Which opera premiered first, Tosca or The Queen of Spades?
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Tosca Tosca (] ) is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. It premiered at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 14 January 1900. The work, based on Victorien Sardou's 1887 French-language dramatic play, "La Tosca", is a melodramatic piece set in Rome in June 1800, with the Kingdom of Naples's control of Rome threatened by Napoleon's invasion of Italy. It contains depictions of torture, murder and suicide, as well as some of Puccini's best-known lyrical arias.
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The Queen of Spades (opera) The Queen of Spades, Op. 68 (Russian: Пиковая дама , "Pikovaya dama", French: La Dame de Pique ) is an opera in 3 acts (7 scenes) by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to a Russian libretto by the composer's brother Modest Tchaikovsky, based on a short story of the same name by Alexander Pushkin, but the plot was dramatically altered. The premiere took place in 1890 in St. Petersburg (at the Mariinsky Theatre), Russia.
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La canterina La canterina ("The Songstress" or "The Diva"), Hob. XXVIII/2, is a short, two-act opera buffa by Joseph Haydn, the first one he wrote for Prince Esterhazy. Based on the intermezzo from the third act of Niccolò Piccinni's opera L'Origille (1760), it lasts about 50 minutes. It was written in 1766, and was premiered in the fall of that year.
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Albina Shagimuratova Albina Shagimuratova (Russian: Альбина Шагимуратова, Tashkent, 1979) is a Russian coloratura soprano, particularly known for singing the Queen of the Night in Mozart's "Die Zauberflöte", which she has sung with Houston Grand Opera, the Salzburg Festival, the Lucerne Festival, San Francisco Opera, Wiener Staatsoper, Teatro alla Scala, Liceu and The Royal Opera, London.
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The Barber of Seville (play) The Barber of Seville or the Useless Precaution (French: "Le Barbier de Séville ou la Précaution inutile" ) is a French play by Pierre Beaumarchais, with original music by Antoine-Laurent Baudron. It was initially conceived as a comic opera, and was rejected as such in 1772 by the Comédie-Italienne. The play as it is now known was written in 1773, but, due to legal and political problems of the author, it was not performed until February 23, 1775, at the Comédie-Française in the Tuileries. It is the first play in a trilogy of which the other constituents are "The Marriage of Figaro" and "The Guilty Mother".
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La Fenice Teatro La Fenice (] , "The Phoenix") is an opera house in Venice, Italy. It is one of "the most famous and renowned landmarks in the history of Italian theatre", and in the history of opera as a whole. Especially in the 19th century, La Fenice became the site of many famous operatic premieres at which the works of several of the four major "bel canto" era composers—Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi were performed.
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The Two Widows The Two Widows () is a two-act Czech opera by Bedřich Smetana based on the libretto of Emanuel Züngel. The libretto is based on Jean Pierre Felicien Mallefille's one-act play "Les deux veuves". The opera was composed between June 1873 and January 1874, and its premiere took place on 27 March 1874 at the Prague Czech Theatre under the direction of Smetana. However, this premiere was not successful and the opera was rewritten in 1874. The spoken dialogue was replaced by through-composed recitatives and some of the music and characters were reworked. The second premiere on 20 October 1874 was very successful. A further revised version was premiered on 17 March 1878, under Adolf Čech.
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Rae Woodland Rae Woodland (9 April 1922 – 12 December 2013) was a British soprano who studied with Roy Henderson. Her debut was as Queen of the Night at Sadlers Wells. She sang in many European festivals, and debuted at Covent Garden in "La sonnambula" with Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti. She was first asked to sing for Benjamin Britten on the English Opera Group's tour of Russia, and played many roles for him subsequently. She also created roles for Gottfried von Einem, Nicholas Maw and Sir Arthur Bliss, and made many live broadcasts for the BBC, from the RAH" Proms" to "Friday Night is Music Night". She retired from the opera stage in 1984. She then taught singing at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and at the Britten-Pears School in Snape Maltings on the invitation of Sir Peter Pears.
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Origins of opera The art form known as "opera" originated in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though it drew upon older traditions of medieval and Renaissance courtly entertainment. The word "opera", meaning "work" in Italian, was first used in the modern musical and theatrical sense in 1639 and soon spread to the other European languages. The earliest operas were modest productions compared to other Renaissance forms of sung drama, but they soon became more lavish and took on the spectacular stagings of the earlier genre known as intermedio.
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Les brigands Les brigands ("The Bandits") is an opéra bouffe, or operetta, by Jacques Offenbach to a French libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. Meilhac and Halévy's libretto lampoons both serious (Schiller's play set to music by Verdi) and light theatre ("Fra Diavolo" and "Les diamants de la couronne" by Auber). The plot is cheerfully amoral in its presentation of theft as a basic principle of society rather than as an aberration. As Falsacappa, the brigand chieftain, notes: "Everybody steals according to their position in society". The piece premiered in Paris in 1869 and has received periodic revivals in France and elsewhere, both in French and in translation.
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Tosca (1953 EMI recording) The 1953 EMI recording of Giacomo Puccini's Tosca conducted by Victor de Sabata, with Maria Callas, Giuseppe Di Stefano and Tito Gobbi, is considered by many opera critics to be one of the most notable opera recordings of the 1950s. It was recorded in August 1953 by the EMI subsidiary Columbia Records and released to critical acclaim. It was a commercial success from the start and continues to be one of the best-selling opera recordings.
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A Hand of Bridge A Hand of Bridge, opus 35, is an opera in one act composed by Samuel Barber with libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti, and is possibly the shortest opera that is regularly performed: it lasts about nine minutes. It premiered as a part of Menotti’s Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto on 17 June 1959 at the Teatro Caio Melisso. The United States premiere occurred the next year. The opera consists of two unhappily married couples playing a hand of bridge, during which each character has an arietta in which he or she professes his or her inner desires.
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Artaserse (Hasse) Artaserse is an opera ("dramma per musica") in three acts composed by Johann Adolph Hasse to an Italian libretto adapted from that by Metastasio by Giovanni Boldini. It premiered at the Teatro di San Giovanni Grisostomo in Venice on 11 February 1730, shortly after the libretto's first setting by Leonardo Vinci premiered in Rome 6 days earlier. Metastasio's libretto, "Artaserse", has been used in more than 90 works. Hasse himself would later re-work the score for performances at the Opernhaus am Zwinger in Dresden (1740) and the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples (1760).
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Zazà Zazà ] is an opera by Ruggero Leoncavallo, with the libretto by the composer. Its première at the Teatro Lirico di Milano on 10 November 1900, starring Rosina Storchio as Zazà, Edoardo Garbin as Milio, Mario Sammarco as Cascart and Clorinda Pini-Corsi as Anaide, and conducted by Arturo Toscanini, began its triumphant run of performances in opera houses around the world.
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Blanche Thebom Blanche Thebom (September 19, 1915March 23, 2010) was an American operatic mezzo-soprano, voice teacher, and opera director. She was part of the first wave of American opera singers that had highly successful international careers. In her own country she had a long association with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City which lasted 22 years. "Opera News" stated, "An ambitious beauty with a velvety, even-grained dramatic mezzo, Thebom was a natural for opera: she commanded the stage with the elegantly disciplined hauteur of an old-school diva, relishing the opportunity to play "femmes du monde" such as Marina in "Boris Godunov", Herodias and Dalila."
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Cora (opera) Cora is an opera in four acts by the French composer Étienne Méhul. The libretto, by Valadier, is based on the novel "Les Incas" by Jean-François Marmontel. It was the first opera Méhul wrote but the second to be performed, receiving its premiere at the Académie Royale de Musique (the Paris Opéra) on 15 February 1791. "Cora" was not a success and there were only four more performances (18, 20, 25 February and 4 March).
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The Doctor of Myddfai The Doctor of Myddfai is an opera in two acts composed by Peter Maxwell Davies to a libretto by David Pountney. The work premiered at the New Theatre in Cardiff on 5 June 1996, performed by the Welsh National Opera and conducted by Richard Armstrong. The libretto was adapted from an ancient Welsh legend which inspired "The Lady of the Lake". The original tale is reinterpreted in terms of a mysterious disease, knowledge of which the authorities are trying to suppress. The opera takes place in a totalitarian society similar to that envisioned in Orwell's "1984", with a supreme ruler, mechanistic bureaucracy and endless war.
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The Queen of Spades (1927 film) The Queen of Spades or Pique Dame is a 1927 German silent drama film directed by  Aleksandr Razumnyj and starring Jenny Jugo, Rudolf Forster and Henri De Vries . It is one of many film adaptations of the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin's 1834 short story "The Queen of Spades".
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The Merchant of Venice (opera) The Merchant of Venice is an opera by André Tchaikowsky (1935–1982) to a libretto, based on the Shakespeare play, by John O'Brien. Written between 1968 and 1982, it was first performed in 2013 at the Bregenz Festival. The British premiere will be presented by the Welsh National Opera in September 2016.
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Il Bellerofonte Il Bellerofonte is an 18th-century Italian opera in three acts by the Czech composer Josef Mysliveček. It conforms to the serious type (opera seria) that was typically set in the distant past. The libretto, based on the Greek legend of Bellerophon, was written by Giuseppe Bonecchi. The work was dedicated to King Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies and was first performed at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples on 20 January 1767, the birthday of his father, King Charles III of Spain. The cast featured two stellar singers of the time, Caterina Gabrielli and Anton Raaff, in the leading roles. The opera was only the composer's second one, and the first that permitted him the opportunity to write music for first-rate vocal artists. The production was highly successful, indeed responsible for a meteoric rise in his reputation as an operatic composer. From the time of the premiere of "Bellerofonte" until his death in 1781, Mysliveček succeeded in having more new "opere serie" brought into production than any other composer in Europe. During the same time span, he also had more new operas staged at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples than any other composer.
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Farsa Farsa (Italian, literally: "farce", plural: "farse") is a genre of opera, associated with Venice in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It is also sometimes called "farsetta".
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Giacomo Puccini Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini (] ; 22 December 1858 29 November 1924) was an Italian opera composer who has been called "the greatest composer of Italian opera after Verdi".