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3 unusual facts about French opera


Cleofonte Campanini

Campanini was known for his association with French opera, and introduced numerous works to the United States; these included Hérodiade, I gioielli della Madonna, Louise, Pelléas et Mélisande, Monna Vanna, Jules Massenet's Sapho, and Thaïs.

Restoration spectacular

Basically home-grown and with roots in the early 17th-century court masque, though never ashamed of borrowing ideas and stage technology from French opera, the spectaculars are sometimes called "English opera".

Thomas Corneille

Thomas Corneille is also remarkable for having excelled in almost all dramatic genres of his time, including the new and innovative genres that were the pièce à machines and opera at the time.


Ernest van Dyck

He stayed in New York City until the 1901-02 season, singing not only Wagner roles but also parts in French operas.


see also

Alexandra David-Néel

From 1895 to 1897 she was prima donna with a touring French opera company in Indochina, appearing at the Hanoi Opera House and elsewhere as La Traviata and Carmen.

Charles Grisart

Charles Jean Baptiste Grisart (29 September 1837, Paris – 11 March 1904, Compiègne) was a French operatic composer.

Dieter Kaegi

In 1982, he became assistant to leading French opera director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle.

Félix Vieuille

Félix Vieuille (15 October 1872, Saujon – 28 February 1953, Saujon) was a French operatic bass who sang for more than four decades with the Opéra-Comique in Paris during the first half of the twentieth century.

Girard de Beaulieu

He was associated with the Académie de Baïf, one of whom's aristocratic poets, Nicolas Filleul de La Chesnaye, the king's almoner was to provide the lyrics for the ballet Circé in the first French opera-ballet, the Balet Comique de la Royne of 1581, to which Beaulieu and Jacques Salmon provided the music.

Jérusalem

It was the one opera which he regarded as the most suitable for being translated into French and, taking Scribe's advice, Verdi agreed that a French libretto was to be prepared by Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaëz, who had written the libretto for Donizetti's most successful French opera, La favorite.

Korla Pandit

In 1944, he married Disney artist Beryl June DeBeeson, and the two reinvented his image, eventually replacing "Juan Rolando" with "Korla Pandit" and fabricating a romantic history for him as a baby born in New Delhi, India to a Brahmin priest and a French opera singer, who traveled from India via England, finally arriving in the United States.

Lakmé Cosmetics

Lakme started as a 100% subsidiary of Tata Oil Mills (Tomco), part of the Tata Group; it was named after the French opera Lakmé, which itself is the French form of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, also renowned for her beauty.

Les fêtes de Polymnie

The second entrée, L'histoire ("History"), tells the story of the Hellenistic king of Syria Seleucus I Nicator, who gives up his fiancée Stratonice when he learns his son Antiochus I Soter is passionately in love with her (this tale was also the subject of a later 18th century French opera, Étienne Méhul's Stratonice).

Louis Varney

Louis Varney was the son of Alphonse Varney, a French conductor at the Bouffes-Parisiens and at the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux, he was also invited to conduct the "French Opera Season" abroad, notably in New Orleans, Louisiana, and this is how Louis came to be born there in 1844.

Louise Beaudet

After performing in amateur productions of H.M.S. Pinafore, she was hired by Maurice Grau's French Opera Company.

Pierre Gaveaux

Pierre Gaveaux (9 October 1761 – 5 February 1825) was a French operatic tenor and composer, notable for creating the role of Jason in Cherubini's Médée and for composing the first operatic version of the story that later found fame as Fidelio.

Renée Doria

Renée Doria (born 13 February 1921) is a French opera singer, one of the leading lyric coloratura sopranos of her era in France.