the organ at church. Her father encouraged her in her studies, but he strongly disapproved of her taking up singing as a career. Melbas mother died suddenly in 1881 at Richmond, Melbas father moved the family to Mackay, Queensland, where he built a new sugar mill. Melba soon became popular in Mackay society for her singing and piano-playing, on 22 December 1882 in Brisbane, she married Charles Nesbitt Frederick Armstrong, the youngest son of Sir Andrew Armstrong. They had one child, a son, George, born on 16 October 1883, the marriage was not a success, Charles reportedly beat his wife more than once. The couple separated after just over a year, and Melba returned to Melbourne determined to pursue a singing career, debuting professionally in concerts in 1884
Nellie Melba
–
Nellie Melba, 1902, by
Henry Walter Barnett
Nellie Melba
–
Melba, drawn by Frank Haviland
Nellie Melba
–
Philippe, Duke of Orléans
Nellie Melba
–
Melba as Marguerite in
Faust
27.
John McCormack (tenor)
–
John Francis, Count McCormack, KSG, KSS, KHS was an Irish tenor, celebrated for his performances of the operatic and popular song repertoires, and renowned for his diction and breath control. He was also a Papal Count and he became a naturalised American citizen before returning to live in Ireland. His parents were employed at the Athlone Woollen Mills, McCormack received his early education from the Marist Brothers in Athlone, and he later attended Summerhill College, Sligo. He sang in the choir of the old St. Peters church in Athlone under his choirmaster Michael Kilkelly, when the family moved to Dublin, he sang in the choir of St Marys Pro-Cathedral where he was discovered by Vincent OBrien. In 1903 he won the gold medal of the Dublin Feis Ceoil. He married Lily Foley in 1906 and they had two children, Cyril and Gwen, in March 1904, McCormack became associated with James Joyce, who at the time had singing ambitions himself. Fundraising activities on his behalf enabled McCormack to travel to Italy in 1905 to receive training by Vincenzo Sabatini in Milan. Sabatini found McCormacks voice naturally tuned and concentrated on perfecting his breath control, in 1906, he made his operatic début at the Teatro Chiabrera, Savona. The next year he began his first important operatic performance at Covent Garden in Mascagnis Cavalleria rusticana, in 1909 he began his career in America. Michael Scott writes that at this stage of his career he should be considered a tenor of the Italian style—and he sang French operatic arias in the Italian language. Steane stresses that, for all his devotion to the concert platform. In February 1911, McCormack played Lieutenant Paul Merrill in the premiere of Victor Herberts drama Natoma with Mary Garden in the title role. Later that year he toured Australia after Dame Nellie Melba engaged him, then at the height of his career aged 27. He returned for tours in subsequent years. By 1912, he was beginning to become involved increasingly with concert performances and he did not, however, retire from the operatic stage until after his performance of 1923 in Monte Carlo, although by then the top notes of his voice had contracted. Famous for his breath control, he could sing 64 notes on one breath in Mozarts Il mio tesoro from Don Giovanni. McCormack made hundreds of recordings, the first on phonograph cylinder in 1904 and his most commercially successful series of records were those for the Victor Talking Machine Company during the 1910s and 1920s. He was Victors most popular Red Seal recording artist after tenor Enrico Caruso and he also broadcast regularly by radio and performed in a few sound films, among them the first British three-strip Technicolor feature, Wings of the Morning
John McCormack (tenor)
–
McCormack in 1919
John McCormack (tenor)
–
John McCormack in the 5000-seat
New York Hippodrome c.1915–1916
John McCormack (tenor)
–
The grave of John McCormack in
Deans Grange Cemetery
John McCormack (tenor)
–
John McCormack blue plaque in London.
28.
Victor Talking Machine Company
–
The Victor Talking Machine Company was an American flagship record company headquartered in Camden, New Jersey. The company was founded by Eldridge R. Johnson, who had previously made gramophones to play Emile Berliners disc records, Victor Talking Machine Co. was incorporated officially in 1901 shortly before agreeing to allow Columbia Records use of its disc record patent. Victor had acquired the Pan-American rights to use the trademark of the fox terrier Nipper listening to a gramophone when Berliner. Barraud noticed that whenever he played a recorded by his brother. Barrauds original depicts Nipper staring intently into the horn of an Edison-Bell while both sit on a wooden surface. The London branch was managed by an American, William Barry Owen, Barraud paid a visit with a photograph of the painting and asked to borrow a horn. Owen gave Barraud an entire gramophone and asked him to paint it into the picture, the original painting still shows the contours of the Edison-Bell phonograph beneath the paint of the gramophone when viewed in the correct light. Only 13 originally commissioned His Masters Voice paintings were commissioned by the company, in 1915, the His Masters Voice logo was rendered in immense circular leaded-glass windows in the tower of the Victrola factory building. The tower remains today with replica windows installed during Radio Corporation of Americas ownership of the plant in its later years, today, one of the original windows is located at the Smithsonian museum in Washington, D. C. There are different accounts as to how the Victor name came about, a second account is that Johnson emerged as the Victor from the lengthy and costly patent litigations involving Berliner and Frank Seamans Zonophone. A third story is that Johnsons partner, Leon Douglass, derived the word from his wifes name Victoria, finally, a fourth story is that Johnson took the name from the popular Victor bicycle, which he had admired for its superior engineering. Of these four accounts the first two are the most generally accepted, perhaps coincidentally, the first use of the Victor title on a letterhead, on March 28,1901, was only nine weeks after the death of British Queen Victoria. Before 1925, recording was done by the purely mechanical. No microphone was involved and there was no means of amplification, the recording machine was essentially an exposed-horn acoustical record player functioning in reverse. The sound-vibrated center of the diaphragm was linked to a stylus that was guided across the surface of a very thick wax disc. The wax was too soft to be played back even once without seriously damaging it, although test recordings were sometimes made, although sound quality was gradually improved by a series of small refinements, the process was inherently insensitive. From the start, Victor innovated manufacturing processes and soon rose to preeminence by recording famous performers, in 1903, it instituted a three-step mother-stamper process to produce more stampers and records than previously possible. These new celebrity recordings bore red labels, and were marketed as Red Seal records, for many years these records were single-sided, only in 1923 did Victor begin offering Red Seals in double-sided form
Victor Talking Machine Company
Victor Talking Machine Company
–
Enrico Caruso with a Victrola
phonograph in 1918
Victor Talking Machine Company
–
A Victor Talking Machine
Victor Talking Machine Company
–
Victor "scroll" label from 1930, featuring the company's house band directed by
Nathaniel Shilkret
29.
HMV
–
HMV Retail Ltd. is an entertainment retailing company operating in the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE Fledgling Index, the first HMV-branded store was opened by the Gramophone Company on Oxford Street in 1921, and the HMV name was also used for television and radio sets manufactured from the 1930s onwards. The retail side of the business began to expand in the 1960s, and in 1998 was divested from EMI, the successor to the Gramophone Company, to form what would become HMV Group. HMV stands for His Masters Voice, the title of a painting by Francis Barraud of the dog Nipper listening to a cylinder phonograph, for advertising purposes this was changed to a wind-up gramophone, and eventually used simply as a silhouette. HMV owned the Waterstones bookshop chain from 1998 until 2011, and has owned the music retailer Fopp since August 2007 and it purchased a number of former Zavvi stores in February 2009, and also branched into live music venue management that year by purchasing MAMA Group. It sold the group in December 2012, on 15 January 2013, HMV Group plc entered administration. Deloitte were appointed to deal with the administration of the company, on 16 January 2013, HMV Ireland declared receivership, and all Irish stores were closed. A week later, on 22 January 2013, it was reported that Hilco UK would buy the debt of HMV, the sale of HMVs Hong Kong and Singapore business to private equity firm Aid Partners was completed on 28 February 2013. On 5 April 2013, HMV was bought out of administration by Hilco UK for an estimated £50 million to form the current company, HMV Group plc was liquidated in July 2014. HMV Canada is a subsidiary which was sold to Hilco by the HMV Group in 2011. HMV Canada went into receivership in 2017, the antecedents of HMV began in the 1890s at the dawn of the disc gramophone. By 1902 it had become the beginnings of the Gramophone Company, in February 1907 they commenced the building of a new dedicated record factory at Hayes, Middlesex. Disc records were sold in shops and independent retailers at this time. In 1921 the Gramophone Company opened the first dedicated HMV shop in Oxford Street, London, in a mens clothing shop. In March 1931 the Gramophone Company merged with Columbia Graphophone Company to form Electric, from the 1930s onwards, HMV manufactured radio and television sets and radiograms under the HMV and Marconiphone brand names in their factory in Hayes, Middlesex. In 1966 HMV began expanding its operations in London. Throughout the 1970s, the continued to expand, doubling in size. It faced new competition, however, from Virgin Megastores, established in 1976, subsequently, HMV overtook Our Price in popularity and threatened their existence, having established a chain of newer, larger stores
HMV
–
A record featuring the "His Master's Voice" title and Nipper
HMV
–
HMV's former flagship branch on
Oxford Street, London
HMV
–
A large HMV branch in
Leeds incorporating an
Orange shop
HMV
–
A branch in
Wakefield closed as part of the group administration (March 2013).
30.
Ambroise Thomas
–
Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas was a French composer, best known for his operas Mignon and Hamlet and as Director of the Conservatoire de Paris from 1871 till his death. There is good music, there is bad music, and then there is Ambroise Thomas, - Emmanuel Chabrier Thomass parents were music teachers. By the age of 10, he was already an experienced pianist and violinist, in 1828, he entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied with Jean-François Le Sueur while at the same time taking piano lessons privately from the famous virtuoso Frédéric Kalkbrenner. In 1832, his cantata Hermann et Ketty won the Conservatorys prestigious composition prize, the Grand Prix de Rome and he took with him a love for Mozart and Beethoven, but once in Rome, he became an ardent admirer of the Italian cantilena and melodic tradition. It was during his Italian sojourn that he wrote all of his music, namely, a piano trio, a string quintet. The first opera Thomas composed, La double échelle, was produced at the Opéra Comique, Le caïd, did still better, and achieved over 400 performances. For the next quarter of a century Thomass productivity was incessant, the overture to Raymond has also been given the occasional modern performance. To his theatrical successes, Thomas added administrative achievements, in 1856 he acquired a professorship at the Conservatoire, where he taught, among others, Jules Massenet, one of the few French composers of the younger generation whose music interested him. See, List of music students by teacher, T to Z#Ambroise Thomas and he succeeded Auber as director of the Conservatoire in 1871. With Mignon, Thomas achieved his first great acclaim outside, as well as within and it is still heard sometimes today, more often in the form of extracts for concert use, or in recordings, than in complete stagings. One of its arias, Connais-tu le pays, was for generations among the most famous operatic excerpts by any composer, Thomas turned to Shakespeare again for his Hamlet, with a libretto by the seasoned team of Jules Barbier and Michel Carré. This opera has a strong, dramatic libretto, although it closes with a happy ending. It enjoyed a vogue, and like Mignon it continues to have a certain following, during 2010 it was heard at New Yorks Metropolitan Opera. His last opera, Françoise de Rimini based on a passage from Dantes Inferno, seven years later La tempête, a ballet, was produced at the Opéra, again with little effect. Massenet had hopes of succeeding him in the job of Conservatoire director, the man who got the job was not Massenet but, rather, organist-composer Théodore Dubois. Thomas was the first musician to ever be awarded the Grand-Croix de la Légion dhonneur, see, List of operas by Ambroise Thomas. La gipsy, second act ballet at the Opéra de Paris,1839 Betty, joseph Mazilier, Opéra de Paris,1846 La tempête, chor. Joseph Hansen, Opéra de Paris,26 June 1889 String Quartet in E major, Op.1 Listing of the works of Alexandre Falguière Composers, Ambroise Thomas Chisholm, Hugh, ed. Thomas, Ambroise Thomas Ambroise Thomas String Quartet in e minor Soundbites & short biography
Ambroise Thomas
–
Photograph of Ambroise Thomas by Wilhelm Benque, c. 1895.
Ambroise Thomas
–
Portrait of Ambroise Thomas in 1834 by
Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin
Ambroise Thomas
–
Thomas circa 1880, taken by
Antoine Samuel Adam-Salomon.
31.
Giuseppe Verdi
–
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian opera composer. Verdi was born near Busseto to a family of moderate means. Verdi came to dominate the Italian opera scene after the era of Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini, whose works influenced him. In his early operas Verdi demonstrated a sympathy with the Risorgimento movement which sought the unification of Italy and he also participated briefly as an elected politician. He surprised the world by returning, after his success with the opera Aida. The baptismal register, prepared on 11 October 1813, lists his parents Carlo, additionally, it lists Verdi as being born yesterday, but since days were often considered to begin at sunset, this could have meant either 9 or 10 October. Verdi himself, following his mother, always celebrated his birthday on 9 October, Verdi had a younger sister, Giuseppa, who died aged 17 in 1833. From the age of four, Verdi was given lessons in Latin and Italian by the village schoolmaster, Baistrocchi. After learning to play the organ, he showed so much interest in music that his parents provided him with a spinet. Verdis gift for music was apparent by 1820–21 when he began his association with the local church, serving in the choir, acting as an altar boy for a while. After Baistrocchis death, Verdi, at the age of eight, Carlo Verdi was energetic in furthering his sons education. something which Verdi tended to hide in later life. He picture emerges of youthful precocity eagerly nurtured by a father and of a sustained, sophisticated. Verdi returned to Busseto regularly to play the organ on Sundays, at age 11, Verdi received schooling in Italian, Latin, the humanities, and rhetoric. By the time he was 12, he began lessons with Ferdinando Provesi, maestro di cappella at San Bartolomeo, director of the music school. This information comes from the Autobiographical Sketch which Verdi dictated to the publisher Giulio Ricordi late in life, in 1879, written, understandably, with the benefit of hindsight, it is not always reliable when dealing with issues more contentious than those of his childhood. The other director of the Philharmonic Society was Antonio Barezzi, a grocer and distiller. The young Verdi did not immediately become involved with the Philharmonic, by June 1827, he had graduated with honours from the Ginnasio and was able to focus solely on music under Provesi. By 1829–30, Verdi had established himself as a leader of the Philharmonic, none of us could rival him reported the secretary of the organisation, Giuseppe Demaldè
Giuseppe Verdi
–
Giuseppe Verdi Portrait by
Giovanni Boldini, 1886
Giuseppe Verdi
–
Verdi's childhood home at Le Roncole.
Giuseppe Verdi
–
Antonio Barezzi, Verdi's patron and later father-in-law
Giuseppe Verdi
–
Margherita Barezzi, Verdi's first wife.
32.
Legato
–
In music performance and notation, legato indicates that musical notes are played or sung smoothly and connected. That is, the player makes a transition from note to note with no intervening silence, Legato technique is required for slurred performance, but unlike slurring, legato does not forbid rearticulation. Standard notation indicates legato either with the word legato, or by a slur under notes that form one legato group, Legato, like staccato, is a kind of articulation. There is an intermediate articulation called either mezzo staccato or non-legato, the player achieves this through controlled wrist movements of the bowing hand, often masked or enhanced with vibrato. Such a legato style of playing can also be associated with portamento, the term hammer-ons from nowhere is commonly employed when crossing strings and relying solely on fretting hand strength to produce a note but on a plucked string. Many guitar virtuosos are well-versed in the technique, as it allows for rapid. Multiple hammer-ons and pull-offs together are also referred to colloquially as rolls. A rapid series of hammer-ons and pull-offs between a pair of notes is called a trill. Legato on guitar is associated with playing more notes within a beat than the stated timing. This gives the passage an unusual timing and when played slowly an unusual sound, however, this is less noticeable by ear when played fast, as legato usually is. There is a line between legato and two-hand finger tapping, in some cases making the two techniques harder to distinguish by ear. Generally, legato adds a fluid, smooth sound to a passage. In synthesizers legato is a type of monophonic operation and this causes the initial transient from the attack and decay phases to sound only once for an entire legato sequence of notes. Envelopes reaching the sustain stage remain there until the note is released. In classical singing, legato means a string of sustained vowels with minimal interruption from consonants and it is a key characteristic of the bel canto singing style that prevailed among voice teachers and singers during the 18th century and the first four decades of the 19th century. Usually referred to as the line, a good, smooth legato is still necessary for successful classical singers, in Western Classical vocal music, singers generally use it on any phrase without explicit articulation marks. Usually the most prevalent issue with vocal legato is maintaining the line across registers, frederic Bernard - Composition Lesson I, “How To Legato. ”
Legato
–
Diatonic scale on C, legato. Play (
help ·
info)
33.
La sonnambula
–
The ballet had premiered in Paris in September 1827 at the height of a fashion for stage works incorporating somnambulism. The first performance took place at the Teatro Carcano in Milan on 6 March 1831, non credea mirarti / Sì presto estinto, o fiore from Aminas final aria is inscribed on Bellinis tomb in the Catania Cathedral in Sicily. Writing to his uncle in Sicily, the composer reported that I shall earn almost twice as much as if I had composed. Then Bellini experienced the re-occurrence of an illness which had emerged in Venice due to pressure of work and the bad weather, the gastro-enteric condition—which he described as a tremendous inflammatory gastric bilious fever— resulted in his being cared for by friends. It was not until the summer, when he went to stay near Lake Como and that Pasta owned a house near Como and would be staying there over the summer was the reason that Felice Romani traveled to meet both her and Bellini. Bellini wrote that is now writing La sonnambula, ossia I Due Fidanzati svezzeri. It must go on stage on 20 February at the latest, during Bellinis lifetime another sfogato, Maria Malibran, was to become a notable exponent of the role of Amina. With its pastoral setting and story, La sonnambula was a success and is still regularly performed. The operas premiere took place on 6 March 1831, a little later than the original date. Its success was due to the differences between Romanis earlier libretti and this one, as well as the accumulation of operatic experience which both and Romani had brought to its creation. After its premiere, the opera was performed in London on 28 July 1831 at the King’s Theatre, Herbert Weinstock provides a comprehensive year-by-year listing of performances following the premiere and then, with some gaps, all the way up to 1900. Later, it was a vehicle for showcasing Jenny Lind, Emma Albani and—in the early 20th century—for Lina Pagliughi, weinsteins account of performances given charts those in the 20th century beginning from 1905. While not part of the repertory, La sonnambula is performed reasonably frequently in the 21st century. A production was mounted by The Royal Opera in London in 2011, by the Salzburger Landestheater in Salzburg 2015, the first mezzo-soprano to record the role was Frederica von Stade in 1980, followed by Cecilia Bartoli. As can be seen in the list in the Recordings section, live performances in the 1950s and from the 1990s have been recorded on CD and DVD. Sol per me non non vha contento / All is joy and merriment. She is consumed with jealousy for she had once been betrothed to Elvino and had abandoned by him in favour of Amina. The lovelorn Alessio arrives, but she rejects his advances, All assembled proclaim the beauty of Amina, In Elvezia non vha rosa / fresca e cara al par dAmina / In Switzerland there is no flower sweeter, dearer than Amina. Then Amina comes out of the mill with her foster-mother, Teresa and she is the owner of the mill and had adopted Amina many years before. Amina thanks her, also expressing her thanks to her friends for their kind wishes
La sonnambula
–
The sleepwalker in act 2, sc. 2, (
William de Leftwich Dodge, 1899)
La sonnambula
–
Ah! non credea mirarti / Sì presto estinto, o fiore ("I did not believe you would fade so soon, oh flower"). This text from act 2, scene 2, of La sonnambula appears on Bellini's tomb in Catania
La sonnambula
–
Giuditta Pasta as Amina, May 1831 premiere
La sonnambula
–
Tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini sang Elvino
34.
Enrico Caruso
–
Enrico Caruso was an Italian operatic tenor. He sang to acclaim at the major opera houses of Europe. Caruso also made approximately 260 commercially released recordings from 1902 to 1920, all of these recordings, which span most of his stage career, remain available today on CDs and as downloads and digital streams. Enrico Caruso came from a poor but not destitute background, born in Naples in the Via San Giovannello agli Ottocalli 7 on 25 February 1873, he was baptised the next day in the adjacent Church of San Giovanni e Paolo. His parents originally came from Piedimonte dAlife in the Province of Benevento, in the Province of Caserta in Campania, called Errico in accordance with the Neapolitan language, he would later adopt the formal Italian version of his given name, Enrico. This change came at the suggestion of a singing teacher, Caruso was the third of seven children and one of only three to survive infancy. There is a story of Carusos parents having had 21 children,18 of whom died in infancy. However, on the basis of research, biographers Pierre Key, Francis Robinson. Caruso himself and his brother Giovanni may have been the source of the exaggerated number, Carusos widow Dorothy also included the story in a memoir that she wrote about her husband. She quotes the tenor, speaking of his mother, Anna Caruso, twenty boys and one girl – too many. Carusos father, Marcellino, was a mechanic and foundry worker, initially, Marcellino thought his son should adopt the same trade, and at the age of 11, the boy was apprenticed to a mechanical engineer who constructed public water fountains. Caruso later worked alongside his father at the Meuricoffre factory in Naples, at his mothers insistence, he also attended school for a time, receiving a basic education under the tutelage of a local priest. He learned to write in a script and studied technical draftsmanship. During this period he sang in his church choir, and his voice showed enough promise for him to contemplate a career in music. Caruso was encouraged in his musical ambitions by his mother. To raise cash for his family, he work as a street singer in Naples. Aged 18, he used the fees he had earned by singing at an Italian resort to buy his first pair of new shoes and his progress as a paid entertainer was interrupted, however, by 45 days of compulsory military service. He completed this in 1894, resuming his voice lessons upon discharge from the army
Enrico Caruso
–
The medal that Enrico Caruso gave to
Pasquale Simonelli, his New York City impresario Obverse: Caruso facing left. Lower right: Salanto, medal maker's signature.
Enrico Caruso
–
Enrico Caruso, c. 1907
Enrico Caruso
–
Reverse:
Muse of music with lyre over PER RICORDO (memento). Around the rim:
TIFFANY & Co. 24 CARAT GOLD Y (27 mm).
Enrico Caruso
–
Enrico Caruso, c. 1910
35.
Frieda Hempel
–
Frieda Hempel was a German soprano singer in operatic and concert work who had an international career in Europe and the United States. Frieda Hempel was born in Leipzig, Germany, and studied first at the Leipzig Conservatory and afterwards at the Stern Conservatory, Berlin and her earliest appearances were in Breslau, singing Violetta, the Queen of the Night and Rosina. She made a debut in Schwerin in 1905, and was engaged there for the two years, singing also Gilda, Leonora and Woglinde. She made such a success that the Kaiser Wilhelm II requested the Schwerin authorities to release her to sing also in Berlin and she made a debut there in 1905 as Frau Fluth. She sang at the Royal Court Opera, Berlin, from 1907 to 1912, in 1912 she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, in New York City as Marguerite de Valois in Les Huguenots. She sang regularly in New York thereafter into the 1920s and she was the first to sing the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier in New York and in Berlin, and she also sang the role in London in 1913. Her La fille du régiment was presented there in 1917, Hempel had a very wide dramatic range, from Rosina or Queen of the Night to Wagners Eva and Webers Euryanthe. After 1919 she devoted herself to recitals, and left the Metropolitan Opera House somewhat abruptly. However she then made a career on the concert platform, excelling in the performance of lieder of Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Wolf, in Mozart concert arias. She became famous for recitals in which she appeared in costume as the famous nineteenth-century soprano Jenny Lind and she died in Berlin in 1955. Hempel began making records in Germany for Odeon Records in 1906 and later recorded for the Gramophone Company in England as well as the Victor Talking Machine Company, most are by the acoustic process. Her vocal students include the American voice teacher and Bel canto scholar Cornelius L. Reid, a. Eaglefield-Hull, A Dictionary of Modern Music and Musicians. G. Kobbé, The Complete Opera Book, H. Rosenthal and J. Warrack, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera. M. Scott, The Record of Singing Volume I
Frieda Hempel
–
Frieda Hempel in costume
Frieda Hempel
36.
Adelina Patti
–
Adelina Patti was an Italian-French 19th-century opera singer, earning huge fees at the height of her career in the music capitals of Europe and America. She first sang in public as a child in 1851, the composer Giuseppe Verdi, writing in 1877, described her as being perhaps the finest singer who had ever lived and a stupendous artist. Verdis admiration for Pattis talent was shared by numerous music critics and she was born Adelina Juana Maria Patti, in Madrid, the last child of tenor Salvatore Patti and soprano Caterina Barilli. Her Italian parents were working in Madrid, Spain, at the time of her birth, because her father came from Sicily, Patti was born a subject of the King of the Two Sicilies. She later carried a French passport, as her first two husbands were French and her sisters Amalia and Carlotta Patti were also singers. Her brother Carlo Patti was a violinist who married actress Effie Germon, in her childhood, the family moved to New York City. Patti grew up in the Wakefield section of the Bronx, where her familys home is still standing, Patti sang professionally from childhood, and developed into a coloratura soprano with perfectly equalized vocal registers and a surprisingly warm, satiny tone. Patti learned how to sing and gained understanding of technique from her brother-in-law Maurice Strakosch. Adelina Patti made her debut at age 16 on 24 November 1859 in the title role of Donizettis Lucia di Lammermoor at the Academy of Music. On 24 August 1860, she and Emma Albani were soloists in the premiere of Charles Wugk Sabatiers Cantata in Montreal which was performed in honour of the visit of the Prince of Wales. In 1861, at the age of 18, she was invited to Covent Garden, to execute the role of Amina in Bellinis La sonnambula. During an 1862 American tour, she sang John Howard Paynes Home, Sweet Home at the White House for the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, the Lincolns were mourning their son Willie, who had died of typhoid. Moved to tears, the Lincolns requested an encore of the song, henceforth, it would become associated with Adelina Patti, and she performed it many times as a bonus item at the end of recitals and concerts. Pattis career was one of success after success and her girlish good looks gave her an appealing stage presence, which added to her celebrity status. Patti, however, turned into a singer in the final phase of her operatic. She knew what suited her aging voice to perfection and she stuck to it, typically, her recital programs during the 1890s featured an array of familiar, often sentimental, not-too-demanding popular tunes of the day, which were sure to appeal to her adoring fans. She also had been prepared to tackle quite dramatic parts in operas like LAfricaine, Les Huguenots and she never attempted to sing any verismo parts, however, because these became popular only in the twilight of her career, during the final decade of the 19th century. Many years earlier, Patti had experienced an encounter in Paris with the bel canto-opera composer Gioachino Rossini
Adelina Patti
–
Adelina Patti
Adelina Patti
–
Patti caricatured by the French artist
André Gill (1840-1885).
Adelina Patti
–
Patti and third husband baron Cederström outside the central station in Stockholm in 1900. Patti, uncomfortable with being photographed, bends over in order to hide her face.
37.
World War I
–
World War I, also known as the First World War, the Great War, or the War to End All Wars, was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. More than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history and it was one of the deadliest conflicts in history, and paved the way for major political changes, including revolutions in many of the nations involved. The war drew in all the worlds great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances, the Allies versus the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. These alliances were reorganised and expanded as more nations entered the war, Italy, Japan, the trigger for the war was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, by Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. This set off a crisis when Austria-Hungary delivered an ultimatum to the Kingdom of Serbia. Within weeks, the powers were at war and the conflict soon spread around the world. On 25 July Russia began mobilisation and on 28 July, the Austro-Hungarians declared war on Serbia, Germany presented an ultimatum to Russia to demobilise, and when this was refused, declared war on Russia on 1 August. Germany then invaded neutral Belgium and Luxembourg before moving towards France, after the German march on Paris was halted, what became known as the Western Front settled into a battle of attrition, with a trench line that changed little until 1917. On the Eastern Front, the Russian army was successful against the Austro-Hungarians, in November 1914, the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers, opening fronts in the Caucasus, Mesopotamia and the Sinai. In 1915, Italy joined the Allies and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers, Romania joined the Allies in 1916, after a stunning German offensive along the Western Front in the spring of 1918, the Allies rallied and drove back the Germans in a series of successful offensives. By the end of the war or soon after, the German Empire, Russian Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, national borders were redrawn, with several independent nations restored or created, and Germanys colonies were parceled out among the victors. During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the Big Four imposed their terms in a series of treaties, the League of Nations was formed with the aim of preventing any repetition of such a conflict. This effort failed, and economic depression, renewed nationalism, weakened successor states, and feelings of humiliation eventually contributed to World War II. From the time of its start until the approach of World War II, at the time, it was also sometimes called the war to end war or the war to end all wars due to its then-unparalleled scale and devastation. In Canada, Macleans magazine in October 1914 wrote, Some wars name themselves, during the interwar period, the war was most often called the World War and the Great War in English-speaking countries. Will become the first world war in the sense of the word. These began in 1815, with the Holy Alliance between Prussia, Russia, and Austria, when Germany was united in 1871, Prussia became part of the new German nation. Soon after, in October 1873, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck negotiated the League of the Three Emperors between the monarchs of Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany
World War I
–
Clockwise from the top: The aftermath of shelling during the
Battle of the Somme,
Mark V tanks cross the
Hindenburg Line,
HMS Irresistible sinks after hitting a
mine in the
Dardanelles, a British
Vickers machine gun crew wears
gas masks during the Battle of the Somme,
Albatros D.III fighters of
Jagdstaffel 11
World War I
–
Sarajevo citizens reading a poster with the proclamation of the
Austrian annexation in 1908.
World War I
–
This picture is usually associated with the arrest of
Gavrilo Princip, although some believe it depicts Ferdinand Behr, a bystander.
World War I
–
Serbian Army
Blériot XI "Oluj", 1915.
38.
Milan
–
Milan is a city in Italy, capital of the Lombardy region, and the most populous metropolitan area and the second most populous comune in Italy. The population of the city proper is 1,351,000, Milan has a population of about 8,500,000 people. It is the industrial and financial centre of Italy and one of global significance. In terms of GDP, it has the largest economy among European non-capital cities, Milan is considered part of the Blue Banana and lies at the heart of one of the Four Motors for Europe. Milan is an Alpha leading global city, with strengths in the arts, commerce, design, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, services, research, and tourism. Its business district hosts Italys Stock Exchange and the headquarters of the largest national and international banks, the city is a major world fashion and design capital, well known for several international events and fairs, including Milan Fashion Week and the Milan Furniture Fair. The city hosts numerous cultural institutions, academies and universities, with 11% of the national total enrolled students, Milans museums, theatres and landmarks attract over 9 million visitors annually. Milan – after Naples – is the second Italian city with the highest number of accredited stars from the Michelin Guide, the city hosted the Universal Exposition in 1906 and 2015. Milan is home to two of Europes major football teams, A. C. Milan and F. C. Internazionale, the etymology of Milan is uncertain. One theory holds that the Latin name Mediolanum comes from the Latin words medio, however, some scholars believe lanum comes from the Celtic root lan, meaning an enclosure or demarcated territory in which Celtic communities used to build shrines. Hence, Mediolanum could signify the central town or sanctuary of a Celtic tribe, indeed, the name Mediolanum is borne by about sixty Gallo-Roman sites in France, e. g. Saintes and Évreux. Alciato credits Ambrose for his account, around 400 BC, the Celtic Insubres settled Milan and the surrounding region. In 222 BC, the Romans conquered the settlement, renaming it Mediolanum, Milan was eventually declared the capital of the Western Roman Empire by Emperor Diocletian in 286 AD. Diocletian chose to stay in the Eastern Roman Empire and his colleague Maximianus ruled the Western one, immediately Maximian built several monuments, such as a large circus 470 m ×85 m, the Thermae Herculeae, a large complex of imperial palaces and several other buildings. With the Edict of Milan of 313, Emperor Constantine I guaranteed freedom of religion for Christians, after the city was besieged by the Visigoths in 402, the imperial residence was moved to Ravenna. In 452, the Huns overran the city, in 539, the Ostrogoths conquered and destroyed Milan during the Gothic War against Byzantine Emperor Justinian I. In the summer of 569, a Teutonic tribe, the Lombards, conquered Milan, some Roman structures remained in use in Milan under Lombard rule. Milan surrendered to the Franks in 774 when Charlemagne took the title of King of the Lombards, the Iron Crown of Lombardy dates from this period
Milan
–
Milan Cathedral,
La Scala opera house and
Porta Nuova business district
Milan
Milan
Milan
39.
Marisa Vernati
–
Marisa Vernati was an Italian actress. Born in Rome, Vernati was helped by her aunt soprano Luisa Tetrazzini to enter the world of entertainment, starting with roles in films directed by Raffaello Matarazzo. Her film career was limited to stereotyped roles of femme fatale or seductress in sentimental melodramas. Her career on stage was more successful, as Vernati was the prima donna in several revues, with the companies of Nino Taranto, Tino Scotti and Fanfulla. In 1947, after her marriage to an Iranian doctor, she followed her husband who for professional reasons had to move to Turkey, once returned, she resumed her activities in films, theater and radio, and then she retired to private life in the mid-1950s. Departure Eternal Melodies Down with Misery Crime News My Beautiful Daughter Peppino e la vecchia signora Marisa Vernati at the Internet Movie Database
Marisa Vernati
–
Marisa Vernati
40.
Nimbus Records
–
Nimbus Records is a British record company based at Wyastone Leys, Ganarew, Herefordshire, England,2 miles from Monmouth and 8 miles from Ross-on-Wye. They specialise in music recordings and were the first company in the UK to produce compact discs. An Ambisonic decoder is required to experience such recordings in their truest, surround-sound and these have never been widely available, so Nimbus recordings are typically experienced as undecoded UHJ, which is compatible with normal stereo reproduction. A large sub-label of Nimbus Records is the vocal series Prima Voce and this label specialises in the transfer of vocal records on 78 rpm disc dating from 1900. The method of transfer involves the use of needles and a giant acoustic horn on a carefully restored gramophone. No electronic processing is used, instead, the gramophone is placed in a room environment and recorded ambisonically, in surround-sound. Although controversial, the technique is capable of producing remarkably lifelike results - particularly for recordings made prior to the arrival of studio microphones in 1925. Nimbus Records was the first company to master and press Compact Discs in the UK and it became part of the Mirror Group in 1987. Wyastone Estate operates Wyastone Business Park, Wyastone Concert Hall and the Nimbus Foundation, Nimbus Records, the latter is a short-run disc manufacturing capability that has enabled Nimbus Records to make virtually all its catalogue of recordings from the earliest times available to record-buyers. This involves restoring and improving the mechanisms used by the Aeolian company and this original German inventions from the early 20th century was widely introduced in the USA in the 1920s and permitted individual key dynamics and real una corda pedal effects. g. The label was one of the first major Western classical labels to also record Indian classical music digitally, in 2004 Wyastone Estate opened a short run CD manufacturing plant. This enabled Nimbus Records to continue adding new titles to the catalogue without being forced to delete the back catalogue, in 2014 Nimbus Records held a catalogue of over 1500 in stock CD titles, their biggest catalogue to date. The label also presses and distributes the recordings of Lyrita, martin Jones Bernard Roberts Wyastone Estate website Nimbus Records website Nimbus Records - label history, artist roster, discography
Nimbus Records
–
Nimbus Records
41.
History Channel International
–
H2 was discontinued in the United States on February 29,2016 in favor of the new Viceland channel. The H2 brand is used for sister channels to History in other markets. The network launched in 1996 as History International and it originally focused mainly on programs and specials focusing on world history. By 2010, this was reduced to an hour-long Spanish language program on weekday mornings titled El Canal de Historia, H2 does not have plans to add reality series as its sister channel has done. H2 signed off on February 29,2016 at 6,00 a. m, ET, being replaced by pre-launch programming for Viceland. The H2 brand will continue to be used on international networks, in 2014, a Latin American version of H2 was launched under the ownership of A+E Networks Latin America and distributed by HBO Latin America Group. H2 launched in the United Kingdom and Ireland on May 4,2013, on June 14,2013, A+E Networks launched a version of H2 in Southeast Asia. It launched on TalkTalk on 28 August 2014 and it is on the Entertainment Boost along with Lifetime. On October 28,2014, H2 launched in Poland, on April 12,2015, H2 launched in Serbia, first on Orion TV and in May on MTS TV. In the Middle East and North Africa region, H2 airs on My-HD, list of programs broadcast by History
History Channel International
–
H2
42.
International Standard Book Number
–
The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
International Standard Book Number
–
A 13-digit ISBN, 978-3-16-148410-0, as represented by an
EAN-13 bar code
43.
Project Gutenberg
–
Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. It was founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library, most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-lasting, as of 3 October 2015, Project Gutenberg reached 50,000 items in its collection. The releases are available in plain text but, wherever possible, other formats are included, such as HTML, PDF, EPUB, MOBI, most releases are in the English language, but many non-English works are also available. There are multiple affiliated projects that are providing additional content, including regional, Project Gutenberg is also closely affiliated with Distributed Proofreaders, an Internet-based community for proofreading scanned texts. Project Gutenberg was started by Michael Hart in 1971 with the digitization of the United States Declaration of Independence, Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, obtained access to a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer in the universitys Materials Research Lab. Through friendly operators, he received an account with an unlimited amount of computer time. Hart has said he wanted to back this gift by doing something that could be considered to be of great value. His initial goal was to make the 10,000 most consulted books available to the public at little or no charge and this particular computer was one of the 15 nodes on ARPANET, the computer network that would become the Internet. Hart believed that computers would one day be accessible to the general public and he used a copy of the United States Declaration of Independence in his backpack, and this became the first Project Gutenberg e-text. He named the project after Johannes Gutenberg, the fifteenth century German printer who propelled the movable type printing press revolution, by the mid-1990s, Hart was running Project Gutenberg from Illinois Benedictine College. More volunteers had joined the effort, all of the text was entered manually until 1989 when image scanners and optical character recognition software improved and became more widely available, which made book scanning more feasible. Hart later came to an arrangement with Carnegie Mellon University, which agreed to administer Project Gutenbergs finances, as the volume of e-texts increased, volunteers began to take over the projects day-to-day operations that Hart had run. Starting in 2004, an online catalog made Project Gutenberg content easier to browse, access. Project Gutenberg is now hosted by ibiblio at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Italian volunteer Pietro Di Miceli developed and administered the first Project Gutenberg website and started the development of the Project online Catalog. In his ten years in this role, the Project web pages won a number of awards, often being featured in best of the Web listings, Hart died on 6 September 2011 at his home in Urbana, Illinois at the age of 64. In 2000, a corporation, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Long-time Project Gutenberg volunteer Gregory Newby became the foundations first CEO, also in 2000, Charles Franks founded Distributed Proofreaders, which allowed the proofreading of scanned texts to be distributed among many volunteers over the Internet
Project Gutenberg
–
Michael Hart (left) and Gregory Newby (right) of Project Gutenberg, 2006
Project Gutenberg
–
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg
–
Formats
44.
Internet Archive
–
The Internet Archive is a San Francisco–based nonprofit digital library with the stated mission of universal access to all knowledge. As of October 2016, its collection topped 15 petabytes, in addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating for a free and open Internet. Its web archive, the Wayback Machine, contains over 150 billion web captures, the Archive also oversees one of the worlds largest book digitization projects. Founded by Brewster Kahle in May 1996, the Archive is a 501 nonprofit operating in the United States. It has a budget of $10 million, derived from a variety of sources, revenue from its Web crawling services, various partnerships, grants, donations. Its headquarters are in San Francisco, California, where about 30 of its 200 employees work, Most of its staff work in its book-scanning centers. The Archive has data centers in three Californian cities, San Francisco, Redwood City, and Richmond, the Archive is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium and was officially designated as a library by the State of California in 2007. Brewster Kahle founded the Archive in 1996 at around the time that he began the for-profit web crawling company Alexa Internet. In October 1996, the Internet Archive had begun to archive and preserve the World Wide Web in large quantities, the archived content wasnt available to the general public until 2001, when it developed the Wayback Machine. In late 1999, the Archive expanded its collections beyond the Web archive, Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software. It hosts a number of projects, the NASA Images Archive, the contract crawling service Archive-It. According to its web site, Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture, without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form, the Archives mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars. In August 2012, the Archive announced that it has added BitTorrent to its file download options for over 1.3 million existing files, on November 6,2013, the Internet Archives headquarters in San Franciscos Richmond District caught fire, destroying equipment and damaging some nearby apartments. The nonprofit Archive sought donations to cover the estimated $600,000 in damage, in November 2016, Kahle announced that the Internet Archive was building the Internet Archive of Canada, a copy of the archive to be based somewhere in the country of Canada. The announcement received widespread coverage due to the implication that the decision to build an archive in a foreign country was because of the upcoming presidency of Donald Trump. Kahle was quoted as saying that on November 9th in America and it was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change. For us, it means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and it means preparing for a Web that may face greater restrictions
Internet Archive
–
Since 2009, headquarters have been at 300 Funston Avenue in
San Francisco, a former
Christian Science Church
Internet Archive
–
Internet Archive
Internet Archive
–
Mirror of the Internet Archive in the
Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Internet Archive
–
From 1996 to 2009, headquarters were in the
Presidio of San Francisco, a former U.S. military base
45.
YouTube
–
YouTube is an American video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. The service was created by three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—in February 2005, Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion, YouTube now operates as one of Googles subsidiaries. Unregistered users can watch videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Videos deemed potentially offensive are available only to registered users affirming themselves to be at least 18 years old, YouTube earns advertising revenue from Google AdSense, a program which targets ads according to site content and audience. As of February 2017, there are more than 400 hours of content uploaded to YouTube each minute, as of April 2017, the website is ranked as the second most popular site in the world by Alexa Internet, a web traffic analysis company. YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Karim could not easily find video clips of either event online, Hurley and Chen said that the original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service, and had been influenced by the website Hot or Not. YouTube began as a venture capital-funded technology startup, primarily from an $11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital between November 2005 and April 2006, YouTubes early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. The domain name www. youtube. com was activated on February 14,2005, the first YouTube video, titled Me at the zoo, shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The video was uploaded on April 23,2005, and can still be viewed on the site, YouTube offered the public a beta test of the site in May 2005. The first video to reach one million views was a Nike advertisement featuring Ronaldinho in November 2005. Following a $3.5 million investment from Sequoia Capital in November, the site grew rapidly, and in July 2006 the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day. The site has 800 million unique users a month and it is estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000. The choice of the name www. youtube. com led to problems for a similarly named website, the sites owner, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, filed a lawsuit against YouTube in November 2006 after being regularly overloaded by people looking for YouTube. Universal Tube has since changed the name of its website to www. utubeonline. com, in October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13,2006. In March 2010, YouTube began free streaming of certain content, according to YouTube, this was the first worldwide free online broadcast of a major sporting event. On March 31,2010, the YouTube website launched a new design, with the aim of simplifying the interface, Google product manager Shiva Rajaraman commented, We really felt like we needed to step back and remove the clutter. In May 2010, YouTube videos were watched more than two times per day
YouTube
–
From left to right:
Chad Hurley,
Steve Chen, and
Jawed Karim
YouTube
–
Screenshot of YouTube's homepage
YouTube
–
YouTube's headquarters as of 2010 in
San Bruno, California.
46.
Virtual International Authority File
–
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library, the National Library of France joined the project on October 5,2007. The project transitions to a service of the OCLC on April 4,2012, the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together, a VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary see and see also records from the original records, and refers to the original authority records. The data are available online and are available for research and data exchange. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol, the file numbers are also being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAFs clustering algorithm is run every month, as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records
Virtual International Authority File
–
Screenshot 2012
47.
Integrated Authority File
–
The Integrated Authority File or GND is an international authority file for the organisation of personal names, subject headings and corporate bodies from catalogues. It is used mainly for documentation in libraries and increasingly also by archives, the GND is managed by the German National Library in cooperation with various regional library networks in German-speaking Europe and other partners. The GND falls under the Creative Commons Zero license, the GND specification provides a hierarchy of high-level entities and sub-classes, useful in library classification, and an approach to unambiguous identification of single elements. It also comprises an ontology intended for knowledge representation in the semantic web, available in the RDF format
Integrated Authority File
–
GND screenshot
48.
MusicBrainz
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MusicBrainz is a project that aims to create an open data music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the placed on the Compact Disc Database. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a compact disc metadata storehouse to become an open online database for music. MusicBrainz captures information about artists, their works, and the relationships between them. Recorded works entries capture at a minimum the album title, track titles, and these entries are maintained by volunteer editors who follow community written style guidelines. Recorded works can also store information about the date and country. As of 26 July 2016, MusicBrainz contained information about roughly 1.1 million artists,1.6 million releases, end-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to add metadata tags to their digital media files, such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC. As with other contributions, the MusicBrainz community is in charge for maintaining and reviewing the data, besides collecting metadata about music, MusicBrainz also allows looking up recordings by their acoustic fingerprint. A separate application, such as MusicBrainz Picard, must be used for this, in 2000, MusicBrainz started using Relatables patented TRM for acoustic fingerprint matching. This feature attracted many users and allowed the database to grow quickly, however, by 2005 TRM was showing scalability issues as the number of tracks in the database had reached into the millions. This issue was resolved in May 2006 when MusicBrainz partnered with MusicIP, tRMs were phased out and replaced by MusicDNS in November 2008. In October 2009 MusicIP was acquired by AmpliFIND, some time after the acquisition, the MusicDNS service began having intermittent problems. Since the future of the free service was uncertain, a replacement for it was sought. The Chromaprint acoustic fingerprinting algorithm, the basis for AcoustID identification service, was started in February 2010 by a long-time MusicBrainz contributor Lukáš Lalinský, while AcoustID and Chromaprint are not officially MusicBrainz projects, they are closely tied with each other and both are open source. Chromaprint works by analyzing the first two minutes of a track, detecting the strength in each of 12 pitch classes, storing these 8 times per second, additional post-processing is then applied to compress this fingerprint while retaining patterns. The AcoustID search server then searches from the database of fingerprints by similarity, since 2003, MusicBrainzs core data are in the public domain, and additional content, including moderation data, is placed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0 license. The relational database management system is PostgreSQL, the server software is covered by the GNU General Public License. The MusicBrainz client software library, libmusicbrainz, is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, in December 2004, the MusicBrainz project was turned over to the MetaBrainz Foundation, a non-profit group, by its creator Robert Kaye
MusicBrainz
