 09/01/2006
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| The first opera? That is the way that Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo is generally presented, for an ordered mind likes to have a point of departure, if not an end. The date of the performance, 1607, tends to comfort such a mind: the beginning of a century, the beginning of a genre, the birth of a new musical era that seems not to be defunct. |
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| 07/01/2006
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| In 1645 the English diarist John Evelyn visited Venice, where he encountered a form of entertainment apparently new to him: "Comedies & other plays represented in Recitative Music by the most excellent Musitians vocal & Instrumental, together with variety of Seeanes painted & contrived with no lesse art of Perspective, and Machines, for flying in the aire, & other wonderful motions." |
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| 15/12/2005
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| He was born Georg Friederich Handel, son of a barber-surgeon who intended him for the law. At first he practised music clandestinely, but his father was encouraged to allow him to study and he became a pupil of Zachow, the principal organist in Halle. |
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| 03/01/2006
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| In January 2000, the opera Griselda by Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725) was staged at the Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden, constituting what can only be described as a landmark event in the world of opera. Three years later came the studio recording. |
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