Written in 1975 and first performed by Dame Janet Baker at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1976, Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra was his final vocal work. He assembled the libretto from parts of a translation by Robert Lowell of Jean Racine’s 1677 play Phèdre, and the cantata sees the eponymous woman contemplate her death as things have completely fallen apart with her husband Theseus. This is due to her lust for his son and her stepson Hippolytus, who has died as an indirect...

Giacomo Puccini’s Il trittico, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1918, is a triptych of one-act operas comprising Il tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi. The composer originally intended for each opera to reflect one part of Dante’s Divina Commedia, although in the event only the final work is based on the poem. As a result, the only theme that really underpins the operas is that they all involve, in one way or another, the concealment of a...

Das Rheingold, performed here in English as The Rhinegold, is the first opera in Richard Wagner’s tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen or Ring Cycle. It sets in motion the story that plays out across the four operas, and establishes the central theme of power versus love. It sees the dwarf, or Nibelung, Alberich steal the gold that is guarded by the Rhinemaidens and forge it into a ring that makes the bearer all powerful. He is only able to do so, however, by renouncing love, which in...

Set in Nagasaki, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly of 1904-07, with a libretto by Giuseppe Giacoso and Luigi Illica, explores the relationship between the American naval officer Pinkerton and Cio-Cio-San from the city’s Omara district. Cio-Cio-San, who Pinkerton knows as Madam Butterfly, takes their love so seriously that she converts to Christianity, and is consequently ostracised by her family. He, on the other hand, sees their marriage as being akin to his Japanese house,...

Luisa Miller is not one of Verdi’s total rarities, but it does not grace major opera houses with anywhere near the same frequency as his most popular creations. The work, however, has much merit as, for example, Act II ends with an allegro in three mounting stages that, although quickening towards an animated finish, is not like a conventional stretta. Written in 1849, it is regarded as coming at the beginning of the composer’s ‘middle period’, with...

Andrea Chénier of 1896 is by far the best known opera by Umberto Giordano (1867-1948), an Italian composer whose profile might have been higher today had not his considerable talents been somewhat eclipsed by those of his contemporary Puccini. It is loosely based on the life of the eponymous poet (1762-1794), who was executed during the French Revolution, while the character Carlo Gérard was inspired by Jean-Lambert Tallien, a leading figure in the Revolution. Sondra...