Nadia Boulanger: La Ville Morte

[mikehopf]

Sunday night on Swedish Radio P2, La Ville Morte .... an opera by Nadia Boulanger dating from 1909:

https://en.opera.se/forestallningar/la-ville-morte-2019-2020/

[BerlinExpat]

As an educator, Nadia Boulanger is one of the most influential people in the musical life of the 20th century. Musicians and composers from all over the world sought her out in Paris and among her students are Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, Astor Piazzolla, Quincy Jones and Philip Glass.
As a composer, Nadia Boulanger is less known, but then she stopped composing as early as the 1920s. She wrote the opera La ville morte in close collaboration with pianist and mentor Raoul Pugno when she was twenty years old. The premiere was scheduled for 1914, but the outbreak of the First World War put a sting on the wheel. In addition, the score and orchestral parts were destroyed in 1917 when the building where they were stored was hit by a bomb. Almost a century later, the opera was orchestrated on the basis of a preserved piano excerpt and premiered in Italy in 2005. The performance of the Gothenburg Opera will be the second ever.
La ville morte (The Dead City) is based on a play by the Italian Gabriele D'Annunzio from 1899 who explores, in symbolic spirit, the connection between outer and inner reality, ideas that lay in the past. In the field of music, for example, you can draw parallels to Debussy's opera Pélleas and Mélisande based on the play of the symbolist Maurice Maeterlink's by the same name. In La morte, there are requests for forbidden overtones in the background of the search for the Greek king Agamemnon's grave outside Mycenae and the poetic text is filled with references to ancient tragedies such as Antigone and Orestia.

In the roles:
Hebé - Catherine Karnèus
Anne - Matilda Paulsson
Leonard - Markus Pettersson
Alexandre - Anton Ljungqvist
Amman - Natallia Salavei
Gothenburg Opera's choir and youth choir. Gothenburg Opera Orchestra.
Conductor: Anna-Maria Helsing.
Live broadcast from the Gothenburg Opera.