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 It is also the first for which she wrote her own libretto, with her starting point being an unpublished play by Amalia Elguera, who had previously written the libretto for Musgrave’s 1973 opera The Voice of Ariadne.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...

This autumn English National Opera is exploring the Orpheus myth by presenting four operatic takes on it, including Harrison Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus and Philip Glass’s Orphée. Each is being introduced in the order in which it was originally composed so that the season began with Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, and now continues with Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, the first version of which premiered in 1858. It is good to see the Offenbach...