Harry Fehr’s New Production of The Elixir of Love at the London Coliseum

Erich Korngold, who is more usually if somewhat unfairly associated with film scores, wrote Die tote Stadt at the age of 23. It is based on Georges Rodebach’s 1892 novel Bruges-la-Morte, which had already been turned into a play by the author. Korngold’s father Julius knew Siegfried Trebitsch, who had translated the latter into German, and Julius and Erich adapted the play into an opera, writing the libretto between them under the joint pseudonym of Paul Schott. Set in...

Philip Glass, who is recognised as one of the leading proponents of minimalism in the world today, has written over twenty-five operas, a total achieved by hardly any composer since the days of Rossini, Donizetti and Verdi. Three of these form the ‘portrait trilogy’, which focuses on pivotal figures in the fields of science, politics and religion respectively. Einstein on the Beach premiered in 1976, Satyagraha (about Mahatma Gandhi) followed in 1980, and then the triptych was...

Herculine Barbin, also known as Alexina B., was born in France in 1838. At birth it was decided that she was a female and she was raised as a girl. When reaching puberty, she realized that her body was not developing like those of the rest of the girls. She never menstruated but suffered from severe pain. Alexina B. found a job as a teacher in a girls’ boarding school where she fell in love with Sara, the daughter of the director of the centre. After their first love encounter...

Based on the fairytales of Karel Jaromír Erben and Božena Němcová, Antonín Dvořák’s Rusalka of 1901, with a libretto by Jaroslav Kvapil, tells the story of the eponymous water sprite. She tells her father Vodník, the water goblin who rules the lake where she lives, that she has fallen in love with a Prince who she has seen hunting. Wishing to become human so that she can embrace him, she seeks the assistance of the witch Ježibaba who explains that...

Das Rheingold, performed here in English as The Rhinegold, is the first opera in Richard Wagner’s tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen or Ring Cycle. It sets in motion the story that plays out across the four operas, and establishes the central theme of power versus love. It sees the dwarf, or Nibelung, Alberich steal the gold that is guarded by the Rhinemaidens and forge it into a ring that makes the bearer all powerful. He is only able to do so, however, by renouncing love, which in...

If Shakespeare's Macbeth is already bloodthirsty, dark, barbaric, ferocious, atavistic and telluric, Verdi's operatic reworking of this work not only keeps intact the strength of the original but, by concentrating and essentialising it, he even increases it. Verdi's Macbeth is the ultimate party of wickedness and an orgy of moral perversion. Stylistically, it is a rare opera that does not fit anywhere – chronologically it should be inscribed in late bel canto, but...