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...

There are certain operas such as Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Handel’s Radamisto where one will forgive the odd piece of clunky or prosaic direction if the musical credentials underpinning the evening are strong. There are other pieces, however, such as Ravel’s L’heure espagnole and Shostakovich’s The Nose where, if the staging is not slick from start to finish, the evening is almost wholly undermined. There is actually something unfair about this, because it...

Jean Philippe Rameau has been a highly regarded composer during the French Baroque period and an important representative of the special French genre Opéra-Ballet, where music, stage and dance play an equal importance. The story is a typical baroque play of intrigues, jealousy, fidelity and love which can take place everywhere and does not really have any content. Les Indes galantes are sent over the exotic world to explore human relations of love, arriving in Peru,...