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The Cumnor Affair or An Elizabethan Murder-Mystery [1] [2] is a one-act opera by the English composer Philip Cashian with an English-language libretto by Iain Pears, [3] lasting 75 minutes in performance. The opera is based on the love affair between Robert Dudley, Amy Robsart, and Elizabeth I of England. The sudden death of Robsart led to speculation that she was murdered. [4]
The work was composed in 2008 [5] and premiered the same year on November 10th by the Tête à Tête opera company at the Riverside Studios in London, England, conducted by Tim Murray. [6] [7] [8] The premiere was directed by Bill Bankes-Jones with set design by Tim Meacock and light design by Mark Doubleday. [9] [10]
According to Ash Smyth of the Oxford Mail, the singing was lackluster and the absence of melody was a jarring error. As Smyth notes, "It is basically without melody, which was bad enough when competing with the singers, and worse when not." [12] Rupert Christiansen of The Telegraph supported the company but noted the failure of the production, "this isn't one of their more successful ventures" [9]
The opera is scored for seven voices and ten instrumentalists: [14]
Isidore de Lara, born Isidore Cohen, was an English composer and singer. After studying in Italy and France, he returned to England, where he taught for several years at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and became a well known singer and composer of art songs. In the early 1880s he began to compose music for the stage, eventually achieving his greatest successes with opera in Monte Carlo from the late 1890s through the outbreak of World War I. His most popular opera, Messaline (1899), enjoyed frequent revivals throughout Europe and in the United States during the first quarter of the 20th century. He returned to London and spent much of the 1920s trying to create a permanent National opera company in England, without much success.
Amy, Lady Dudley was the first wife of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, favourite of Elizabeth I of England. She is primarily known for her death by falling down a flight of stairs, the circumstances of which have often been regarded as suspicious. Amy Robsart was the only child of a substantial Norfolk gentleman. In the vernacular of the day, her name was spelled as Amye Duddley.
Hans Abrahamsen is a Danish composer born in Kongens Lyngby near Copenhagen. His Let me tell you (2013), a song cycle for soprano and orchestra, was ranked by music critics at The Guardian as the finest work of the 21st-century. His opera The Snow Queen was commissioned and premiered by the Royal Danish Theatre in 2019.
Kenilworth. A Romance is a historical romance novel by Sir Walter Scott, one of the Waverley novels, first published on 13 January 1821. Set in 1575, it leads up to the elaborate reception of Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth Castle by the Earl of Leicester, who is complicit in the murder of his wife Amy Robsart at Cumnor.
Billy Budd, Op. 50, is an opera by Benjamin Britten to a libretto by the English novelist E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier, based on the short novel Billy Budd by Herman Melville. Originally in four acts, the opera received its premiere at the Royal Opera House (ROH), London, on 1 December 1951. Britten later revised the work into a two-act opera, with a prologue and an epilogue. The revised version received its first performance at the ROH, Covent Garden, London, on 9 January 1964.
James Dillon is a Scottish composer who is often regarded as belonging to the New Complexity school. Dillon studied art and design, linguistics, piano, acoustics, Indian rhythm, mathematics and computer music, but is self-taught in composition.
Philip Cashian is an English composer. He is the head of composition at the Royal Academy of Music.
Cumnor is a village and civil parish 3½ miles (5.6 km) west of the centre of Oxford, England. The village is about 2 miles (3.2 km) south-west of Botley and its centre is west of the A420 road to Swindon. The parish includes Cumnor Hill,, Chawley, the Dean Court area on the edge of Botley and the outlying settlements of Chilswell, Farmoor, Filchampstead and Swinford. It was within Berkshire until the 1974 local government boundary changes transferred it to Oxfordshire. The 2011 Census recorded the parish population as 5,755.
Sinfonia da Requiem, Op. 20, for orchestra is a symphony written by Benjamin Britten in 1940 at the age of 26. It was one of several works commissioned from different composers by the Japanese government to mark Emperor Jimmu's 2600th anniversary of the founding of the Japanese Empire. The Japanese government rejected the Sinfonia for its use of Latin titles from the Catholic Requiem for its three movements and for its somber overall character, but it was received positively at its world premiere in New York on 29 March 1941 under John Barbirolli. A performance in Boston under Serge Koussevitzky led to the commission of the opera Peter Grimes from the Koussevitzky Music Foundations.
David Bruce is a British composer and a YouTuber.
Michael Jeffrey Shapiro is an American composer, conductor, and author.
The Minotaur is an opera in two acts, with 13 scenes by English composer Harrison Birtwistle to a libretto by poet David Harsent, commissioned by the Royal Opera House in London. The work, a retelling of the Greek myth of the Minotaur, premiered at the Royal Opera House on 15 April 2008 under the stage direction of Stephen Langridge. The score is modernistic, and the scenes fall into three types: bullfights; scenes between Ariadne and Theseus; and dream sequences for the Minotaur, in which the creature has the gift of speech. The opera lasts about 140 minutes. A detailed analysis of the opera was published by Rhian Samuel.
Rebecca Saunders is a London-born composer who lives and works freelance in Berlin. In a 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000, Saunders' compositions received the third highest total number of votes (30), surpassed only by the works of Georg Friedrich Haas (49) and Simon Steen-Andersen (35). In 2019, writers of The Guardian ranked Skin (2016) the 16th greatest work of art music since 2000, with Tom Service writing that "Saunders burrows into the interior world of the instruments, and inside the grain of Fraser's voice [...] and finds a revelatory world of heightened feeling."
Tête à Tête is an opera company based in Cornwall that currently operates in Cornwall, London and North-East England. Its primary mission is to reach new audiences, support artists' development, and to extend the boundaries of traditional opera.
Charlotte Bray is a British composer. She was championed by the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, London Sinfonietta and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, BBC Symphony Orchestra. Her music has been performed by many notable conductors such as: Sir Mark Elder, Oliver Knussen, Daniel Harding, and Jac van Steen.
Brokeback Mountain is an opera by American composer Charles Wuorinen, with a libretto in English by Annie Proulx, based on her 1997 short story "Brokeback Mountain". They began work on it in 2008 under a commission by Gerard Mortier of the New York City Opera. He took the project with him to the Teatro Real of Madrid, where the opera was premiered on January 28, 2014.
Edward Lambert is an English composer who has written chamber music, vocal and choral works, and chamber operas. He is also a conductor and pianist.
Philip Venables is a British composer known for his operatic and theatrical works with themes of sexuality, violence and politics.
Joseph Phibbs is an English composer of orchestral, choral and chamber music. He has also composed for theatre, both in the UK and Japan. Since 1998 he has written regularly to commissions for Festivals, for private sponsors, and for the BBC, which has broadcast premieres of his orchestral and chamber works from the Proms and elsewhere. His works have been given premieres in Europe, the United States and the Far East, and he has received prestigious awards, including most recently a British Composer Award, and a Library of Congress Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation Award. Many of his works have been premiered by leading international musicians, including Dame Evelyn Glennie, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leonard Slatkin, Sakari Oramo, Vasily Petrenko, Gianandrea Noseda, and the Belcea Quartet.
Robin de Raaff is a Dutch composer. He has written five symphonies, eleven concertos, an oratorio entitled Atlantis, and two main stage operas. The last opera Waiting for Miss Monroe is about the tragic death of Marilyn Monroe sung by American soprano Laura Aikin. The first opera RAAFF is an opera about the complex relationship between the older Anton Raaff and the young M. in their struggle to create the world premiere of Idomeneo. Both operas were commissioned by Dutch National Opera coproduced by the Holland Festival.