Pearls of Music Theater
The program broadcasts the best performances of famous operas, ballets, musicals, and operettas, presenting their plots and the history of their creation. Before each act, the corresponding part of libretto is read, which makes the listening experience more vivid and comprehensible.
- Author of the program: Inessa Khachatryan
Ludwig van Beethoven, "Fidelio"
"Fidelio" is the only complete opera of Beethoven. The plot is based on a real story about a political prisoner whose wife selflessly saved her husband from a certain death. The dramatic nature of the opera, its moral pathos, heroism, glorification of the purity and strength of marital love, the desire to fight against totalitarianism were close to Beethoven's ideas.
Carl Maria von Weber, The Freeshooter
The Opera "The Freeshooter" ("Der Freischütz") is considered the first truly romantic German opera. The work is based on an ancient legend, common among Germans and Czechs, about a young hunter, but the ending of the libretto is different from that of the legend. The author of the libretto, Johann Friedrich Kind, changed it so that in the struggle of good and evil, good wins and everything ends happily for the heroes.
Carl Maria von Weber wrote this opera during the rise of the national liberation struggle and justified the expectations of the audience of Democrats. This opera was assessed not only as a brilliant phenomenon of arts, but also as a strong patriotic work.
Mikhail Glinka, Ruslan and Lyudmila
Glinka had the idea of creating the opera "Ruslan and Lyudmila" still at the time of Pushkin. The composer wanted to create it on a libretto by Alexander Pushkin, but because of the sudden death of the poet he was forced to turn to his friends: he wrote the libretto with the help of Valerian Shirkov, Constantine Bahturin, Nestor Kukolnik, and others.
In this work, Glinka instilled the images with epic breath, developed the content of the opera, and created new types of operatic drama that are based on the development of symphonism, the clash and juxtaposition of opposite characters, and the sequence of separate complete episodes.
Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas
The opera is based on Part IV of Virgil's epic poem "Aeneid" where the author tells about the legendary Trojan hero Aeneas. The libretto was written by Nahum Tate. "Dido and Aeneas" is the first music drama by Purcell. The composer wrote it in 1689 by a special order to present it at the graduation ceremony of Josias Priest's Girls' School.
