Opera
- Jack Beeson - Hello, Out There
- Benjamin Britten - The Turn of the Screw
- Valentino Bucchi – Il contrabasso (Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, 20 June)
- Aaron Copland - The Tender Land
- Paul Hindemith - Neues vom Tage (revision)
- Bohuslav Martinů - Mirandolina
- Jerome Moross - The Golden Apple
- William Walton - Troilus and Cressida
Read more about this topic: 1954 In Music
Famous quotes containing the word opera:
“The real exertion in the case of an opera singer lies not so much in her singing as in her acting of a role, for nearly every modern opera makes great dramatic and physical demands.”
—Maria Jeritza (1887–1982)
“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.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“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)