The Pirates of Penzance; or, The Slave of Duty is the fifth Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration, and premiered in New York City on 31 December 1879. It made its London debut on 3 April 1880, and was warmly received with the critical consensus being that it represented a significant advance on the duo’s earlier works. The Herald in New York suggested that ‘the new work is in every respect superior to the Pinafore, the text more humorous, the music more elegant and more...

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...

The Yeomen of the Guard of 1888 is one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s richest and darkest operettas. Set in the Tower of London in the sixteenth century, it sees one Colonel Fairfax face execution. The charge of sorcery, however, was the doing of his uncle who stands to inherit his estate if he dies unmarried. Fairfax plans to thwart his relative by marrying in the final hour of his life, and asks his friend Sir Richard Cholmondeley to find a suitable bride who will receive a large...