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Masquerade (Danish: Maskarade) is an opera in three acts by Carl Nielsen to a Danish libretto by Wilhelm Andersen, based on the comedy by Ludvig Holberg. The first performance was at the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen, 11 November 1906. The first reported New York performance was by the Bronx Opera Company in 1983.^[1]

Announcement of plans to turn Holberg’s classical comedy into an opera buffa met with dismay in Danish literary circles, but the opera quickly gained popularity, surpassing that of the play itself. Nielsen was not entirely satisfied with the opera, citing structural weakness in the final two acts; but he never got around to revising the work. The overture and the ballet from the third act (“Dance of the Cockerels”) are performed frequently as orchestral excerpts.

Maskarade has become something like the Danish national opera. The masquerade of the title is a place where the characters can leave behind the oppressed lives they lead in a rigid society; it represents liberty and the Enlightenment, and even more, perhaps, a sense of joie de vivre in a land where weather (and duty) is often cold and gloomy. The patriarch Jeronimus, Leander’s father, rails against the masquerade and all it represents; but a thread of the plot explores how all his authority and his antipathy toward the masquerade fail to prevent his son’s (not to mention his own) progress toward freedom and happiness. The final scene of the opera is colored by a bitter-sweet recognition of human mortality, and the urgent importance of finding happiness to brighten it.

The plot revolves around Leander and Leonora, two young people who meet fortuitously at a masquerade ball, swear their undying love for each other and exchange rings. The following day, Leander tells his valet Henrik of his newfound love. He becomes distraught when reminded by Henrik that his parents have betrothed him in marriage to a neighbor’s daughter. Things get complicated when Leonard, the neighbor whose daughter is the other part of this arrangement, comes complaining to Leander’s father that his daughter is in love with someone she met at the masquerade the previous night. In the third act, all is resolved when the various parties slip off to the night’s masquerade, where all is revealed to everyone’s mutual satisfaction.

• Notes and libretto accompanying the 1998 Decca recording 460 227-2.
• The Oxford Dictionary of Opera, by John Warrack and Ewan West (1992), 782 pages, ISBN 0-19-869164-5

• Review of Maskarade at Covent Garden in 2005: “Drunk with Pleasure” by Edward Seckerson, at Andante.com
• The Carl Nielsen Society :
  • Discography
  • Account of the opera’s composition

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