Boccaccio
Music by Franz von Suppé · libretto by Camillo Walzel · premiered 1879 · at Carltheater
Boccaccio, oder Der Prinz von Palermo (Boccaccio, or the Prince of Palermo) is an operetta in three acts by Franz von Suppé to a German libretto by Camillo Walzel and Richard Genée, based on the play by Jean-François Bayard, Adolphe de Leuven, Léon Lévy Brunswick and Arthur de Beauplan, based in turn on The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. Despite the opera's clear links to the Viennese opera tradition, Suppé's opera takes most of its style from Italian opera. The opera was begun somewhere around the fall of 1878 and first published in 1879 by the August Cranz company and performed at the Carltheater, Vienna, on 1 February 1879. An English translation and adaptation was completed in 1880 by Dexter Smith and later by Oscar Weil and Gustav Hinrichs around 1883. The first contemporary edit of the work occurred in 1950 for the premiere of the work at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, with several more iterations occurring through the 20th century. In 1940, Boccaccio was made into a film by American-born Italian film director Marcello Albani.
Text from the Wikipedia article "Boccaccio (operetta)", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
About the Composer
Franz von Suppé, born Francesco Ezechiele Ermenegildo de Suppé (18 April 1819 – 21 May 1895) was an Austrian composer of light operas and other theatre music. He came from the Kingdom of Dalmatia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now part of Croatia). A composer and conductor of the Romantic period, he is notable for his four dozen operettas, including the first operetta to a German libretto. Some of them remain in the repertory, particularly in German-speaking countries, and he composed a substantial quantity of church music, but he is now chiefly known for his overtures, which remain popular in the concert hall and on record. Among the best-known are Poet and Peasant, Light Cavalry, Morning,…
Text from the Wikipedia article "Franz von Suppé", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Other Operas by Franz von Suppé
- Die schöne Galathée
- Fatinitza (1861)
- Leichte Kavallerie (1866)
- Des Matrosen Heimkehr (1879)
- Donna Juanita (1880)
- Dichter und Bauer (1900)