A Surreal Double Bill: Larmes de couteau and Full Moon in March at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

The Marriage of Figaro of 1786 is one of three operas on which Mozart collaborated with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte (the others being Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte). It is based on the second of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’ trilogy of Figaro plays, while the first was later to be immortalised by Rossini in The Barber of Seville. It centres on the day on which Figaro, valet to Count Almaviva, tries to wed Susanna, maid to the...

Since 2013, the artistic and general director of the Komische Oper Berlin, Barrie Kosky, has dedicated the last production of the year to a work by Paul Abraham. This year it is Die Blume von Hawaii or The Flower of Hawaii, which, in 1931, helped the composer to achieve final recognition as a master of the operetta genre. After its world premiere in Leipzig, this jazz operetta began its tour de force, and not only in Germany. Abraham incorporated many musical elements of the new jazz...

Written in 1841, Nabucco is considered to be the opera that established Giuseppe Verdi’s reputation as a composer. The Italian libretto by Temistocle Solera is based on the biblical books of 2 Kings, Jeremiah, Lamentations and Daniel and the 1836 play by Auguste Anicet-Bourgeois and Francis Come, although Antonio Cortese’s 1836 ballet adaptation of the latter was a more important source for Solera than the play itself. The opera originally bore the title of Nabucodonosor,...

Fairy tale ‘mash-ups’, whereby many of our favourite magical stories are rolled into one, are not unknown in theatre. Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods constitutes one, as does arguably Act III of Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, in which a plethora of well loved characters dance. If, however, these works have already ensured that musical theatre and ballet are in on the act, Wolf Witch Giant Fairy now guarantees that opera is present at the party. Wolf...

After the great success at the Salzburg Festival in summer 2019, the co-production with Komische Oper of Orpheus in the Underworld was finally able to take place in front of a 100% full house in Berlin. 2G+ (vaccinated or recovered, wearing a mask at all times) regulations makes it possible. For his first full-length opera, Jacques Offenbach based his inspiration on the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, but shifted it to the France of the 2nd Republic and used it as an opera buffa...

Based on Victorien Sardou’s 1887 French-language play, Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca of 1900 is one opera that few directors choose to set in anything other than its original time and place. There are exceptions to this rule, but when all of the action can be linked to a real historical event on a precise date, there are certainly advantages to retaining the intended setting, and many risks associated with changing it. The entire story takes place during the afternoon,...