In the Theater Museum of Vienna in the Eroica Hall, I was both a fortunate participant and observer of a wonderful talk given by Christa Ludwig, a former opera star about her time in the limelight together with Maria Callus.
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At the end of the Christa Ludwig’s talk, Vienn State Opera principal dancer Simona Noja danced a short solo a five minute excerpt from Maria Callus’s famous performance of Violetta (Verdi’s La Traviata)…. I shot vertically as I find the horizontal frame of a television extremely unattractive for a dance solo, particularly in a room like the Eroica Sall in the Austrian Theatre Museum.
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I shot vertically as I find the horizontal frame of a television extremely unattractive for a dance solo, particularly in a room like the Eroica Sall in the Austrian Theatre Museum…. For more pictures of Simona Noja as Maria Callas, please visit my friend photographer Anton Hoellersberger who took some wonderful photographs during the filming.
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Aware of his audience – in large part families with children – Toulon shifts the focus from the grands pas of the fairies into some kind of excursion into a Disney-like world of fairytales…. It makes a nice allusion to the end of Charles Perrault’s and Battista’s original versions of the Sleeping Beauty story (dropped in the Brother Grimm’s Dörnroschen, the Petipa Sleeping Beauty and in the Disney film – which appears to be based closely on the Petipa ballet in turn based on the first half of Perrault.
3 CommentsI haven’t been able to find a definitive version of the original Maurius Petipa and Ivan Vsevolozhsky libretto to which Pyotr Tschaikowsky composed the original score. Here is Marinsky Theatre Director’s Vsevolozhsky’s comment on the origins of the ballet: I conceived the idea of writing a libretto on La Belle au bois dormant after Perrault’s tale. I want to do the mise-en-scène in the style of Louis XIV. Here the musical imagination can be carried away, and melodies composed in the spirit of Lully, Bach, Rameau, etc., etc. In the last act indispensably necessary is a quadrille of all of…
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THE SLEEPING BEAUTY IN THE WOODS Charles Perrault Once upon a time there was a king and a queen, who were very sorry that they had no children,—so sorry that it cannot be told. At last, however, the Queen had a daughter. There was a very fine christening; and the Princess had for her godmothers all the fairies they could find in the whole kingdom (there were seven of them), so that every one of them might confer a gift upon her, as was the custom of fairies in those days. By this means the Princess had all the perfections…
1 CommentSUN, MOON, AND TALIA Fifth Diversion of the Fifth Day There once lived a great lord who was blessed with the birth of a beautiful infant daughter, whom he named Talia. The lord sent for wise men and astrologers to foretell what fate had in store for his daughter, and after they had consulted together and cast her horoscope, they told the lord that Talia would be put in great danger by a splinter of flax. The lord then decreed that no flax or hemp, or anything of the kind, should be brought into the house; he thought that by…
38 CommentsBriar-Rose A long time ago there were a King and Queen who said every day, “Ah, if only we had a child!” but they never had one.
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