Franz Schubert completed about 16 works roughly described as belonging to the category of opera; only three were produced in his lifetime, enjoying no more than moderate success. When Schubert's operas are recorded, though infrequently, one often encounters some statement to the effect of "this overlooked opera is Schubert's one masterpiece in the genre," and indeed, both Alfonso und Estrella (1820) and Fierabras (1823) have gained a tenuous toehold in the revival repertory. No one has ever tried to make such a claim about ...
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Franz Schubert completed about 16 works roughly described as belonging to the category of opera; only three were produced in his lifetime, enjoying no more than moderate success. When Schubert's operas are recorded, though infrequently, one often encounters some statement to the effect of "this overlooked opera is Schubert's one masterpiece in the genre," and indeed, both Alfonso und Estrella (1820) and Fierabras (1823) have gained a tenuous toehold in the revival repertory. No one has ever tried to make such a claim about Sakuntala (1820), which is an unfinished, but substantial, sketch for an opera based on a German version of Kalidasa's fourth century Sanskrit play The Recognition of Shakuntala -- a favorite of Goethe -- fashioned by Schubert's friend Johann Philipp Neumann. As late as 2000, one writer quipped "[Sakuntala] remains to this day the one and only Schubert stage work of which not one note has been performed for the public, anywhere, ever." Nevertheless, even by that time, it had already...
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