Verdi’s final opera Falstaff premiered in 1893 as the composer was approaching his eightieth birthday. With the exception of the ill-fated Un giorno di regno, it is the only comedy that he ever wrote, but its obvious hilarity should not detract from its musical and emotional intelligence. It almost requires more skill to write a piece that maintains a cracking pace throughout, and hence sees recitative and aria virtually merge into one, than it does to compose the most soulful,...

Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is something of an operatic oddity. It describes the establishing and subsequent implosion of a city that is designed to give people fun because, as its founders assert, there is nothing else in the world to rely on. Weill and librettist Bertolt Brecht were writing predominantly about the world they saw around them in 1930, but their depiction of Mahagonny, and by extension society in general, feel highly relevant today. They...

Don Giovanni of 1787 is one of three operas that Mozart wrote with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte (the others being Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte). It tells of the eponymous hero, or rather antihero, who effortlessly conquers thousands of women. Although in the process he makes many enemies, the ladies he has cheated have a habit of coming back for more or trying to save him, and in the end he is responsible for his own downfall. When the ghost of the...

Polish composer Karol Szymanowski’s Król Roger (King Roger) is by any measure an operatic rarity. Written between 1918 and 1924, and enjoying a handful of outings until 1949, it was entirely neglected for the following twenty-six years. It has experienced something of a renaissance since 1975, when conductor Charles Mackerras led a performance with the New Opera Company in London, but Kasper Holten’s production still marks the first time that it has ever had an outing at...

As the curtain falls on Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s Madama Butterfly, the Royal Opera House swaps tragedy for comedy with the second revival of the same directors’ 2005 production of Il turco in Italia. Rossini’s thirteenth opera of 1814 is a comedy of errors involving a series of love triangles between various Turkish and Italian characters. The added twist is that many of these ‘errors’ are deliberately engineered by the poet Prosdocimo as he...

Set in Japan, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly of 1904 explores the relationship between the American naval officer Pinkerton and the Nagasaki born Cio-Cio-San, whom he both affectionately and patronisingly addresses as Madam Butterfly. She takes their love so seriously that she converts to Christianity, and is consequently ostracised by her family. He, on the other hand, sees their marriage as being akin to his Japanese house, which he has on a 999-year lease that he can cancel at any...