Program Notes
Program Notes Saturday, April 18, 7:30pm Five Flags Theatre Sunday, April 19, 2:00pm Downtown Dubuque WILLIAM INTRILIGATOR, Music Director & Conductor Best of Opera Opera, where compelling drama meets virtuosic vocal and instrumental music, is the most visceral genre in classical music. Its characters burst into song because their emotions are simply too powerful for ordinary speech. Though operatic plots are frequently hard to believe, they always deal with the most basic and universal of human emotions: ambition, jealousy, anger, revenge, and above all, passionate love. Drawing on music from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, tonight’s concert travels from France to Italy to Germany and Austria, and on to Russia to visit many of the most beloved moments in opera: from exhilarating orchestral overtures to full-throated choruses to the magnificently heart-on-sleeve arias of some of opera’s most memorable characters. We begin with the very colorful “Les Voici” chorus that opens Act IV of Georges Bizet’s (1838–1875) masterpiece Carmen, premiered in 1875. Today, Carmen is considered one of the most perfect of all operas: an ideal blending of spellbinding story, vivid characters, expert pacing, and, above all, nonstop musical inspiration. The libretto was based on Prosper Mérimée’s gritty novella about an untamed gypsy who makes her own rules, chooses her own lovers, and welcomes death without a tremor. Carmen seduces an upright young soldier, Don José, away from the army and his fiancée into a nefarious life of smuggling, then jilts him for the glamorous toreador, Escamillo. Maddened by jealousy, Don José stalks her at the bullfights in Seville and stabs her to death outside the arena.
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