Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata of 1853 is one of the most frequently performed operas in the world today, and the Royal Opera has been putting a special focus on the work in its 2021/22 season. By the end of this month no less than six different singers will have taken on the main role with Lisette Oropesa, Kristina Mkhitaryan and Anush Hovhannisyan having sung it across a dozen performances last autumn. The opera now returns for thirteen outings in April 2022, as well as a live cinema...

Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlo, which premiered in 1867 in Paris as Don Carlos, exists in several versions, and, depending on which is performed, is either his longest or one of his longest operas. Although the first performance was in French, Nicholas Hytner’s 2008 production for the Royal Opera House employs the Modena version of 1886, which is one of several to utilise an Italian libretto. Don Carlo ; © ROH, Catherine Ashmore Don Carlo ; © ROH, Catherine...

George Frideric Handel’s opera Oreste of 1734 is a pasticcio, which is a work built around music (usually from a range of composers) that already exists. These were very common in the eighteenth century, partly because the demands on an establishment’s resident composer to produce work were so great that it became a standard practice to bolster output by utilising them, and partly because there was a strong tradition of using such creations to showcase the compositions of a...