Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: How many plays did Max Rudolf Frisch write?
Frisch's dramas up until the early 1960s are divided by the literary commentator into three groups: (1) the early wartime pieces, (2) the poetic plays such as "" ("Don Juan oder Die Liebe zur Geometrie") and (3) the dialectical pieces. It is above all with this third group, notably the parable "The Fire Raisers" (1953), identified by Frisch as a "lesson without teaching", and with "Andorra" (1961) that Frisch enjoyed the most success. Indeed, these two are among the most successful German language plays. The writer nevertheless remained dissatisfied because he believed they had been widely misunderstood. In an interview with Heinz Ludwig Arnold Frisch vigorously rejected their allegorical approach: "I have established only that when I apply the parable format, I am obliged to deliver a message that I actually do not have". After the 1960s Frisch moved away from the theatre. His late biographical plays "" ("Biografie: Ein Spiel") and "" were apolitical but they failed to match the public success of his earlier dramas. It was only shortly before his death that Frisch returned to the stage with a more political message, with "Jonas and his Veteran", a stage version of his arresting dialogue "Switzerland without an army? A Palaver".
Tristan und Isolde ("Tristan and Isolde", or "Tristan and Isolda", or "Tristran and Ysolt") is an opera, or music drama, in three acts by Richard Wagner to a German libretto by the composer, based largely on the 12th-century romance "Tristan" by Gottfried von Strassburg. It was composed between 1857 and 1859 and premiered at the Königliches Hof- und Nationaltheater in Munich on 10 June 1865 with Hans von Bülow conducting. Wagner referred to the work not as an opera, but called it "eine Handlung" (literally "a drama", "a plot" or "an action"), which was the equivalent of the term used by the Spanish playwright Calderón for his dramas.
Between February and October 1933 he travelled extensively through eastern and southeastern Europe, financing his expeditions with reports written for newspapers and magazines. One of his first contributions was a report on the Prague World Ice Hockey Championship (1933) for the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung". Other destinations were Budapest, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, Zagreb, Istanbul, Athens, Bari, and Rome. Another product of this extensive tour was Frisch's first novel, "Jürg Reinhart", which appeared in 1934. In it Reinhart represents the author, undertaking a trip through the Balkans as a way to find purpose in life. In the end the eponymous hero concludes that he can only become fully adult by performing a "manly act". This he achieves by helping the terminally ill daughter of his landlady end her life painlessly.
This is an audio and video discography of Tristan und Isolde, an opera by Richard Wagner which was first performed on 10 June 1865 in Munich.
The Merry Wives of Windsor () is a 1950 East German musical comedy film directed by Georg Wildhagen. It was based on William Shakespeare's play by the same name.
With its setting in the Thirty Years' War, it covered a period never previously depicted on film (apart from 1933's "Queen Christina"). In this light, George MacDonald Fraser wrote in 1988, "The plot left me bewildered - in fact the whole bloody business is probably an excellent microcosm of the Thirty Years' War, with no clear picture of what is happening and half the cast ending up dead to no purpose. To that extent, it must be rated a successful film. ... As a drama, "The Last Valley" is not remarkable; as a reminder of what happened in Central Europe, 1618-48, and shaped the future of Germany, it reads an interesting lesson." Fraser says of the stars, "Michael Caine ... gives one of his best performances as the hard-bitten mercenary captain, nicely complemented by Omar Sharif as the personification of reason."
The play formed the basis for an opera with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte and music by Mozart, also called "The Marriage of Figaro" (1786). In 1799, another opera based on the same play, "La pazza giornata, ovvero Il matrimonio di Figaro", was produced in Venice with libretto by Gaetano Rossi and music by Marcos Portugal.
In 1984, Austrian culture minister Helmut Zilk designated Drese as director of the Vienna State Opera in Vienna. Drese began his tenure in 1986 and chose Claudio Abbado as the State Opera's music director. In the following five years, the State Opera experienced a very fruitful period. Abbado conducted both new productions and revivals, among them "Un ballo in maschera" (staged by Gianfranco de Bosio, designed by Emmanuele Luzzati), "L'Italiana in Algeri" (staged and designed by Ponnelle), "Carmen" (revival of the 1978 Franco Zeffirelli-production), "Pelléas et Mélisande" (staged by Antoine Vitez and designed by Yannis Kokkos), "Il viaggio a Reims" (staged by Luca Ronconi and designed by Gae Aulenti), "Don Carlo" (staged and designed by Pier Luigi Pizzi), "Don Giovanni" (staged by Luc Bondy, with Ruggero Raimondi as the Don), "Le nozze di Figaro" (staged by Jonathan Miller). Drese initiated cycle of all the major Mozart-operas.
The Marriage of Figaro (, ), K. 492, is an opera buffa (comic opera) in four acts composed in 1786 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with an Italian libretto written by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 1 May 1786. The opera's libretto is based on a stage comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, "La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro" ("The Mad Day, or The Marriage of Figaro"), which was first performed in 1784. It tells how the servants Figaro and Susanna succeed in getting married, foiling the efforts of their philandering employer Count Almaviva to seduce Susanna and teaching him a lesson in fidelity.
His first major plays were performed in 1960 in Lübeck, Mannheim and Heidelberg. Since then, his plays have been performed in the whole world. Dorst's work has been recognized with many prizes and distinctions, including the Gerhart Hauptmann Prize (1964), Prize of the City of Florence (1970), Literature Prize of the Bayerische Akademie der Künste (1983), Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis (1989), Georg Büchner Prize (1990), E.T.A. Hoffmann Prize (1996) and the city of Zurich's Max Frisch Prize (1998). In 2006, he was awarded the Samuel Bogumil Linde Prize. He was awarded the European Prize for Literature (2008). Dorst held visiting professorships at universities in Germany, Australia and New Zealand.
Another composer to rework material from "Tristan" was Emmanuel Chabrier in his humorous "Souvenirs de Munich – quadrilles on themes from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde". These were augmented and orchestrated by Markus Lehmann in 1988. Leopold Stokowski made a series of purely orchestral "Symphonic Syntheses" of Wagner's operas during his time as conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, bringing to concert audiences of the 1920s and '30s music they might not otherwise have heard. He made a 'long version' of music from "Tristan and Isolde" which consisted mainly of the act 1 prelude, the from act 2 and the from act 3. A shorter version of music from the 2nd and 3rd acts was called "Love Music from "Tristan and Isolde"". He made recordings of both versions on 78s and again on LP.
Wagner's composition of "Tristan und Isolde" was inspired by the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (particularly "The World as Will and Representation"), as well as by Wagner's affair with Mathilde Wesendonck. Widely acknowledged as one of the peaks of the operatic repertoire, "Tristan" was notable for Wagner's unprecedented use of chromaticism, tonal ambiguity, orchestral colour and harmonic suspension.
The Merry Wives of Windsor (in German: Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor) is an opera in three acts by Otto Nicolai to a German libretto by Salomon Hermann Mosenthal based on the play "The Merry Wives of Windsor" by William Shakespeare.
Most critics consider "Merry Wives" to be one of Shakespeare's weakest plays, and the Falstaff of "Merry Wives" to be much inferior to the Falstaff of the two "Henry IV" plays. That Shakespeare would so stumble with one of his greatest creations is puzzling and a satisfactory reason for this remains to be found. The most obvious explanation is that it was written very quickly. Leslie Hotson wrote that "it is certain that the play bears the earmarks of hasty writing."
"The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein" was praised by the critic Camille Paglia, who wrote in "Salon" that "Lauritsen assembles an overwhelming case that Mary Shelley, as a badly educated teenager, could not possibly have written the soaring prose of 'Frankenstein' ... and that the so-called manuscript in her hand is simply one example of the clerical work she did for many writers as a copyist." Paglia compared Lauritsen's work to that of the critic Leslie Fiedler, concluding that, "This is a funny, wonderful, revelatory book that I hope will inspire ambitious graduate students and young faculty to strike blows for truth in our mired profession, paralyzed by convention and fear."
In April 1974, while on a book tour in the USA, Frisch launched into an affair with an American called Alice Locke-Carey who was 32 years his junior. This happened in the village of Montauk on Long Island, and Montauk was the title the author gave to an autobiographical novel that appeared in 1975. The book centred on his love life, including both his own marriage with Marianne Oellers-Frisch and an affair that she had been having with the American writer Donald Barthelme. There followed a very public dispute between Frisch and his wife over where to draw the line between private and public life, and the two became increasingly estranged, divorcing in 1979.
The world's first opera was "Dafne" by Jacopo Peri, which appeared in Florence in 1598. Three decades later Heinrich Schütz set the same libretto in a translation by the poet Martin Opitz, thus creating the first ever German-language opera. The music to Schütz's "Dafne" is now lost and details of the performance are sketchy, but it is known to have been written to celebrate the marriage of Landgrave Georg II of Hessen-Darmstadt to Princess Sophia Eleonora of Saxony in Torgau in 1627. As in Italy, the first patrons of opera in Germany and Austria were royalty and the nobility, and they tended to favour composers and singers from south of the Alps. Antonio Cesti was particularly successful, providing the huge operatic extravaganza "Il pomo d'oro" for the imperial court in Vienna in 1668. Opera in Italian would continue to exercise a considerable sway over German-speaking lands throughout the Baroque and Classical periods. Nevertheless, native forms were developing too. In Nuremberg in 1644, Sigmund Staden produced the "spiritual pastorale", "Seelewig", which foreshadows the "Singspiel", a genre of German-language opera in which arias alternate with spoken dialogue. "Seelewig" was a moral allegory inspired by the example of contemporary school dramas and is the first German opera whose music has survived.
Group C
In 1786, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed an opera, "Le Nozze di Figaro", based on "The Marriage of Figaro", with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte based on the play. Several composers including Paisiello in 1782 wrote operas based on "The Barber of Seville". Rossini's 1816 version is his most successful work and still often performed. In 1966, Darius Milhaud composed an opera, "La mère coupable", based on "The Guilty Mother".
The arrival of sound at the very end of the 1920s, produced a final artistic flourish of German film before the collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1933. As early as 1918, three inventors came up with the Tri-Ergon sound-on-film system and tried to introduce it to the industry between 1922 and 1926. UFA showed an interest, but possibly due to financial difficulties, never made a sound film. But in the late 1920s, sound production and distribution were starting to be adopted by the German film industry and by 1932 Germany had 3,800 cinemas equipped to play sound films. The first filmmakers who experimented with the new technology often shot the film in several versions, using several soundtracks in different languages. The film "The Blue angel" (1930), directed by the Austrian Josef von Sternberg and produced by Erich Pommer, was also shot in two versions - German and English, with a different supporting cast in each version. It is considered to be Germany's first "talkie" and will always be remembered as the film that made an international superstar of its lead actress Marlene Dietrich. Other notable early sound films, all from 1931, include Jutzi's adaptation to Alfred Döblin's novel "Berlin Alexanderplatz", Pabst's Bertolt Brecht adaptation "The Threepenny Opera" and Lang's "M," as well as Hochbaum's "Raid in St. Pauli" (1932). Brecht was also one of the creators of the explicitly communist film "Kuhle Wampe" (1932), which was banned soon after its release.
The Merry Wives of Windsor (German:Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor) is a 1918 German silent comedy film directed by William Wauer. It is an adaptation of William Shakespeare's "The Merry Wives of Windsor".
Max Rudolf Frisch (15 May 1911 – 4 April 1991) was a Swiss playwright and novelist. Frisch's works focused on problems of identity, individuality, responsibility, morality, and political commitment. The use of irony is a significant feature of his post-war output. Frisch was one of the founders of Gruppe Olten. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1986.
Many of Frisch's most important plays, such as "" ("Count Öderland") (1951), "" ("Don Juan oder Die Liebe zur Geometrie") (1953), "The Fire Raisers" (1953) and "Andorra" (1961), were initially sketched out in the "Diary 1946–1949" ("Tagebuch 1946–1949") some years before they appeared as stage plays. At the same time several of his novels such as "I'm Not Stiller" (1954), "Homo Faber" (1957) as well as the narrative work "Montauk" (1975) take the form of diaries created by their respective protagonists. Sybille Heidenreich points out that even the more open narrative form employed in "Gantenbein / A Wilderness of Mirrors" (1964) closely follows the diary format. Rolf Keiser points out that when Frisch was involved in the publication of his collected works in 1976, the author was keen to ensure that they were sequenced chronologically and not grouped according to genre: in this way the sequencing of the collected works faithfully reflects the chronological nature of a diary.
His next play "" ("Biografie: Ein Spiel"), followed on naturally. Frisch was disappointed that his commercially very successful plays "Biedermann und die Brandstifter" and "Andorra" had both been, in his view, widely misunderstood. His answer was to move away from the play as a form of parable, in favour of a new form of expression which he termed "Dramaturgy of Permutation" (""Dramaturgie der Permutation""), a form which he had introduced with "Gantenbein" and which he now progressed with "Biographie", written in its original version in 1967. At the centre of the play is a behavioural scientist who is given the chance to live his life again, and finds himself unable to take any key decisions differently the second time round. The Swiss premier of the play was to have been directed by Rudolf Noelte, but Frisch and Noelte fell out in the Autumn of 1967, a week before the scheduled first performance, which led to the Zürich opening being postponed for several months. In the end the play opened in the Zürich Playhouse in February 1968, the performances being directed by Leopold Lindtberg. Lindtberg was a long established and well regarded theatre director, but his production of "" neither impressed the critics nor delighted theatre audiences. Frisch ended up deciding that he had been expecting more from the audience than he should have expected them to bring to the theatrical experience. After this latest disappointment it would be another eleven years before Frisch returned to theatrical writing.
Working with the theatre director Hirschfeld enabled Frisch to meet some leading fellow playwrights who would influence his later work. He met the exiled German write, Carl Zuckmayer, in 1946, and the young Friedrich Dürrenmatt in 1947. Despite artistic differences on self-awareness issues, Dürrenmatt and Frisch became lifelong friends. 1947 was also the year in which Frisch met Bertolt Brecht, already established as a doyen of German theatre and of the political left. An admirer of Brecht's work, Frisch now embarked on regular exchanges with the older dramatist on matters of shared artistic interest. Brecht encouraged Frisch to write more plays, while placing emphasis on social responsibility in artistic work. Although Brecht's influence is evident in some of Frisch's theoretical views and can be seen in one or two of his more practical works, the Swiss writer could never have been numbered among Brecht's followers. He kept his independent position, by now increasingly marked by scepticism in respect of the polarized political grandstanding which in Europe was a feature of the early cold war years. This is particularly apparent in his 1948 play "" ("Als der Krieg zu Ende war"), based on eye-witness accounts of the Red Army as an occupying force.