Salammbô (opera)

"Salammbô" is an opera in five acts composed by Ernest Reyer to a French libretto by Camille du Locle. It is based on the novel "Salammbô" by Gustave Flaubert (1862). The opera was first performed at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels on 10 February 1890. The American premiere was at the French Opera House in New Orleans on 25 January 1900.

Roles

etting

*Place: Carthage
*Time: 240 BC

Other opera adaptations

In 1863, Modest Mussorgsky also started writing text and music for an opera based on Flaubert's novel, but he never managed to complete the work. Other versions were written by V Fornari (1881), Niccolo Massa (1886), Eugeniusz Morawski-Dąbrowa, Josef Matthias Hauer (1930), Alfredo Cuscinà (1931), Veselin Stoyanov (1940) and Franco Casavola (1948). Contemporary French composer Philippe Fénélon's "Salammbô" was first performed in the Opéra Bastille in 1998.

Trivia

For the film score of Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane", Bernard Herrmann wrote an aria for the fictional opera "Salammbô" performed by Kane's mistress, Susan Alexander. According to Tim Dirks it was actually John Houseman who composed the aria for the "Citizen Kane" opera called "Salammbo".

References

* [http://www.amadeusonline.net/almanacco.php?Start=0&Giorno=10&Mese=02&Anno=1890&Giornata=&Testo=&Parola=Stringa Amadeus Almanac, accessed 25 September 2008]
*Warrack, John and West, Ewan (1992), "The Oxford Dictionary of Opera", 782 pages, ISBN 0-19-869164-5