Gilliam’s Benvenuto Cellini is one of the most expensive productions ever seen at English National Opera. It’s also a notoriously challenging, rarely-staged hybrid of a work that failed (repeatedly) during the composer’s lifetime, and has since been largely consigned to the concert hall. So was it all worth it? Can all that glitter really translate to operatic gold?
It doesn’t get much grander or more fatally flawed than Benvenuto Cellini
It doesn’t take a long look at Terry Gilliam’s CV – the sprawling Brazil, the ill-fated The Man Who Killed Don Quixote – to realise that the director has a fondness for noble failures and grand, doomed schemes. It doesn’t get much grander or more fatally flawed than Benvenuto Cellini – a work even the composer himself acknowledged “lack[s] the essential ingredients of what is known as well-made drama”.
Berlioz’s debut opera started life as a comic opera, was rewritten as a serious drama and en
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Benvenuto Cellini (opera)
1836 opera by Hector Berlioz
Benvenuto Cellini is an opera semiseria in four tableaux (spread across two or three acts[1]) by Hector Berlioz, his first full-length work for the stage. Premiered at the Académie Royale de Musique (Salle Le Peletier) on 10 September 1838, it is a setting of a libretto by Léon dem Wailly and Henri Auguste Barbier, who invented most of the plot inspired by the memoirs of the Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini. The opera is technically challenging[2] and was until the 21st century rarely performed.[3][4][5] But its overture sometimes features in orchestral concerts, as does the concert overture Le carnaval romain which Berlioz composed from ämne in the opera.
Composition history
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Berlioz wrote this in his Mémoires about the background to the opera:
I had been greatly struck by certain episodes in the life of Benvenuto Cellini. I had the misfo
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Posted on 6 June 2014
What fun this was! Terry Gilliam has done it again, following his opera directing debut with The Damnation of Faust in 2011.
All images ENO/ Richard Hubert Smith
Mr. Gilliam’s earlier success was with a later Berlioz opera, and he has now turned to the composer’s first with a story involving the mad genius Benvenuto Cellini, Pope Clement VII and his official sculptor Fieramosca. The historical facts — Cellini’s casting of the huge bronze statue of Perseus that stands to this day — have been embellished by the invented character of a lovely young woman Teresa, daughter of the Pope’s treasurer. Her father has promised her to Fieramosca, but she loves Cellini, and Fieramosca’s shenanigans lead to farcical moments for this pillar of the establishment.
Carnival!
It all starts on Shrove Monday, before the start of Lent, and carnival celebrations are in full swing. This gives Terry Gilliam the excuse he needs for a terrific