If there were a Top Ten List of great playwrights whose work has also inspired operas you might think Shakespeare would be number one. After all, his plays have been turned into hundreds of operas. But Shakespeare has proven troublesome for composers, and only a handful of those operas have been truly successful.
Instead, one dramatist who might appear at the top of that list would be the 18th-century German writer Friederich Schiller. He had little interest in music and his plays aren't as familiar as Shakespeare's, but they did inspire a remarkable number of truly fine musical dramas, including operas about Joan of Arc by both Verdi and Tchaikovsky, Rossini's William Tell, Donizetti's Maria Stuarda, Puccini's Turandot — and Verdi's Luisa Miller. Verdi based Luisa on a Schiller play with a title that not only describes that opera, but also countless others. It's called Kabale und Liebe — or Intrigue and Love.
Verdi wrote Luisa Miller in 1849, and it's not his most famous Schiller-based opera. That distinction would go to his sprawling drama Don Carlos. But of the two, Luisa Miller is surely the more straightforward and accessible, with its troubled love story plagued by corrupt politics, class conflicts and bitter family squabbles.
On World of Opera, host Lisa Simeone presents this early gem by Verdi in a production from the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, featuring soprano Krassimira Stoyanova and tenor Ramon Vargas.
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