In Greek mythology, Orestes or Orestis was the son of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, and the brother of Electra. He is the subject of several Ancient Greek plays and of various myths connected with his madness and purification, which retain obscure threads of much older ones.
Darius Milhaud was a French composer, conductor, and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and Brazilian music and make extensive use of polytonality. Milhaud is considered one of the key modernist composers. A renowned teacher, he taught many future jazz and classical composers, including Burt Bacharach, Dave Brubeck, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis among others.
Germaine Tailleferre was a French composer and the only female member of the group of composers known as Les Six.
William Elden Bolcom is an American composer and pianist. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Medal of Arts, a Grammy Award, the Detroit Music Award and was named 2007 Composer of the Year by Musical America. He taught composition at the University of Michigan from 1973 until 2008. He is married to mezzo-soprano Joan Morris.
John Harris Harbison is an American composer, known for his symphonies, operas, and large choral works.
Elizabeth Jolas is a Franco-American composer.
Bruce Mather is a Canadian composer, pianist, and writer who is particularly known for his contributions to contemporary classical music.
Christophe Colomb is an opera in two parts by the French composer Darius Milhaud. The poet Paul Claudel wrote the libretto based on his own play about the life of Christopher Columbus, Le Livre de Christophe Colomb. The opera was first performed at the Staatsoper, Berlin, on 5 May 1930 in a German translation by Rudolph Stephan Hoffmann. Milhaud thoroughly revised the work and produced a second version around 1955. The opera is on a large scale and requires many resources for its staging. As in many of his other works, Milhaud employs polytonality in parts of the score.
This is an incomplete list of plays for which incidental music has been written.
Hulda is an opera by César Franck to a French libretto by Charles Grandmougin. It is set in 11th-century Norway, and is based on the play Lame Hulda (1858) by Norwegian writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. The complete opera contains a prologue, three acts and an epilogue, albeit the world premier recording by Naxos has five acts. It was composed between 1879 and 1885.
Gloria Wilson Swisher was an American composer, music educator and pianist. She died July 23, 2023 in Edmonds, Washington.
Geneviève de Brabant is a theatre piece composed around 1900 by Erik Satie. The score was intended as incidental music for a three-act comedy in verse and prose by J. P. Contamine de Latour, based on the medieval legend of Genevieve of Brabant. Unproduced at the time, its existence was not discovered until after Satie's death in 1925.
Kenneth Kiesler is an American symphony orchestra and opera conductor and mentor to conductors. Kiesler is conductor laureate of the Illinois Symphony Orchestra where he was music director from 1980 to 2000 and founder and director of the Conductors Retreat at Medomak. In 2014, Kiesler was nominated for a Grammy Award for his recording of Darius Milhaud’s opera L’Orestie d’Eschyle. He is Director of Orchestras and Professor of Conducting at the University of Michigan.
Louis-Jacques Rondeleux was a 20th-century French lyrical artist (baritone).
Trois mélodies is a 1916 song cycle for voice and piano by Erik Satie. One of Satie's rare excursions in mélodies, it lasts under four minutes in performance.
La Délivrance de Thésée is the final opera in a trilogy of "opéras minute", composed by the French composer Darius Milhaud in 1927 to a libretto by Henri Hoppenot. The first two works in the series are L'Enlèvement d'Europe and L'abandon d'Ariane, and the running time for the complete trilogy is approximated at 28 minutes. La Délivrance is the shortest of the three operas, with a running time recorded as 7 minutes 27 seconds, and when written was generally regarded as the world's shortest opera.
Électre is a large-scale operatic oratorio–cantata by Théodore Gouvy from 1886.
