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BRITISH OPERA

No Dark Ages to separate the antiquity from the Renaissance?

Learn how and why Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt were invented and crafted during Renaissance. Discover the Old Testament as a veiled rendition of events of Middle Ages written centuries after the New Testament. Perceive the Crusaders as contemporaries of The Crucifixion punishing the tormentors of the Messiah. What if Jesus Christ was born in 1053 and crucified in 1086 AD?

Sounds unbelievable? Not after you've read "History: Fiction or Science?" by Anatoly Fomenko, leading mathematician of our time. He follows in steps of Sir Isaac Newton, finds clear evidence of falsification of History by clergy and humanists. Armed with computers, astronomy and statistics he proves the history of humankind to be both dramatically different and drastically shorter than generally presumed.

Opera in England

England, like other European countries apart from Germany, France and Italy, lacked an established national tradition of opera until the 20th century. Henry Purcell, in the later 17 th century, wrote a wealth of incidental music and contributed to a genre recent scholars have called semi -opera , an amalgamation of spoken drama and a strong and often supernatural musical element. It was Italian opera, however, that entertained the fashionable world in the 18 th century, in spite of the damaging effect of the anti- opera of John Gay, The Beggar's Opera . This began a new form, the English ballad opera, with its use of popular melodies. The musical borrowings, at least, must recall the practice of the Paris Fair Theatres.

19th Century

While there were English, Scottish and Irish composers of opera, there is relatively little trace of their work in continuing repertoire. Two Irish composers, however, Balfe and Wallace, are remembered, respectively, for The Bohemian Girl and Maritana staged in London in the 1840s. Another composer of paternal Irish origin, Arthur Sullivan, survives triumphantly in his operettas, collaborations with W. S. Gilbert.

National Opera

The 20 th century brought an element of national opera through Vaughan Williams, Holst and others. Their work in this form was largely for local audiences. A more markedly international school of English opera started with Britten's opera Peter Grimes in 1945. The subject was local but its implications, as a study of an outsider in a closed community, were much wider. This was followed by a remarkable series of works, chamber operas and operas for the larger stage, culminating in Death in Venice , based on the novella by Thomas Mann. Another element in English opera of the later 20 th century has been provided by Michael Tippett and by a younger generation of composers in music- theatre and in work for the opera- house.

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