Opera in Vienna - Gassmann, Mozart, Donizetti, Puccini

Not content with being the most important city in the history of western music, Vienna continues to nurture an exceptionally active cultural life of a high level of excellence. Music and opera are cherished by government and citizens in happy concord perhaps more than anywhere else in the world. 

In common with many great cities, Vienna boasts three major opera houses, and our tour takes in all of them. The Staatsoper, Musiktheater an der Wien and Volksoper all have their own distinctive aesthetics and these days are all under dynamic leaderships – witness their vibrant programming.

The first two of the operas we’ll take in on this tour were both premiered in Vienna, both indeed at another famous venue: the Burgtheater, these days the city’s leading drama stage and, in effect, Austria’s national theatre. Leopold Gassmann’s comedy L’opera seria pokes fun at the operatic conventions of the day (1769), its libretto by Ranieri de’ Calzabigi parodying his celebrated senior, Pietro Metastasio. As a ‘meta-opera’, it anticipates such well-loved works as Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos by a century and a half. It will be staged at the Theater an der Wien, which occupies a special place in Viennese music history and is the site of many operatic premieres, from Salieri’s last opera onwards. Beethoven lived in rooms at the theatre for a period and many of his works were first heard there, including the first version of his great opera Fidelio. Subsequent premieres there included Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus and The Gypsy Baron, and Lehár’s The Merry Widow.

Gassmann’s premiere coincided with the emergence of Mozart, who in 1786 took Vienna by storm with his incomparable Le nozze di Figaro, the first of his three collaborations with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. We’ll see it at the Volksoper — the ‘people’s opera’, located a little way out from Vienna’s grand centre but nevertheless an integral part of the city’s operatic life — in a recent new production by that theatre’s artistic director, Lotte de Beer.

Two popular Italian operas take us to the Staatsoper, one of the high temples of international opera. Don Pasquale was Donizetti’s last operatic comedy, a ‘dramma buffo’ premiered on Paris in 1843 with a cast including four of the most celebrated singers of the day. It remains one of the most popular Italian comic operas and was an immediate success — unlike the now well-loved Madama Butterfly, which flopped at its La Scala premiere in 1904 but after Puccini’s revisions quickly worked its way into audiences’ affections.

All will be introduced during the daily session of talks and discussions. There are also guided tours on foot to a choice selection of Vienna’s art, architecture and musical heritage, as well as plenty of free time for rest, recuperation and preparation for the next performance.