Held annually, the Bal des Petits Lits Blancs was a charity gala benefitting orphaned children in France. Here, a glamorous socialite waves a symbolic white bed sheet from within her opera box.
Cocorico was a magazine published between 1898 and 1902. As a literary and artistic publication, its main role was to promote the Art Nouveau movement and its primary artists included Grun, Mucha, Steinlen, de Feure, Villon and many others. In all, there were 63 issues. The name of the periodical is the French term for “cock-a-doodle-doo,” the crowing of a rooster.The light opera by Ganne bearing the same title as the well-known magazine is justly forgotten and the poster by Gruen extremely rare.
Die Fledermaus (The Bat) is an operetta composed by Johann Strauss II to a German libretto by Karl Haffner and Richard Genée. For the staging of this classic operetta, artist George Dola (1872-1950) chose to depict Prince Orloffsky’s ball from the second act. This was the first time Paris saw this internationally acclaimed work, which by rights should have been introduced there thirty years earlier. It seems that in 1872, Johann Strauss visited Paris and saw a stage play titled “Le Reveillon”. He immediately approached the authors for the rights to put music to the piece, but they refused, hoping to sell the idea instead to Jacques Offenback. Strauss went home to Vienna and transformed the play into the operetta “Die Fledermaus”. Thirty years of legal wrangling ensued until finally, in 1904, by which time both Strauss and Meilhac had died, Haveley consented to have the hallowed operetta presented in a French version.
For Giuseppe Verdi, Aida represented a significant break with his past compositional and staging practices. The new opera was in complete contrast with his last two works, Don Carlos (Paris, 1867) and the revision of La Forza del Destino (Milan, 1869). Both present large, grandiose, and sometimes sprawling visual and musical images in projecting the dramatic action. Aida, on the other hand, is clearly delineated, precisely constructed and provides more \’bite\’.
When Giacomo Puccini wrote the opera in Milan in 1904, he had to have had American gunboat diplomacy and Western imperialism in mind. The often disastrous meeting of East and West at the turn of the 20th century inspired this very bitter operatic tragedy.
