From around the world: Boston.(North America ... Die Schone und Getreue Ariadne is produced with fidelity to original 1691 detail)(Opera Review)

When the rich, cosmopolitan city of Hamburg built the Theater am Ganse-markt, in 1678, they picked a Venetian architect who knew just what an opera house required. The building, which remained in use for sixty years, boasted the grandest stage machinery in Europe, including sets on wheels for swift scene changes and a rear wall that could open to end a show with fireworks.

In the 1690s, the theater was managed by Johann Georg Conradi, who had studied in Italy and was familiar, as well, with the contemporary works of Lully. Conradi's masterpiece, Die Schone und Getreue Ariadne (The Fair and Faithful Ariadne), was the hit of 1691 and a local favorite for decades. Recently rediscovered, the opera was given its American premiere at the opulent Emerson Majestic Theater as the centerpiece of the biennial Boston Early Music Festival last June.

Drew Minter, who directed (and who is a contributor to this magazine), attempted to give us something like the show the Hamburgers of 1691 loved: song and dance in generous helpings (to the lively rhythms from a band of early-instrument specialists), extravagant costumes, old-fashioned scenic tricks, and farcical cutting up by Pamphilius, a forerunner of Papageno.

Ariadne's story was set so often that Richard Strauss chose it to parody classical opera in his Ariadne auf Naxos, the only version most modern audiences know. Conradi set much more of the myth: devious Theseus seduces Ariadne (though preferring her sister, Phaedra) in order to learn the secret of the Labyrinth in which her father, King Minos, has ordered him to fight the dreaded Minotaur. Ariadne is then abandoned on a desert island. Enter (with dancing bacchantes and goat-footed ...