English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing.
Conductor Oliver Zeffman has commissioned the very first opera for a socially distanced world, which is now available to watch exclusively on Apple Music. Eight Songs From Isolation has been written by eight leading composers, specifically for streaming - rather than live performance - and is the first opera written for a time when the performers were unable to meet in person.
Leading freelance musicians unite in Parliament Square to call for targeted support for colleagues in the arts and entertainment sector.
Duo Lewis Murphy (composer) and Laura Attridge (writer) have launched a charitable song project entitled Notes From Isolation. The resulting songs, featuring some of the UK's top singing talent, are being released online between August and October 2020 and can be enjoyed free of charge.
The Royal Opera House is thrilled to announce an exciting, wide-ranging new line-up for its autumn programme. For the first time, extraordinary performances will be accessible online for a global audience through livestreams and for socially distanced live audiences at our home in Covent Garden. In a global first, we present a new opera in hyper-reality, alongside repertory favourites from both artistic companies.
Some of the most famous and outstanding stars from the opera world are to take part in a very special evening from Wexford Festival Opera, including Aigul Akhmetshina, Joseph Calleja, Daniela Barcellona, Juan Diego Flórez, Igor Golovatenko, Ermonela Jaho, Sergey Romanovsky, and many more.
Following its successful launch in 2019, OperaStreaming streams nine operas on YouTube from the historic opera houses of Emilia-Romagna during the 2020-21 season, with fully-staged productions of Verdi's La traviata in October from Modena and Verdi'sOtello from Bologna in...
‘A brief history of song’ is the subtitle of the 2020 Oxford Lieder Festival (10th-17th October), which will present an ambitious, diverse and imaginative programme of 40 performances and events.
Bampton Classical Opera returns to the Baroque splendour of London’s St John’s Smith Square on November 6 with a concert performance of Gluck’s one-act opera The Crown, the first in the UK since 1987. The performance will also be filmed and available to watch on demand on the Bampton website from 9 November.
While many of us spent lockdown at home taking it a little easier, composer Andrew Synnott wrote an opera.
Owen Wingrave is part of the new Interim Season of 19 brand new events, all free to view online between September and December 2020.
The Arts Council has awarded innovative UK charity Music and Theatre For All (MTFA) a major new grant to develop three ambitious new projects in the wake of Covid 19.
English National Opera (ENO) will reopen the London Coliseum to socially distanced audiences on 6 and 7 November for special performances of Mozart’s Requiem. These will provide audiences with an opportunity to reflect upon and to commemorate the difficulties the nation has faced during the pandemic.
The Royal Opera House is proud to continue its curated #OurHouseToYourHouse programme into the autumn, bringing audiences the best of the ROH through a new series of Friday Premieres and cultural highlights.
After six months of closure, the Royal Opera House is thrilled to be opening its doors to the public as part of Open House London weekend, giving visitors a taste of one of the world’s most famous theatres for free.
The Academy of St Martin in the Fields is thrilled to announce re:connect - an eight concert series with live socially distanced audiences at its namesake church, St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The autumn concerts will take place at 5pm & 7:30pm on two Saturdays per month with guest artists including baritone Roderick Williams, soprano Carolyn Sampson and composer-conductor-pianist Ryan Wigglesworth performing a wide range of repertoire.
Music and poetry unite and collide across centuries, from the Medieval to the Enlightenment to the present day. This year, the Oxford Lieder Festival will present a thrilling and innovative programme comprising more than forty events streamed over eight days.
The English Concert with artistic director Harry Bicket is delighted to announce a series of concerts from 1-15 October 2020. The concerts take place in historic London venues with star soloists and will be performed and streamed live to a paying audience at 7pm GMT on each performance date. The programmes include first-class vocal and instrumental works from the two pillars of the English Baroque, covering different aspects of the repertoire.
Glyndebourne has announced plans for a ‘staycation’ series of socially-distanced indoor performances, starting on 10 October 2020.
The Royal Opera House is delighted to announce two packed evenings of opera and ballet, live from our stage in Covent Garden and available to view wherever you are in the world online.
![Someone Younger [Image courtesy of Victory Hall Opera]](http://www.operatoday.com/SomeoneYoungerCropped.png)
Victory Hall Opera is a new company making its debut in Charlottesville Virginia on August 14, 2016. Its first presentation will be Richard Strauss’s and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier.
Only after that deciding on it's opening opera, did company executives learn of a bittersweet relationship between the mother of Charlottesville citizen Mary (aka Marie-Therese von Degenfeld) Miller and the librettist. Mary grew up in Europe, but married an American diplomat and eventually moved to Yule Farm, just outside of Charlottesville.
Mary’s mother, German Countess Ottonie von Degenfeld, met the librettist at Neubeuern Castle in Southeast Bavaria in 1906. She must have impressed him deeply, because two years later he wrote, “Although I only met her one day in my life, my thoughts kept returning to her.” Ottonie was a widow, but Hofmannsthal was married so the countess kept the correspondence they exchanged a secret up until 1912. It was only after Ottonie’s death in 1970 that Mary found the letters, carefully bound in blue ribbon, among her mother’s papers. By that time von Hofmannsthal’s artistically important letters had already been published.
What the new discovery tells us is that Ottonie was the librettist’s muse during the time he was working on Der Rosenkavalier. Much of what he wrote about the Marschallin and Octavian may have been inspired by his dreams of the lovely countess. He definitely tried to relieve the pain she felt because of the loss of her husband. She was depressed and he tried hard to bring her out of it by his expressions of devotion to her and his recommendations of reading material. They did meet at other times, sometimes on trains, but those assignations had to be short and discreet.
Hofmannsthal tried hard to convince Ottonie to attend the world premiere of Der Rosenkavalier on January 26, 1911, in Dresden, but she did not appear. He left tickets for her at the box office many times after that and she finally did attend a performance, unescorted. He also saw that when she returned to her hotel room it was full of roses. Although the librettist’s shy muse would remain unknown for many years after Dresden, Der Rosenkavalier was soon on its way to becoming a valuable part of the operatic repertoire.
Victory Hall Opera offers a pioneering new model for an opera company. It places the creative reins in the hands of the one who knows opera best: the singer. By featuring a core ensemble of exceptional masters of their craft, this company endeavors to develop a new opera aesthetic resulting in performances that are personal, vital, and relevant to every member of the audience.
"Victory Halls" were community theaters built all over the world after WWI to encourage touring musicians to perform concerts in regional towns. Victory Hall Opera harkens back to this time and seeks, once again, to bring the best the opera world has to offer back home to Charlottesville, VA.
Co-founders of Victory Hall Opera are: Maggie Bell, Miriam Gordon-Stewart and Brenda Patterson. Charlottesville native Maggie Bell worked extensively in opera productions throughout the United States before becoming the dramaturg at Berlin’s Volksbühne. Internationally acclaimed Australian soprano Miriam Gordon-Stewart, who specializes in the music of Wagner and Strauss, gained recognition across four continents for her powerful voice and dramatic ability. Virginia-raised mezzo-soprano Brenda Patterson is noted for her roles in contemporary American opera. She spent several years at Hamburg State Opera before continuing at La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera.
About the premiere performances:
Victory Hall Opera presents a chamber version of Someone Younger (Der Rosenkavalier) on August 14, 17, and 20 at The V. Earl Dickinson Theater, Piedmont Virginia Community College, 501 College Drive, Charlottesville, VA. For more information, please visit www.victoryhallopera.org.
Maria Nockin
References:
[1] The Poet and the Countess: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Correspondence with the Countess Ottonie von Degenfeld. Edited by Marie-Therese Miller-Degenfeld. Camden House, 2000. Hugo von Hofmannsthal letters to Ottonie Gräfin von Degenfeld-Schonberg and Julie Freifrau von Wendelstadt, 1908-1918.
[2] Memoirs of Marie Therese Miller-Degenfeld, An International Life in the 20th Century. Marie-Therese Miller-Degenfeld. Trafford, 2006.