Maria Golovin

FREE for Paley Center Members.
Included with admission for the general public. 

This event is copresented by the Paley Center and Opera Index.

Join us for a screening of this rarely performed opera and a conversation with one of the stars.

NBC commissioned Gian Carlo Menotti to write Maria Golovin, which had its premiere at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair and ran briefly on Broadway in late 1958 before its television premiere on NBC Opera on March 8, 1959.

In this old-fashioned romantic opera Maria Golovin, a married woman whose husband is a prisoner of war, comes with her young son to spend the summer in a villa in which she has rented apartments. She soon falls in love with Donato, a budding architect who was blinded in the war and whose mother owns the villa. Donato’s jealousy develops into madness and brings about a shattering conclusion.

Franca Duval, Richard Cross, Patricia Neway, and Ruth Kobart were in the Brussels premiere and the Broadway production of Maria Golovin, and Richard Cross won a Theatre World Award for his Broadway debut in this work.

“This is a love story that should touch the hearts of sentimentalists,” wrote critic Howard Taubman in the New York Times following the world premiere in Brussels. “The find of the production is Richard Cross, who sings and plays the blind man with force and compassion . . . Franca Duval is personally attractive, musically intelligent and touchingly vulnerable as Maria Golovin.”

MARIA GOLOVIN
Music and libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti
Airdate: Mar 8, 1959
Conducted by Peter Herman Adler
Directed by Kirk Browning
Designed by Rouben Ter-Arutunian

Franca Duval as Maria Golovin
Richard Cross as Donato
Ruth Kobart as Agata, the maid
Patricia Neway as The Mother
Herbert Handt as Dr. Zuckertanz, the tutor
Chester Ludgin as The Prisoner
Craig Sechler as Trottolo, the boy

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