Temistocle Solera

Temistocle Solera (25 December 1815 – 21 April 1878) was an Italian opera composer and librettist.

Life and career

He was born in Ferrara. He received his education at the Imperial College in Vienna and at the University of Pavia. Throughout his life he actively participated in anti-Austrian resistance. At one point, he was incarcerated for his activities. He completed several literary works, including the novel Michelino, his style influenced by Alessandro Manzoni. He then found work as a librettist; his collaboration with the composer Giuseppe Verdi began in 1839 and lasted for a few years.

Solera then found work as the impresario for the Royal Theatre in Madrid. He died in Milan in 1878.

List of major works

Composer

Auguste Anicet-Bourgeois

Auguste Anicet, later Auguste Anicet-Bourgeois (25 December 1806– 12 January 1871) was a French dramatist. He was born in Paris.

The first play to bear his name is L'Ami et le mari, ou le Nouvel Amphitryon, a vaudeville in one act. It was produced in 1825, when the author was still in his teens.

Over the course of his career he was credited in the writing of nearly 200 plays, as many as ten a year. However the nature of theatrical collaboration at this time was such that the extent of his contribution to any given play is debatable. In fact it is known that he assisted Alexandre Dumas in the writing of several plays (Térésa, Angèle, Le Mari de la Veuve, La Vénitienne), sometimes without acknowledgement. He is the subject of an anecdote in Dumas's "Comment je devins auteur dramatique" ("How I became a Dramatist"), published in 1833 in Revue des Deux Mondes. Other writers with whom he worked were Philippe Dumanoir, Julien de Mallian, Victor Ducange, Francis Cornue, Lockroy, Édouard Brisebarre, Michel Masson and Paul Féval. One of his plays was adapted for the English stage as The Black Doctor (1846), a vehicle for Ira Aldridge.

Antonio Cortesi

Antonio Cortesi (December 1796 – April 1879) was an Italian ballet dancer, choreographer, and composer. He was particularly known for the numerous ballets which he created and choreographed in the first half of the 19th Century for major Italian theatres, including La Scala, La Fenice, and the Teatro Regio in Turin.

Cortesi was born in Pavia, the son of the dancer and choreographer Giuseppe Cortesi and the ballerina Margherita Reggini.

Ballets

Many of Cortesi's ballets had music expressly composed for them by Luigi Maria Viviani. Others used existing pieces of music by a variety of composers, chosen and arranged by Cortesi. On occasion he composed some of the music himself, especially for his one-act ballets. Ballets devised and choreographed by Cortesi include:

Teatro Regio

Teatro Regio (Italian for ‘Royal Theatre’) may refer to two opera houses in Italy:

It may also be a reference to the 18th-century opera house in Milan that is now replaced by La Scala:

Teatro Regio (Parma)

The Teatro Regio di Parma, originally constructed as the Nuovo Teatro Ducale (New Ducal Theatre), is an opera house and opera company in Parma, Italy.

Replacing an obsolete house, the new Ducale achieved prominence in the years after 1829, and especially so after the composer Giuseppe Verdi, who was born near Busseto, some thirty kilometres away, had achieved fame. Also well known in Parma was the conductor Arturo Toscanini, was born there in 1867.

As has been noted by Lee Marshall, "while not as well known as La Scala in Milan or La Fenice in Venice, the city’s Teatro Regio....is considered by opera buffs to be one of the true homes of the great Italian tradition, and the well-informed audience is famous for giving voice to its approval or disapproval – not just from the gallery."

The 1,400-seat auditorium, with four tiers of boxes topped by a gallery, was inaugurated on 16 May 1829 when it presented the premiere of Vincenzo Bellini's Zaira, a production which was staged another seven times, although it did not prove to be popular with the Parma audiences. Initially Rossini had been invited to compose a work for the inauguration of the house, but he was too busy and so the task fell to Bellini. However, that inaugural season saw three Rossini operas staged, including Moïse et Pharaon, Semiramide, and Il barbiere di Siviglia.