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...

Composer George Benjamin and librettist Martin Crimp have already had two major successes on the main stage of the Royal Opera House. Written on Skin, which appeared at Covent Garden in 2013 and 2017, may now be the most frequently performed opera written in the twenty-first century, and it was followed by Lessons in Love and Violence in 2018.  Benjamin and Crimp’s first collaboration, however, was a chamber opera entitled Into the Little Hill in 2006, and it is to this...

Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia is the first work to which he applied his term ‘chamber opera’. With an English libretto by Ronald Duncan that is based on André Obey’s play Le Viol de Lucrèce, the piece premiered at Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 1946 and was seen there again in 2015 following the development of a touring version in 2013. It is set towards the end of the sixth century B.C. during the reign of the seventh and final King of...