Opera
- Samuel Adler – The Outcast of Poker Flat
- Jurriaan Andriessen – Kalchas
- Claude Arrieu – La cabine téléphonique (March 15, 1959, RTF)
- Henk Badings – Salto mortale (TV chamber opera), Nederlandse Televisie Sichting, June 19, 1959
- Samuel Barber – A Hand of Bridge
- Grażyna Bacewicz – Przygoda króla Artura
- Karl-Birger Blomdahl – Aniara
- Carlos Chávez – Love Propitiated October 28, 1959, Mexico City (revised version of Panfilo e Lauretta)
- Paul Dessau – Puntila
- Ferenc Farkas – Paradies der Schwiegersöhne
- Nicolas Flagello – The Judgment of St Francis
- Lukas Foss – Introductions and Goodbyes (a nine-minute opera, libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti)
- Peggy Glanville-Hicks – The Glittering Gate (New York, May 15, 1959)
- Jakov Gotovac – Stanac
- Alan Hovhaness – Blue Flame, op. 172
- Sven-Eric Johanson – Kunskapens vin
- Elizabeth Maconchy – The Sofa
- Carl Orff – Oedipus der Tyrann (Stuttgart, December 11, 1959)
- Francis Poulenc – La Voix humaine
Read more about this topic: 1959 In Music
Famous quotes containing the word opera:
“Opera once was an important social instrument—especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television.”
—Luciano Berio (b. 1925)
“The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.”
—Jean De La Bruyère (1645–1696)
“I have witnessed, and greatly enjoyed, the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)