Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd, which premiered at the Royal Opera House in 1951 before undergoing revisions in 1960, is based on the eponymous novella by Herman Melville, and has a libretto by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier. With the main action set aboard the HMS Indomitable in 1797 during the French Revolutionary Wars, the story centres on Billy Budd who at the start is pressed into serving in the Royal Navy from a merchant ship. He has a lot of positive attributes including...

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,...

A  little known Wagner, and with a dubious reputation, basically because of its exclusion from the true ‘corpus’ at Bayreuth, wherefrom it was banned together with Die Feen and Rienzi by composer and family. It’s strange that in the most sacred place of Wagnerism it’s impossible to see an opera that, following a wonderful work by Shakespeare much more ambiguous, complex and finally interesting than the libretto written by the author, the typical ‘opera...