Carl Heinrich Maria Orff was a German composer and music educator, who composed the cantata Carmina Burana (1937). The concepts of his Schulwerk were influential for children's music education.
In Greek mythology, Antigone is a Theban princess, and a character in several ancient Greek tragedies. She is the daughter of Oedipus, king of Thebes. Her mother is Jocasta. In another variation of the myth, her mother is Euryganeia. She is a sister of Polynices, Eteocles, and Ismene. The meaning of the name is, as in the case of the masculine equivalent Antigonus, "in place of one's parents" or "worthy of one's parents". Antigone appears in the three 5th century BC tragic plays written by Sophocles, known collectively as the three Theban plays. She is the protagonist of the tragedy Antigone. She makes a brief appearance at the end of Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes, while her story was also the subject of Euripides' now lost play with the same name.
Antigone is an Athenian tragedy written by Sophocles in 441 BC and first performed at the Festival of Dionysus of the same year. It is thought to be the second oldest surviving play of Sophocles, preceded by Ajax, which was written around the same period. The play is one of a triad of tragedies known as the three Theban plays, following Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. Even though the events in Antigone occur last in the order of events depicted in the plays, Sophocles wrote Antigone first. The story expands on the Theban legend that predates it, and it picks up where Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes ends. The play is named after the main protagonist Antigone.
De temporum fine comoedia is a choral opera-oratorio by 20th-century German composer Carl Orff. His last large work, and a personal one, it took ten years to compile the text and another two years to compose ; he revised it in 1979 and again in 1981. Orff presents a mystery play summarizing his view of the end of time sung in Ancient Greek, Latin, and a German translation by Wolfgang Schadewaldt. De temporum fine comoedia was recorded before it was premiered. Herbert von Karajan conducted sessions from 16 to 21 July 1973 in a studio in Leverkusen-Wiesdorf, employing three choruses and the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra. The public and stage premiere took place at the Salzburg Festival a month later, on 20 August, with the same forces and stage direction by August Everding.
Wolfgang Rihm is a German composer and academic teacher. He is musical director of the Institute of New Music and Media at the University of Music Karlsruhe and has been composer in residence at the Lucerne Festival and the Salzburg Festival. He was honoured as Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2001. His musical work includes more than 500 works. In 2012, The Guardian wrote: "enormous output and bewildering variety of styles and sounds".
Peter Ruzicka is a German composer and conductor of classical music. He was director of the Hamburg State Opera, the Philharmonic Orchestra of Hamburg and the Salzburg Festival. Ruzicka was managing director and Intendant of the Salzburg Easter Festival and is professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. The list of his compositions includes numerous orchestral and chamber music works as well as the opera "Celan", about the poet Paul Celan, which was premiered in Dresden in 2001. His opera "Hölderlin" had its premiere at the Berlin State Opera in 2008. Ruzicka's third opera "Benjamin", about the philosopher Walter Benjamin, was written in 2015/16 for the Hamburg State Opera and premiered in 2018.
Werner Egk, born Werner Joseph Mayer, was a German composer.
Gerhard Stolze was a German operatic tenor.
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle was a French opera director, set and costume designer.
Aribert Reimann was a German composer, pianist, and accompanist, known especially for his literary operas. His version of Shakespeare's King Lear, the opera Lear, was written at the suggestion of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who performed the title role. His opera Medea after Grillparzer's play premiered in 2010 at the Vienna State Opera. He was a professor of contemporary Lied in Hamburg and Berlin. In 2011, he was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize for his life's work.
Œdipe à Colone is an operatic tragédie lyrique by Antonio Sacchini first performed at Versailles on 4 January 1786 in the presence of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The libretto, by Nicolas-François Guillard, is based on the play Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles. The premiere, intended to inaugurate the new theatre at Versailles, was not a success, possibly due to the quality of the performances, the staging, or the acoustics. Marie Antoinette promised Sacchini a better production at Fontainebleau in the autumn, but the Affair of the Diamond Necklace meant she was unable to have her wish. The news that the production was cancelled is said to have hastened the death of the already seriously ill composer on October 9, 1786. Œdipe was given a posthumous performance by the Paris Opera at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin on February 1, 1787. This time the audience was warmly appreciative and the opera became one of the most popular pieces in the repertoire for several decades, reaching a total of almost 600 performances by 1844.
Carmina Burana is a cantata composed in 1935 and 1936 by Carl Orff, based on 24 poems from the medieval collection Carmina Burana. Its full Latin title is Carmina Burana: Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choris cantandae comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis. It was first performed by the Oper Frankfurt on 8 June 1937. It is part of Trionfi, a musical triptych that also includes Catulli Carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite. The first and last sections of the piece are called "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi" and start with "O Fortuna".
Wilhelm Killmayer was a German composer of classical music, a conductor and an academic teacher of composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München from 1973 to 1992. He composed symphonies and song cycles on poems by Friedrich Hölderlin, Joseph von Eichendorff, Georg Trakl and Peter Härtling, among others.
Nicolaus A. Huber is a German composer.
Johannes Wolfgang Zender was a German conductor and composer. He was the chief conductor of several opera houses, and his compositions, many of them vocal music, have been performed at international festivals.
Literaturoper, a term coined by the German music critic Edgar Istel, describes a genre of opera that emerged during the late 19th century. When an existing play for the legitimate theatre is set to music without major changes and without the intervention of a librettist, a “Literaturoper” is the result. Although the term is German, it can be applied to any kind of opera, irrespective of style or language.
Luciano Berio was an Italian composer noted for his experimental work, and for his pioneering work in electronic music. His early work was influenced by Igor Stravinsky and experiments with serial and electronic techniques, while his later works explore indeterminacy and the use of spoken texts as the basic material for composition.
Kieth Engen was an American operatic bass who was a member of Munich's Bavarian State Opera for decades. Although his career was based in Munich, he appeared internationally as a guest singer at major opera houses and festivals and performed and recorded many of Bach's Passion oratorios and cantatas, primarily with the conductor Karl Richter. He was born Keith Sheldon Engen in Frazee, Minnesota, and died in Murnau am Staffelsee, Germany at the age of 79. He was given the title of Kammersänger in 1962 and was a recipient of the Bavarian Order of Merit. In the mid-1950s he also had a brief parallel career as a pop singer under the pseudonym Stan Oliver.
Prometheus is an opera by Carl Orff. The opera's Greek text is based on the drama by Aeschylus, the only surviving part of his Prometheus trilogy. Since Aeschylus's text in Ancient Greek has been directly set to music without alterations or cuts, Orff's score qualifies as one of the most typical examples for the operatic genre of Literaturoper. The premiere took place on March 24, 1968, at Staatstheater Stuttgart under the direction of Ferdinand Leitner in a production by Rudolf Sellner with sets and costumes by Teo Otto.
Wilfried Hiller is a German composer. He became known above all for his stage works for families, children and young people.
