Blue, written by Tony Award winning composer Jeanine Tesori and librettist Tazewell Thompson, sees a tragedy occur against the backdrop of a clash between a father and son and the way in which black people are treated in society at large. Set in Harlem in 2007 it sees a black Mother and Father have a Son, all of whom are only ever referred to by those names. As soon as The Mother even tells her friends she is pregnant, they tell her there is no future for black boys because of the...

Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, Op. 36, more commonly known as the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, premiered at the Royan International Festival on 4 April 1977. With the symphony being indicative of the transition from the composer’s earlier dissonant style to his later more tonal style, it sees a soprano sing a different Polish text during each of its three movements. The first is a fifteenth century Polish lament of Mary, mother of Jesus, while the second comes from a...

Georg Friedrich Handel’s Arminio, with a libretto by Antonio Salvi that had previously been set to music by Alessandro Scarlatti, was not a great hit when it premiered on 12 January 1737 at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Despite the composer’s output being as prolific as ever, this was not an easy time for him as he was competing for audiences with the rival Opera of the Nobility when there was really not enough potential audience in London to support two houses. Although...

Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence, which is currently enjoying its UK premiere at the Royal Opera House, is one opera where it does not pay to read the synopsis in advance. In most instances, the advantage of having some prior knowledge of what to look out for outweighs the disadvantage of any surprises being spoilt, but that is not the case here. This is because it is an opera in which we are constantly learning new things as the drama unfolds, with some of the revelations being so...

When Robert Schumann wrote his song cycle Dichterliebe in 1840 he originally composed twenty songs. Four of these were then cut before publication to produce the sixteen that we know today. No contemporary records reveal exactly why he decided to exclude them, so composer Bernard Foccroulle and librettist Martin Crimp took this as their starting point to intervene at the points where the songs were removed, and to extend the song cycle, to produce Zauberland. With the original sixteen...

Erich Korngold, who is more usually if somewhat unfairly associated with film scores, wrote Die tote Stadt at the age of 23. It is based on Georges Rodebach’s 1892 novel Bruges-la-Morte, which had already been turned into a play by the author. Korngold’s father Julius knew Siegfried Trebitsch, who had translated the latter into German, and Julius and Erich adapted the play into an opera, writing the libretto between them under the joint pseudonym of Paul Schott. Set in...