Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore of 1853 is based on Antonio García Gutiérrez’s play El trovador. Set in fifteenth century Spain it tells of the noble lady Leonora who is in love with the troubadour Manrico, but is herself loved by the Count di Luna, a nobleman in the service of the Prince of Aragon. The Count’s younger brother Garzia supposedly died in infancy when a gypsy was burnt at the stakefor allegedly bewitching him, and the charred body of a baby was...

Like Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia and Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier is the story of an ageing man attempting to put himself between two young lovers. In addition, it features an older woman who is also capable of standing in the way of the couple, but who honourably chooses not to do so. Princess Marie Thérèse von Werdenberg, known as the Marschallin, enjoys a relationship with Octavian, despite the fact that she is...

Philosopher and composer, Theodor W. Adorno stated that Alban Berg’s Lulu is ‘one of those works that reveals the extent of its quality the longer and more deeply one immerses oneself in it’. It was composed between 1929 and 1935 when the composer died, premiered incomplete in 1937, and in a complete version in 1979. When Berg died he left only portions of the final act fully scored, and after Arnold Schönbergdeclined to complete the orchestration, Berg’s wife...

George Frideric Handel’s opera Oreste of 1734 is a pasticcio, which is a work built around music (usually from a range of composers) that already exists. These were very common in the eighteenth century, partly because the demands on an establishment’s resident composer to produce work were so great that it became a standard practice to bolster output by utilising them, and partly because there was a strong tradition of using such creations to showcase the compositions of a...

Jacques Offenbach’s Les contes d’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 in a three-act version (with prologue and epilogue), but Offenbach never got to see the full version performed having died four months earlier. It had, however, been presented in an abridged form at the...

Don Giovanni of 1787 is one of three operas that Mozart wrote with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte (the others being Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte). It tells of the eponymous hero, or rather antihero, who effortlessly conquers thousands of women. Although in the process he makes many enemies, the ladies he has cheated have a habit of coming back for more or trying to save him, and in the end he is responsible for his own downfall. When the ghost of the Commendatore...