Unlike the ballet The Nutcracker, which is also currently on at Covent Garden, The Magic Flute is not strictly a Christmas piece. However, Mozart’s final opera, which premiered on 30 September 1791 just a few months before his death, is both enchanting and humorous, meaning it is perfect fare for the festive season. The work, which takes the form of a Singspiel that combines singing with spoken dialogue, sees the Queen of the Night persuade Prince Tamino to rescue her daughter Pamina...

Based on Victorien Sardou’s 1887 French-language play, Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca of 1900, with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, not only occurs in a specific time and place, but on a precise date that can be linked to an historical event. All of the action takes place during the afternoon, evening and early morning of 17 and 18 June 1800, following the Battle of Marengo between Napoleon’s army and Austrian forces. The Austrians were initially...

Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life of 1946, itself based on Philip Van Doren Stern’s short story The Greatest Gift (self-published in 1943), is one of the all time classic Christmas films. It sees George Bailey, played by James Stewart, grow up in the first half of the twentieth century in an American town named Bedford Falls. George has ambitions to go to college and see the world, but at every point in his life he is held back by circumstances and a sense of...

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...

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...

The story to be found in Handel’s Alcina of 1735 comes from Ludovico Ariosto’s epic sixteenth century poem Orlando furioso. This had already been employed by Francesca Caccini in La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina of 1625, which is recognised today as the first opera to be written by a woman. Handel himself used the libretto of L'isola di Alcina, an opera that was set in 1728 in Rome by Riccardo Broschi, which he acquired the...