A Surreal Double Bill: Larmes de couteau and Full Moon in March at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Tosca, one of the titles in the repertoire that performs best at the box office, has returned to Liceu to reach the figure of two hundred performances in the history ofthe Barcelona theatre. It has done so in a co-production between Liceu and other Spanish and European theatres under the direction of the young Sevillian director Rafael R. Villalobos, aspiring enfant terrible of today's operatic stage direction. Villalobos's Tosca is one of those that needs an instruction manual...

Unlike the ballet The Nutcracker, which is also currently on at Covent Garden, The Magic Flute is not strictly a Christmas piece. However, Mozart’s final opera, which premiered on 30 September 1791 just a few months before his death, is both enchanting and humorous, meaning it is perfect fare for the festive season. The work, which takes the form of a Singspiel that combines singing with spoken dialogue, sees the Queen of the Night persuade Prince Tamino to rescue her daughter Pamina...

Based on Victorien Sardou’s 1887 French-language play, Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca of 1900, with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, not only occurs in a specific time and place, but on a precise date that can be linked to an historical event. All of the action takes place during the afternoon, evening and early morning of 17 and 18 June 1800, following the Battle of Marengo between Napoleon’s army and Austrian forces. The Austrians were initially...

35 years after having last appeared at Liceu, Puccini's Trittico has returned to its stage. It has done so in a 2017 Munich Opera production directed by Lotte de Beer. Achieving a visual and dramatic union in a single production of three titles as different as those that make up Il Trittico is not at all easy, the Dutch stage director half succeeds at it. De Beer takes death as a thread: in the first opera, a passionate thriller, there is a murder; in the second, a melodrama, we...

Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life of 1946, itself based on Philip Van Doren Stern’s short story The Greatest Gift (self-published in 1943), is one of the all time classic Christmas films. It sees George Bailey, played by James Stewart, grow up in the first half of the twentieth century in an American town named Bedford Falls. George has ambitions to go to college and see the world, but at every point in his life he is held back by circumstances and a sense of...

Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia is the first work to which he applied his term ‘chamber opera’. With an English libretto by Ronald Duncan that is based on André Obey’s play Le Viol de Lucrèce, the piece premiered at Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 1946 and was seen there again in 2015 following the development of a touring version in 2013. It is set towards the end of the sixth century B.C. during the reign of the seventh and final King of...