A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy play written by William Shakespeare in about 1595 or 1596. The play is set in Athens, and consists of several subplots that revolve around the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. One subplot involves a conflict among four Athenian lovers. Another follows a group of six amateur actors rehearsing the play which they are to perform before the wedding. Both groups find themselves in a forest inhabited by fairies who manipulate the humans and are engaged in their own domestic intrigue. A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most popular and widely performed plays.
Pyramus and Thisbe are a pair of legendary, ill-fated lovers from Babylon whose story forms part of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The story has been retold by many authors.
The mechanicals are six characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream who perform the play-within-a-play Pyramus and Thisbe. They are a group of amateur and mostly incompetent actors from around Athens, looking to make names for themselves by having their production chosen among several acts as the courtly entertainment for the royal wedding party of Theseus and Hippolyta. The servant-spirit Puck describes them as "rude mechanicals" in Act III, Scene 2 of the play, in reference to their occupations as skilled manual laborers.
Johann Adolph Hasse was an 18th-century German composer, singer and teacher of music. Immensely popular in his time, Hasse was best known for his prolific operatic output, though he also composed a considerable quantity of sacred music. Married to soprano Faustina Bordoni and a friend of librettist Pietro Metastasio, whose libretti he frequently set, Hasse was a pivotal figure in the development of opera seria and 18th-century music.
Roméo et Juliette is a seven-movement symphonie dramatique for orchestra and three choruses, with vocal solos, by French composer Hector Berlioz. Émile Deschamps wrote its libretto with Shakespeare's play as his base. The work was completed in 1839 and first performed on 24 November of that year, but it was modified before its first publication, in 1847, and modified again for the 2ème Édition of 1857, today's reference. It bears the catalogue numbers Op. 17 and H. 79. Regarded as one of Berlioz's finest achievements, Roméo et Juliette is also among his most original in form and his most comprehensive and detailed to follow a program. The vocal forces are used in the 1st, 5th and 7th movements.
La Cenerentola, ossia La bontà in trionfo is an operatic dramma giocoso in two acts by Gioachino Rossini. The libretto was written by Jacopo Ferretti, based on the libretti written by Charles-Guillaume Étienne for the opera Cendrillon with music by Nicolas Isouard and by Francesco Fiorini for Agatina, o la virtù premiata with music by Stefano Pavesi. All these operas are versions of the fairy tale Cendrillon by Charles Perrault. Rossini's opera was first performed in Rome's Teatro Valle on 25 January 1817.
Rodion Konstantinovich Shchedrin is a Soviet and Russian composer and pianist, winner of USSR State Prize (1972), the Lenin Prize (1984), and the State Prize of the Russian Federation (1992), and is a former member of the Inter-regional Deputies Group (1989–1991). He is also a citizen of Lithuania and Spain.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Op. 64, is an opera with music by Benjamin Britten and set to a libretto adapted by the composer and Peter Pears from William Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was premiered on 11 June 1960 at the Aldeburgh Festival, conducted by the composer and with set and costume designs by Carl Toms. Stylistically, the work is typical of Britten, with a highly individual sound-world – not strikingly dissonant or atonal, but replete with subtly atmospheric harmonies and tone painting. The role of Oberon was composed for the countertenor Alfred Deller. Atypically for Britten, the opera did not include a leading role for his partner Pears, who instead was given the comic drag role of Flute/Thisbe.
Yevstigney Ipat'yevich Fomin was a Russian opera composer of the 18th century
La finta semplice, K. 51 (46a) is an opera buffa in three acts for seven voices and orchestra, composed in 1768 by then 12-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Young Mozart and his father Leopold were spending the year in Vienna, where Leopold was trying to establish his son as an opera composer. He was acting on a suggested request from the Emperor Joseph II that the young boy should write an opera.
Marco Coltellini was an Italian opera tenor, librettist and printer.
La Dafne (Daphne) is an early Italian opera, written in 1608 by the Italian composer Marco da Gagliano from a libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini. It is described as a favola in musica composed in one act and a prologue. The opera is based on the myth of Daphne and Apollo as related by Ovid in the first book of the Metamorphoses. An earlier version of the libretto had been set to music in 1597–98 by Jacopo Peri, whose Dafne is generally considered to be the first opera.
Pyramus and Thisbe is a "mock opera" by the German-born composer John Frederick Lampe on the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. It was first performed at Covent Garden Theatre, London, on 25 January 1745. The anonymous libretto is based on Richard Leveridge's The Comickal Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe (1716), itself inspired by the "play within a play" in act 5 of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
The Amber Witch is an opera in four acts composed by William Vincent Wallace to an English libretto by Henry Fothergill Chorley, after Lady Duff-Gordon's translation of Meinold's Maria Schweidler: Die Bernsteinhexe.
Michael Schneider is a German flautist, recorder player, conductor and academic teacher. He is especially connected with later Baroque repertoire such as the works of Telemann and with early Classical repertoire such as the works of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and founded the orchestra La Stagione to perform and record such repertoire.
Pirame et Thisbé is an opera by the French composers François Francoeur and François Rebel, first performed at the Académie Royale de Musique on 17 October 1726. It takes the form of a tragédie en musique in a prologue and five acts. The libretto, by Jean-Louis-Ignace de La Serre, is based on the story of Pyramus and Thisbe in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The role of Thisbé was created by Marie Pélissier.
The Gamblers, Op. 63, is an unfinished opera, composed by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1941/42 to his own libretto based on Nikolai Gogol's comedy The Gamblers (1842). The surviving first act lasts around 47 minutes. Krzysztof Meyer realised a completion in German, Die Spieler, in 1981. Both versions were performed on stage and recorded.
La Stagione Frankfurt is a German ensemble of Baroque and classical music, adept at historically informed performance.
Silvia Weiss is a German operatic and concert soprano.
