Franz von Suppé

Suppé's parents named him Francesco Ezechiele Ermenegildo when he was born on 18 April 1819 in Spalato, now Split, Dalmatia, Croatia.

[1] According to some accounts his father wanted him to be a lawyer, and sent him to study in Padua,[6][7] from where he supposedly visited Milan and met Rossini, Donizetti and Verdi and attended performances of their operas.

From 1840 Suppé worked as a composer and conductor for Franz Pokorny,[1] the director of several theatres in Vienna, Pressburg (now Bratislava), Ödenburg (now Sopron) and Baden bei Wien.

[14] Das Pensionat not only emulates Offenbach, but refers to him in the first act, when the heroine, the schoolgirl Sophie, and her friends learn about the can-can and proceed to dance it.

[16] It was modelled, Traubner comments, in both title and style, on Offenbach’s La belle Hélène which had been a great success in Vienna earlier that year.

[4][17] A full-length operatic success eluded Suppé for some years, and it was not until after the triumph of Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus in 1874 that he caught up.

[1] Suppé retained links with his native Dalmatia, occasionally visiting Split (Spalato), Zadar (Zara), and Šibenik.

After retiring from conducting, Suppé continued to write stage works, but increasingly shifted his interest to sacred music.

[1] He wrote a Requiem for Pokorny in 1855; an oratorio, Extremum Judicium; three masses, among them the Missa Dalmatica [de]; songs; symphonies; and concert overtures.

[25] The musicologist Robert Letellier writes that Suppé was a master of three styles, the Italian (opera buffa), the French (opéra-comique) and the German: "He knew how to blend them irresistibly, assisted in the instrumentation by his rich experience as a theatre orchestra conductor, and with a sure symphonic technique deriving from his classical training.

"[26] Letellier comments that Suppé's overtures were a major feature of his operatic works: "some attaining immense popularity, and securing him an enduring fame in the concert hall ...

[32] The Musical Times described it as an accomplished piece and singled out the quieter passages "such as the obsessive orchestral motif that backs the Liber scriptus, the lovely oboe solo at the beginning of Recordare, or the high violins irradiating the brief Sanctus".

[34][35] The most extensive recorded collection is in six volumes on the Marco Polo label, released between 1994 and 2001 with the Slovak State Philharmonic Orchestra and various conductors.