Premiering in Milan in 1832, The Elixir of Love, with a libretto by Felice Romani, is one of Gaetano Donizetti’s most popular operas. Originally set in a village in the Basque Country at the end of the eighteenth century, it sees the peasant Nemorino love the landowner Adina, even as she tells him she is fickle and that he should forget her. When, however, she reads the legend of Tristan and Isolde, Nemorino is inspired to ask travelling quack doctor Dulcamara if he has any of the...

Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann is based on three short stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann, with the French libretto having been written by Jules Barbier. It premiered at the Théâtre National de l’Opéra-Comique in Paris on 10 February 1881, but Offenbach never got to see it having died four months earlier. It had, however, been presented in an abridged form at the composer’s house, 8 Boulevard des Capucines, on 18 May 1879, and a version that...

Based on Victor Hugo’s play Le roi s’amuse, Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto was a triumph when it premiered at La Fenice in Venice in 1851, and has remained one of the composer’s most frequently performed operas ever since. Its popularity is thoroughly deserved but might still be deemed interesting, given that it is a contender for the cruellest opera in the mainstream repertoire. While many works see the innocent suffer and die, there is usually a sense in which...

The Turn of the Screw is a 1954 chamber opera by Benjamin Britten, with Myfanwy Piper’s libretto being based on Henry James’ eponymous novella of 1898. Told across a Prologue and sixteen scenes, with each of these being preceded by a variation on the twelve-note ‘Screw’ theme, it has been described as one of the most dramatically appealing of all English operas. Set in an English country house in Bly, originally in the middle of the nineteenth century, it...

Leonard Bernstein composed his one act opera Trouble in Tahiti in 1952, and on this occasion wrote the libretto himself. It concerns a married couple who on the surface have it made with their beautiful suburban home, but who find it difficult to live with each other and constantly bicker and fight. In 1983 he wrote A Quiet Place, which considers where the same family’s members are thirty years later. While performing both in the same evening would seem an obvious thing to...

Fidelio is the only opera that Beethoven ever wrote. Originally entitled Leonore, oder Der Triumph der ehelichen Liebe, with the libretto prepared by Joseph Sonnleithner from the French of Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, it premiered at the Theater an der Wien on 20 November 1805. The following year Beethoven’s friend Stephan von Breuning rewrote the libretto to create a second version that shortened the opera from three acts to two. In 1814 Beethoven revised his opera yet again,...