Ever since he had first begun to study music and to teach it, Rousseau had dreamed of piercing through to fame as the result of a successful opera.

But he recalled that Rameau had once had a private performance of his opera Armide, behind closed doors, just for himself alone.

Then later I had quit my safe, secure five-a-week spot on a network soap opera to take a part in this play.

Salieri also had never truly mastered the German language, and he now felt no longer competent to continue as assistant opera director.

The opera Les Danaïdes ( The Danaids ) is a five-act tragédie lyrique ; the plot was based on an ancient Greek legend that had been the basis for the first play in a trilogy by Aeschylus, entitled The Suppliants.

The original commission that reached Salieri in 1783 – 84 was to assist Gluck in finishing a work for Paris that had been all but completed ; in reality, Gluck had failed to notate any of the score for the new opera and gave the entire project over to his young friend.

Les Danaïdes followed in the tradition of reform that Gluck had begun in the 1760s and that Salieri had emulated in his earlier opera Armida.

Shortly after this success Joseph II had Mozart and Salieri each contribute a one-act opera and / or singspiel for production at a banquet in 1786.

For example, when Salieri was appointed Kapellmeister in 1788 he revived Figaro instead of bringing out a new opera of his own ; and when he went to the coronation festivities for Leopold II in 1790 he had no fewer than three Mozart masses in his luggage.

She notes that she too once had dreams, having come to Vienna to study opera singing with Salieri.

The opera had its premiere in Leipzig in March 1930 and played in Berlin in December of the following year.

However, two years earlier, Umlauf had watched as the composer's attempt to conduct a dress rehearsal of his opera Fidelio ended in disaster.

The ghostly music may have had its roots in sketches for a Macbeth opera that Beethoven was contemplating at the time.

For a compilation album of the Glenmark duo Gemini, Andersson had Björn Ulvaeus write new Swedish lyrics for the re-recording of two old songs ; Ulvaeus also wrote new English lyrics to older Swedish language songs for opera singer Anne Sofie von Otter tribute album " I Let The Music Speak ".

Following the 1919 revolution, he was pressured by the new Soviet government to remove the name of the librettist Béla Balázs from the opera ( Chalmers 1995, 123 ), as he was blacklisted and had left the country for Vienna.

Its style is clearly reflective of the mature Haydn and Mozart, and its instrumentation gave it a weight that had not yet been felt in the grand opera.

Although the castrato ( or musico ) predates opera, there is some evidence that castrati had parts in the earliest operas.

Although female roles were performed by castrati in some of the papal states, this was increasingly rare ; by 1680, they had supplanted " normal " male voices in lead roles, and retained their position as primo uomo for about a hundred years ; an Italian opera not featuring at least one renowned castrato in a lead part would be doomed to fail.

The censors had the general superintendence of all the public buildings and works ( opera publica ), and to meet the expenses connected with this part of their duties, the senate voted them a certain sum of money or certain revenues, to which they were restricted, but which they might at the same time employ according to their discretion.

On 17 September 2010 Coronation Street entered the Guinness World Records book as the world's longest-running television soap opera after the American soap opera As the World Turns had its final episode.

She has been made the heroine of a tragedy by François Ponsard, Agnès de Méranie, and of an opera by Vincenzo Bellini, La straniera.

A complete opera composed in 1769 ( presumably as a culminating study ) La vestale ( The Vestal Virgin ) has also been lost.

In February 1684 he became Maestro di Cappella to the viceroy of Naples, perhaps through the influence of his sister, an opera singer, who might have been the mistress of an influential Neapolitan noble.

The song " Kärlekens Tid "-performed by Helen Sjöholm with BAO !--has also been performed in English by opera baritone Bryn Terfel.

The term ballad opera has also been used to describe musicals using folk music, such as The Martins and the Coys in 1944, and Peter Bellamy's The Transports in 1977.

Since the Renaissance the myth of Diana has often been represented in the visual and dramatic arts, including the opera L ' arbore di Diana.

The tale has been adapted to various media, most notably the opera Hänsel und Gretel ( opera ) | Hänsel und Gretel ( 1893 ) by Engelbert Humperdinck and a stop-motion animated feature film based on the opera.

No really adequate recording has been made of Schmidt's second and last opera Fredigundis, of which there has been but one " unauthorized " release in the early 1980s on the Voce Label of an Austrian Radio broadcast of a 1979 Vienna performance under the direction of Ernst Märzendorfer.

Until his retirement in 1829, Rossini had been the most popular opera composer in history.

Rossini, who had been considering the subject of Faust for a new opera, did return, however, to Paris in November of that year.

Puccini had been considering an opera on this theme since he saw the play Tosca by Victorien Sardou in 1889, when he wrote to his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, begging him to get Sardou's permission for the work to be made into an opera: " I see in this Tosca the opera I need, with no overblown proportions, no elaborate spectacle, nor will it call for the usual excessive amount of music.

However, the opera has been acclaimed for its incorporation of advanced harmonic language and rhythmic complexity into the Italian operatic form.

Moreover, the firm of Ricordi had declined the score of the opera, which had been taken up by their rival, Lorenzo Sonzogno, who arranged the first performance in neutral Monaco.

Verdi's grand opera, Aida, is sometimes thought to have been commissioned for the celebration of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, but, according to one major critic, Verdi turned down the Khedive's invitation to write an " ode " for the new opera house he was planning to inaugurate as part of the canal opening festivities.

The composition of his chamber opera Dido and Aeneas, which forms a very important landmark in the history of English dramatic music, has been attributed to this period, and its earliest production may well have predated the documented one of 1689.

Gluck feared that the Parisian critics would denounce the opera by a young composer known mostly for comic pieces and so the opera was originally billed in the press as being a new work by Gluck with some assistance from Antonio Salieri, then shortly before the premiere of the opera the Parisian press reported that the work was to be partly by Gluck and partly by Salieri, and finally after popular and critical success were won on stage the opera was acknowledged in a letter to the public by Gluck as being wholly by the young Antonio.

Mozart's opera Don Giovanni was originally intended to be performed in honor of Anton and his wife for a visit to Prague on 14 October 1787, as they traveled between Dresden and Vienna, and librettos were printed with dedication to them.

Five months after the release of Tommy, The Kinks released another concept album, Arthur ( Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire ) ( September 1969 ), written by Ray Davies ; though considered by some a rock opera, it was originally conceived as the score for a proposed but never realised BBC television drama.

" Heart of Oak " was originally written as an opera.

The members of the Camerata considered that the " chorus " parts of Greek dramas were originally sung, and possibly even the entire text of all roles ; opera was thus conceived as a way of " restoring " this situation.

The popularity of Peyton Place prompted the CBS network to spin off popular As the World Turns character Lisa Miller into her own evening soap opera, Our Private World ( originally titled " The Woman Lisa " in its planning stages ).

" Alabama Song " was written and composed by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in 1927, for their opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny ( Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny ); " Back Door Man " was written by Willie Dixon and originally recorded by Howlin ' Wolf.

* February 15 – Clara, Lu & Em, generally regarded as the first daytime network soap opera, debuts in its morning time slot over the Blue Network of NBC Radio, having originally been a late evening program.

Verdi originally chose not to write an overture for the opera, but merely a brief orchestral prelude.

The idea of reducing the scope and scale of Don Carlos had originally come to Verdi in 1875, partly as a result of his having heard reports of productions, such as Costa's, which had removed Act 1 and the ballet and introduced cuts to other parts of the opera.

Wagner originally wrote the work to be performed without intermission – an example of his efforts to break with tradition – and, while today's opera houses sometimes still follow this directive, it is also performed in a three-act version.

Many of the originally pornographic French ( and Viennese ) operettas were later played in a toned-down, " classical " version, which is how audiences today are mostly presented with the genre — in an opera house with opera singers, rather than in a private theatre with courtesans in the lead roles.

Overture ( French ouverture ; German Ouvertüre, Vorspiel ; Italian overtura ; i. e. opening ) in music is the term originally applied to the instrumental introduction to an opera.

His unfinished opera Die drei Pintos ( The Three Pintos ) was originally given by Weber's widow to Giacomo Meyerbeer for completion ; it was eventually completed by Gustav Mahler, who conducted the first performance in this form in Leipzig on 20 January 1888.

His first surviving opera, Cox and Box ( 1866 ), was originally written for a private performance.

Ruddigore ; or, The Witch's Curse, originally called Ruddygore, is a comic opera in two acts, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert.

During these years Holst also became interested in Hindu mysticism and spirituality, and this interest led to the composition of several works set to translations of Sanskrit texts, including: Sita ( 1899 – 1906 ), a three-act opera based on an episode in the Ramayana ; Sāvitri ( 1908 ), a chamber opera based on a tale from the Mahabharata ; 4 groups of Hymns from the Rig Veda ( 1908 – 14 ); and two texts originally by Kalidasa: Two Eastern Pictures ( 1909 – 10 ) and The Cloud Messenger ( 1913 ).

* The Dales, a BBC radio soap opera originally called Mrs Dale's Diary

The daytime soap opera The Edge of Night was originally meant to be a daytime version of Perry Mason, until Gardner had a falling-out with CBS network officials.