Almost certainly.  Which reminds me - Oberon was written as a showcase for the stage machinery at Covent Garden, and designed to wow a pantomime audience with its rapid changes of scenery.

And Freischutz depends on special effects for the Wolf's Glen scene - the score specifying in some detail the apparitions that appear while Samiel is casting the bullets. Although, really, everything you need is in the extraordinary music.

I've just been listening to Wozzeck, and so far I notice that a perfectly conventional sunset and dusk in Act 1 Scene 2 gets Wozzeck even more nervy than so far.  The stage directions are fairly precise about the state of the skies.

I have seen it once many years ago, but this is the first time I've set out to get to know it.  Is it one of those works they never do at the ENO (like Norma)?

Nobody told me Schonberg was like that!!!

Bang on the money as ever, IGI .  Kristine Ciesinki as Marie, John Treleaven as the Drum Major. My recollection is that it was OK but not one to write home about. Maxwell was the best thing in it, or at least his was the only performance that has stuck in the memory.

I have a recollection that ENO had a later crack at WOZZECK, as part of their attempt to launch a second stage for small-scale work at LBH ("Lilian Baylis House", the ENO rehearsal studios which had formerly been the EMI recording studios in W Hampstead).   I don't know if this production was complete or "workshop", but I believe Malcolm Rivers (one of those singers who are believed to be manifestations of ignored greatness, I think every opera house has 1-2 of them) was given a crack at the title role?   This was all after my time and when I was no longer living in London, so it's on the basis of the luvvie grapevine and might be wildly inaccurate?   The attempt to start an ENO version of the ROH's Linbury was not a success, and fell foul of the funding/management crisis in the main house...  the whole thing was quietly swept under the carpet later.

There was (and probably still is) an informal agreement between ENO and the ROH that they wouldn't premiere new productions of the same works against each other (by and large).  This might account for ENO not doing WOZZECK recently, as their own ex-staffer Keith Warner staged a rather successful production at the ROH in 2002.


Surely the crowning glory of that stage direction?  They ought to make "galloping unobtrusively" a Stanislavskian exercise, to see exactly how it could be achieved in practice?     Thanks to GG for it

My own humble entry is the closing scene of JONNY SPIELT AUF, set at the station.  Daniello, the violin virtuoso, fails to prevent Anita (with whom he's had an affair) returning to her lover Max...   in the ensuiing struggle Daniello falls under an arriving train and is killed.  Max & Anita board the train and set off to begin a new life in America,  at which point the Station Clock Tower opens to reveal Jonny and his jazz-band, with Jonny playing Daniello's stolen Amati.


There is nothing a resourceful SM cannot do, provided with an appropriate quantity of duct tape.


DM has covered a huge amount in his career, not only G&S (which he does with great panache).  He's sung almost all the dramatic baritone roles, and his Sharpless for WNO was probably the best I've ever seen anywhere.    He sang many of the Janacek roles in the WNO/SO cycle,  including a terrifying Shishkov in HOUSE OF THE DEAD, and a viciously cold-blooded Jaroslav Prus.  I vividly remember his performance as Anckaerstrom with WNO, which I saw at the old Southampton Gaumont.  An artiste to be reckoned with!

Back to the question, and the plot doesn't depend on it but I seem to remember a glorious sunset over Lake Lucerne called for at the end of Guilliaume Tell.  Bit odd symbolising a brave new democratic world with a sunset, but operatically it was the composer's, poor old thing.

(I imagine Rossini would now be called a manic depressive.)

He's also memorably created some roles in modern works - the one which springs to mind being Don Perlimpin in Simon Holt's Lorca opera The Nightingale's to Blame.

If my memory of a programme note at the 2001 Buxton Festival serves me, he has - over the years - sung three different roles in Verdi's Un giorno di regno.

Early this decade he took over the directorship of the National Opera Studio, and on one occasion at the annual Showcase performance, he was required to fill in for an indisposed student in an extract from L'assedio de Calais.  He announced this to the audience at the start of the performance: "Ladies and gentlemen, due to the indisposition of Mr. (whoever it was), the role of Edmundo will be sung tonight by Mr. Donald Maxwell.  Now the complication in this matter is that Mr. (whoever it was) is a tenor, and I am not one.  However, necessity is the mother of tight trousers."