The Opera Barga Festival is an annual opera festival held in July in the town of Barga, Italy. Founded in 1967 by Peter Gellhorn and Lorenzo Malfatti, its performances take place in the late 18th Century theatre, Teatro dei Differenti which seats 289. (Between 1982 and 1998, the theatre was taken over by the town administration and closed for renovations.)
The main artistic aim of the festival is to perform works from the Baroque era - in addition to modern operas - and, since its inception, it has staged more than 40 operas, many being heard for the first time in modern times. The performers are young musicians taking part in the festival's summer school. Past participants have included the Welsh operatic tenor Dennis O'Neill, and the bass-baritone, John Del Carlo.
Vivaldi's operas play an important role in this festival. In 2005, his totally unknown opera, Motezuma, was due to have been performed. The score had been discovered in Kiev in the Ukraine as part of the collection of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin which had been looted towards the end of World War ll. Due to a complex copyright dispute, a German court issued an injunction to prevent the performance, and substitute music from other Vivaldi operas was presented along with the original text.
Famous quotes containing the words opera and/or festival:
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
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“Sabbath. A weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.”
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