Opera

Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” Overture: Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra

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When Andris Nelsons was five years old, his parents took him to see a production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser. The Latvian conductor recalls that his parents prepared him for the occasion by playing an LP of the opera at home. He was also introduced to the story, based on German medieval legend, of a knight who is pulled between the pleasures of earthly love and lust and the redemptive love of sacred devotion. According …

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Mozart’s “The Impresario” Overture: Comedy with Music

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In January of 1786, Mozart was hard at work on The Marriage of Figaro when he received an attractive imperial commission. Emperor Joseph II was hosting visiting nobility at Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace. The festivities included a duel between two competing forms of opera. At one end of the room was Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor, K. 486 (“The Impresario”), representing German singspiel. At the other end, Antonio Salieri represented Italian opera buffa with Prima la …

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Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 2: From Imprisonment to Freedom

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Beethoven was a composer who worked and reworked musical ideas in a painstaking series of sketches. His only opera, Fidelio, provides the most extreme example. Beethoven labored over it for over ten years, creating three distinct versions (1805, 1806, and 1814), and four different overtures. The overture we know as Leonore No. 2, Op. 42a opened the original 1805 Vienna premiere of Fidelio. Ultimately, Beethoven believed that the dramatic weight of the …

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André Previn’s “I Want Magic” from “A Streetcar Named Desire”: Renée Fleming

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I Want Magic is a key aria from the third act of André Previn’s 1995 opera, A Streetcar Named Desire.  With a libretto by Philip Littell, the work, premiered by San Francisco Opera in 1998, is based on the play of the same name by Tennessee Williams. Renée Fleming appeared in the role of Blanche Dubois, a promiscuous, aging Southern belle who escapes into a veiled fantasy world to avoid confronting the harsh realities …

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Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Golden Cockerel”: Excerpts from a Dark Fairytale Opera

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Completed in 1907, The Golden Cockerel was the last opera of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Based on an 1834 poem by Alexander Pushkin, its fairytale plot unfolds over three acts, bookended by a prologue and epilogue. The story involves the bumbling Tsar Dodon. “Advised by an Astrologer, Dodon uses a magical cockerel (a young male rooster) to warn of threats, but his incompetence leads to his sons’ deaths and his infatuation with the treacherous …

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Rameau’s “Zaïs” Overture: Creation Develops out of Chaos

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Creation develops out of primordial chaos in the Overture to the 1748 opera, Zaïs, by French Baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764). The shocking and innovative music predates Haydn’s similar depiction in the opening of his oratorio, The Creation, by half a century. The Zaïs Overture begins with muted drumbeats, followed by detached fanfare fragments. At first, rhythm falters and the harmony is directionless. Disparate musical building blocks, representing the four elements of Earth, …

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Rameau’s “Les Boréades” (Entrée de Polymnie): “The Arts and the Hours”

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Les Boréades was the final opera of French Baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764). The story of the five-act tragédie lyrique is based loosely on the Greek legend of the sage and healer, Abaris the Hyperborean. Although the work was rehearsed at the Paris Opera in 1763, it was never performed. Rameau died the following year at the age of 80. (The first fully staged performance, led by John Eliot Gardiner, took place in …

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