Background
Max Maretzek was born on June 28, 1821 in Brno, Moravia, now in the Czech Republic.
(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
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(Published for the first time is the third book of memoirs...)
Published for the first time is the third book of memoirs of Max Maretzek (1821-1897), a Moravian conductor and composer of dramatic music who became a leading impresario of Italian opera in New York.
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Max Maretzek was born on June 28, 1821 in Brno, Moravia, now in the Czech Republic.
He studied music and composition in his youth with the Viennese composer, I. X. Seyfried, a piano pupil of Mozart and conductor at the An der Wien theatre.
When he was twenty-one his three-act opera Hamlet was produced in Brünn. In the year following he gave up a theatrical conductorship in Agram, then the capital of Croatia, to go to Paris, where he dedicated a series of songs to the Duchess de Nemours and wrote ballet music for Grisi and Grahn. In 1844 he went to Her Majesty's Theatre in London as assistant conductor to Balfe, and in 1847 his ballet "Les Génies du Globe" opened the season at Drury Lane in conjunction with Lucia di Lammermoor. In 1848 he emigrated to New York as the conductor of the Italian Opera Company at the Astor Place Opera House, then under the management of Edward R. Fry. When the company failed in 1849, Maretzek reopened the same house as impresario-conductor. Thereafter, until 1879, he was active as an impresario and producer of Italian opera at the Astor Place and Grand opera houses and, notably, at the old Academy of Music, making occasional tours with his company through the United States and beyond. He opened the new Academy of Music in 1867 with Minnie Hauk in Gounod's Romeo et Juliette. In 1879 his three-act American opera, Sleepy Hollow, was given there. Maretzek was the only impresario who, after others had failed, managed to establish Italian opera in New York as a permanent institution for a term of years. Maretzek, "the Magnificent" as he was familiarly known, retired from his managerial activities with the advent of James Henry Mapleson and devoted himself to teaching singing, coaching operatic aspirants, and contributing musical sketches to American, French, and German periodicals.
He died on May 14, 1897 of heart disease at his home in Pleasant Plains, Staten Island, N. Y. , in his seventy-sixth year. His two books of autobiographic reminiscences, Crotchets and Quavers: or, Revelations of an Opera Manager in America (1855), and "Sharps and Flats": A Sequel to "Crotchets and Quavers" (1890), a "serio-comic history of opera in America for the past forty years, with reminiscences and anecdotes, " offer vivid pictures of operatic life in New York during the fifties, sixties, and seventies of the nineteenth century, and of the adventurous side of touring with an opera company in Cuba and Mexico in those days.
(Published for the first time is the third book of memoirs...)
(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)