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 It is also the first for which she wrote her own libretto, with her starting point being an unpublished play by Amalia Elguera, who had previously written the libretto for Musgrave’s 1973 opera The Voice of Ariadne.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

Premiering in 1893, Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, with a libretto by his sister Adelheid Wette, is based on the eponymous fairytale that was recorded by the Brothers Grimm and published in 1812. It follows the Grimm version of the story reasonably closely, although there are a few notable differences including the fact that the Mother here is not intent on losing the children in the forest so that she and her husband might survive the hard times. She sends them there to...