Taking the advice of my inner Don, I decided to attend the sym-posium, “Don Giovanni and Casanova,” which is held every year in a different Italian city, this time in Venice. I go there with a young Polish woman, Emilia, a student of mine from many years ago. She is almost fifty now but is still as playful, and sometimes as acerbic, as she once was. The thea…
When Carl Maria von Weber conducted Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Dresden in the 1820s, one of the people sitting in the auditorium was the Italian singer Luigi Bassi who had created the title role back in 1787. And he was not pleased with what he saw. ‘Bassi generally passed the judgement on all Don Giovannis whom he and I saw performing’, his friend Count Hohenthal recalled a few years afte…
The present research intends to trace the presence of opera and reconstruct the organisa-tional system in the theatres situated along the coastline of present-day Croatia in the period immediately following the constitution of the first Diet of Dalmatia (1861) until the end of the First World War. The period is sufficiently broad to permit us to understand and define the workings of both the im…