On Tuesday, January 10, the Municipal Theater of Piraeus hosts the State Orchestra of Athens in a special opera evening. Popular excerpts from timeless works make up the concert program with arias and duets from Georges Bizet’s Carmen, Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus and Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow, and others. Dimitris Paxoglu. The main musician Romanos Papazoglu is on the podium.

Among other things, in terms of program, Gaetano Donizetti’s operas are typical examples of Italian bel canto (bel canto), which literally means “beautiful song” and characterizes the dominant aesthetic and compositional trend of Italian opera composers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The one-act opera The Rural Cavalry was the first (and greatest) triumph of Pietro Mascani (1870) and at the same time one of the first operas of the verismo movement, which drew its themes from the people and situations of everyday life.

The first productions of Georges Bizet’s opera “Carmen” based on the novel of the same name by Prosper Mérimée were given in Paris in 1875 and were not successful. The composer died in June of the same year, never having had time to survive the subsequent triumph of his opera, which began to be perceived by both the international public and great composers with genuine admiration.

The virtuoso operetta Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss was completed in 1874, and the premiere (of course, in Vienna) took place on April 5 of the same year under the direction of the composer and was a huge success.

The most prominent descendant of Suppe and Strauss in the genre of operetta was the Austrian composer of Hungarian origin Franz Lehár. His most famous work is The Merry Widow, which premiered in Vienna in December 1905. The arias and duets included in the concert program belong to the most famous pages of Lehar’s creative work.