Mary, Queen of Scots, a commission by Scottish Opera that premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1977, is the first of Thea Musgrave’s four operas on historical figures. It is also the first for which she wrote her own libretto, with her starting point being an unpublished play by Amalia Elguera, who had previously written the libretto for Musgrave’s 1973 opera The Voice of Ariadne.  While there have been plays and operas about the character before, the majority have...

In 2020 director Joe Hill-Gibbins did not have much luck with his new staging of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro for English National Opera. Premiering on 14 March of that year, it was set to run until 20 April, but enjoyed no more than its first performance after COVID-19 saw all UK theatres close the following week and a formal lockdown declared on 23 March. What is technically therefore the production’s first revival at the Coliseum is in reality the first time it will...

The Pirates of Penzance; or, The Slave of Duty is the fifth Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration, and premiered in New York City on 31 December 1879. It made its London debut on 3 April 1880, and was warmly received with the critical consensus being that it represented a significant advance on the duo’s earlier works. The Herald in New York suggested that ‘the new work is in every respect superior to the Pinafore, the text more humorous, the music more elegant and more...

Premiering in Milan in 1832, The Elixir of Love, with a libretto by Felice Romani, is one of Gaetano Donizetti’s most popular operas. Originally set in a village in the Basque Country at the end of the eighteenth century, it sees the peasant Nemorino love the landowner Adina, even as she tells him she is fickle and that he should forget her. When, however, she reads the legend of Tristan and Isolde, Nemorino is inspired to ask travelling quack doctor Dulcamara if he has any of the...

Based on Victor Hugo’s play Le roi s’amuse, Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto was a triumph when it premiered at La Fenice in Venice in 1851, and has remained one of the composer’s most frequently performed operas ever since. Its popularity is thoroughly deserved but might still be deemed interesting, given that it is a contender for the cruellest opera in the mainstream repertoire. While many works see the innocent suffer and die, there is usually a sense in which...

The Turn of the Screw is a 1954 chamber opera by Benjamin Britten, with Myfanwy Piper’s libretto being based on Henry James’ eponymous novella of 1898. Told across a Prologue and sixteen scenes, with each of these being preceded by a variation on the twelve-note ‘Screw’ theme, it has been described as one of the most dramatically appealing of all English operas. Set in an English country house in Bly, originally in the middle of the nineteenth century, it...