Scores for Orchestra

Ernest Guiraud (1837–1892) war ein Kollege und guter Freund Bizets. Nach Bizets Tod komponierte er die noch heute in Carmen verwendeten Rezitative. Zwischen 1880 und 1882 stellte er aus dieser Oper zw...

Ernest Guiraud (1837–1892) war ein Kollege und guter Freund Bizets. Nach Bizets Tod komponierte er die noch heute in Carmen verwendeten Rezitative. Zwischen 1880 und 1882 stellte er für Choudens, Bize...

While it scandalized Parisian audiences at its premiere by the Opéra-Comique in Paris on March 3rd, 1875, Georges Bizet's (1838-1875) CARMEN became, a mere decade later, one of the most popular and fr...

Alexander Borodin (1833-1887) composed the four-act opera Prince Igor between 1869-1887, although it remained unfinished at his death. Fellow Russian composers Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov completed a...

IL MATRIMONIO SEGRETO (THE SECRET MARRIAGE) by Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801) is his only work still to be regularly performed today and arguably among the greatest 18th century opera buffa. The dramma...

In 1890, Engelbert Humperdinck (1854-1921) wrote an assortment of songs for a play written by Adelheid Wette, his sister, as a gift to her children. Spurred by his friend Richard Strauss, he took some...

The Snow Maiden is an opera in four acts with a prologue by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, composed during 1880–1881. The Russian libretto, by the composer, is based on the like-named play by Alexander Ostr...

The well-known Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868) opera La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie) tells the story of a young servant girl named Ninetta, who is sentenced to death for the theft of her employer'...

Spanish violin virtuoso and composer Pablo de Sarasate (1844-1908) was a child prodigy raised in a musical family. Following an education at the Paris Conservatoire, which he entered at the age of twe...

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) composed PIQUE DAME (THE QUEEN OF SPADES), Op. 68, for a commission by the Imperial Theatre. The libretto, adapted from an 1834 novella by Alexander Pushkin, was w...

The opera LA FORZA DEL DESTINO by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) was written in 1862 and premiered in the Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre of Saint Petersburg, Russia on November 10 of that same year. Following ma...

The fourth and final opera of Richard Wagner's (1813-1883) DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN (THE RING OF THE NIBELUNG, or THE RING CYCLE for short), the three-act drama GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG (TWILIGHT OF THE GODS) p...

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Master-Singers of Nuremberg) WWV 96 is a music drama/opera in three acts by Richard Wagner (1813-1883). Taking nearly four and a half hours to perform in its entire...

Tristan und Isolde (Tristan and Isolde), WWV 90, is an opera in three acts by Richard Wagner to a German libretto by the composer, based largely on the 12th-century romance Tristan by Gottfried von St...

The Ride of the Valkyries refers to the beginning of act 3 of Die Walküre, the second of the four operas constituting Richard Wagner's (1813-1883) Der Ring des Nibelungen. As a separate piece, the "Ri...

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) drew from several Norse and Germanic legends as plot material for the second opera in his Ring cycle. DIE WALKÜRE, completed in March 1856, premiered at the Bayreuth Festspi...

LE NOZZE DI FIGARO (THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO) is based on LA FOLLE JOURNEE OU LE MARIAGE DE FIGARO (1784), a comic play by Pierre Beaumarchais. Lorenzo Da Ponte, who also collaborated with Mozart on DON...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) wrote the two-act opera Don Giovanni, K. 527, in 1787 following a commission from Prague impresario Pasquale Bondini. Following the success of The Marriage of Figar...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) wrote the music to COSI FAN TUTTE (So do they all), his third collaboration with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, only after his contemporaty Antonio Salieri rejected t...

Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball) is an 1859 three act opera by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) with a libretto by Antonio Somma. Initially based on Eugène Scribe's libretto for Daniel Auber's 1833 five...

Premiering on May 22, 1813 at the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice, L'italiana in Algeri by Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868) was a success, with subsequent performances in Vicenza, Milan, and Naples. It w...

LA TRAVIATA (THE FALLEN WOMAN), an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), is based on La Dame aux camélias (1852), a play adapted from the novel by Alexandre Dumas. The opera was originall...

Norma is a two-act lyric tragedy by Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835). A leading example of the bel canto genre, the opera premiered at La Scala in Milan on December 26th, 1831. The story tells of a love t...

LE NOZZE DI FIGARO (THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO) is based on LA FOLLE JOURNEE OU LE MARIAGE DE FIGARO (1784), a comic play by Pierre Beaumarchais. Lorenzo Da Ponte, who also collaborated with Mozart on DON...

LE NOZZE DI FIGARO (THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO) is based on LA FOLLE JOURNEE OU LE MARIAGE DE FIGARO (1784), a comic play by Pierre Beaumarchais. Lorenzo Da Ponte, who also collaborated with Mozart on DON...