Leonard Bernstein composed his one act opera Trouble in Tahiti in 1952, and on this occasion wrote the libretto himself. It concerns a married couple who on the surface have it made with their beautiful suburban home, but who find it difficult to live with each other and constantly bicker and fight. In 1983 he wrote A Quiet Place, which considers where the same family’s members are thirty years later. While performing both in the same evening would seem an obvious thing to...

Antonio Vivaldi’s L'Olimpiade uses an Italian libretto by Pietro Metastasio that was originally written for Antonio Caldara’s eponymous 1733 opera. Vivaldi’s own version premiered at Venice’s Teatro Sant’Angelo on 17 February 1734, while the libretto would go on to be set to music by over fifty composers including Giovanni Battista Pergolesi in 1735. The action takes place in ancient times in Sicyon during an Olympic Games. Megacle plans to enter...

This Royal Opera double bill, performed by Jette Parker Artists, presents two one-act operas that were written at broadly opposite ends of the twentieth century, but received their premieres just eight years apart. Bohuslav Martinů composed Larmes de couteau, to a French libretto by Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, in 1928, but it did not receive its premiere until 1969 at the State Theatre, Brno. The music demonstrates the composer’s then preoccupation with jazz, while the story...

Giant, with music by Sarah Angliss and libretto by Ross Sutherland, was commissioned by Britten Pears Arts and first appeared at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2023. It explores the relationship between the eighteenth century British surgeon John Hunter and Charles Byrne who, measuring seven feet, seven inches (judged by his skeletal remains) was known as ‘The Irish Giant’. Following Byrne’s death in 1783, Hunter arranged for his body to be stolen while it was on its way to...

Composer George Benjamin and librettist Martin Crimp have already had two major successes on the main stage of the Royal Opera House. Written on Skin, which appeared at Covent Garden in 2013 and 2017, may now be the most frequently performed opera written in the twenty-first century, and it was followed by Lessons in Love and Violence in 2018.  Benjamin and Crimp’s first collaboration, however, was a chamber opera entitled Into the Little Hill in 2006, and it is to this...

Bushra El-Turk’s Woman at Point Zero, with a libretto by Stacy Hardy, is based on Nawal El Saadawi’s 1975 novel Point Zero. Having already appeared in France (at the Aix-en-Provence Festival), Belgium and Luxembourg, it now comes to the Royal Opera House to take centre-stage at this year’s Engender Festival, an initiative to transform gender representation in opera and music theatre. The production is by LOD Music Theatre, and it is co-presented as part of the Aldeburgh...