Product Details

• Actors: Milan Knazko, Kamila Magálová, Luciano Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland, Huguette Tourangeau
• Directors: Petr Weigl
• Writers: Friedrich Schiller, Giuseppe Bardari
• Format: Classical, Color, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Image Entertainment
• VHS Release Date: September 7, 1999
• Run Time: 90 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00000JN2K
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #389,463 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Incoherent mish-mash, August 19, 2002

By 

Robert G. VanStryland (Denton, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Donizetti - Maria Stuarda (DVD)

This is not a performance of Donizetti's opera. Scenes from the opera (sung in Italian) are interspersed with scenes from Schiller's play (spoken in German). The result is ... well, I don't know what name to give to the result. Petr Weigl has made some pretty good opera films, and some pretty awful ones, but this one takes the cake as the worst trashing of an opera ever committed to film. It doesn't do much for Schiller's play, either. The singing (what there is of it) by Joan Sutherland, Huguette Tourangeau, and Luciano Pavarotti is very good (Weigl obtained a pre-existing sound recording of the complete opera and sliced out the little bits that he needed for his film), but there's not enough of the opera or of the play for any music drama or any other sort of drama to happen. Avoid this DVD and buy the CD set of the opera instead. If you're interested in Schiller's play, just read it.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Both dimished by half, October 19, 2004

By 

S. J McKenna "JussiLover" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Donizetti - Maria Stuarda (DVD)

Bloodless bland facial expressions and body language as accompaniment to deliberately emotional full-body singing is a disconnect I don't find appealing. Just letting your mouth hang open as long as a note is held does not convey the fire or the ice of the musical content and intent. Yikes. This is painful to watch when these two genres -- Italian opera and German dramatic play -- are mixed, but never really blended. I'd rather watch a too-old Sutherland and an un-English Pavarotti impersonating their characters through music than watch actors impersonate characters while impersonating singers.

It all comes across hollow/empty/fake/contrived to this viewer/listener. This is a hybrid that thankfully cannot reproduce itself.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An Infertile Hybrid, June 23, 2001

By 

Stanley H. Nemeth (Garden Grove, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Donizetti - Maria Stuarda (DVD)

Petr Weigl deserves praise for his bold experiment, a combining of the rhetoric of Schiller with the lyricism of Donizetti to achieve something higher, a Shakespearian heft in the telling of the sad tale of the Scottish queen, Mary Stuart. Unfortunately, the tale as related does not transcend the soap operatic, and this despite the beautiful voices of Sutherland, Tourangeau and Pavarotti. The end result is essentially no more than vintage melodrama. The characters parade past the viewer as if on stilts. The combination of the rhetorical and the lyrical emerges simply as doubly pretentious in the unfriendly (because realistic) medium of film. The director's intention was fascinating. It is too bad that the resultant film is no more than mediocre.