Ambroise Thomas: Mignon (Concert production of the opera)

The French composer, Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas, whose life spanned almost the entire 19th century (1811 – 1896), wrote twenty operas. Two of them earned him immortality: Mignon, and Hamlet. The popularity of his first seventeen operas – most of them opéras-comiques, where music alternated with spoken parts – did not last, and nor did it reach beyond the French borders. Ambroise Thomas thus had to wait 35 years for his first genuine success, which came with the opera Mignon, in 1866, when he was 55 years old. The theme – the story of Mignon, from Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship – was taken care of by a duo of renowned French librettists, Jules Barbier and Michel Carré. The opera was premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, on November 17, 1866, and became an utter triumph. The Emperor Napoleon III, who attended the work’s 22nd repeat performance, was so enthralled that he ordered the opera to be performed fifteen times during the 1867 World Exhibition in Paris. The exhibition ran from April 1 through October 31, and by July 18, Mignon had seen its 100th showing.

In the Bohemian lands, the opera was first performed as early as 1869, at Prague’s Estates Theatre. The New German Theatre, today’s Prague State Opera, staged its first production of Mignon on May 5, 1889, and still in the same month the title role was performed here by a famous guest artist, the Swedish soprano Sigrid Arnoldson. After the Second World War, Mignon did not feature on the repertoire anywhere in Prague until 1992. On April 1, 1992, the Prague State Opera marked the beginning of its existence as an independent institution, and Mignon became its first new production (first night on May 23, 1992).

Premiere: Apr 1, 2012