Jun 15, 2008

Opera quizz


You are a real opera fanatic if all of the following answers are obvious to you ;
1. Who composed the first opera? a. Giovanni Gabrieli b. Giacomo Carrisimo c. Claudio Monteverdi 2. Didon was the queen of which city? a. Carthage b. Troie c. Tyr 3. Where is buried Georg Friedrich Haendel? a. Westminster Abbey, London b. Hamburg c. Rome 4. Which two composers wrote an opera about Orfeo? a. Claudio Monteverdi b. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart c. Christoph Willibald von Gluck 5. Which writer created the Don Juan myth? a. Cervantès b. Tirso de Molina c. Lorenzo Da Ponte 6. Cosima Wagner was the daughter of: a. Weber b. Hans von Bulow c. Franz Liszt 7. How is called Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung? a. the Tetralogy b. the Cosmology c. the Ontology 8. For which piece was Berlioz inspired by Shakespeare? a. La Damnation de Faust b. Roméo et Juliette c. Les Troyens 9. Who composed Il Barbiere di Siviglia? a. Mozart b. Rossini c. Puccini 10. What writer was the inspiration behind Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor? a. Walter Scott b. Alexandre Dumas c. Victor Hugo 11. In Verdi's Otello, how is called Otello's wife? a. Desdemona b. Mimi c. Violetta 12. Which two operas were composed by Gounod? a. Faust b. Mireille c. Samson et Dalila 13. Which writer inspired Bizet for Carmen? a. Prosper Mérimée b. Garcia Lorca c. Halévy 14. Which two operas were composed by Jules Massenet? a. Werther b. Manon c. Les Pêcheurs de Perles 15. Which librettist is behind Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande? a. Maurice Maeterlinck b. Pierre Louÿs c. Tristan L'Hermite 16. With which librettist did Richard Strauss most work? a. Oscar Wilde b. Hugo von Hofmannsthal c. Eichendorff 17. Where was Janacek from? a. Romania b. Bulgaria c. Czech Republic [Extract from L'indispensable de la culture musicale, Marie-France Castarède and Benoît Berthou, published in 2004, in French] [Answers on demand]

3 comments:

Alex said...

Just a note to the first question; even though Monteverdi wrote one of the first operas (in 1607), he didn't write the first (Daphne, in 1597). That was Peri and the Florentine Cameratas.

Extatic said...

Answering outside the box. That is definitely my kind of opera junky!

Thanks for the relevant comment.

The Opera Tattler said...

I was just going to make the same comment. This was fun.