Three Operas by Women in Tales of Love and Loss at the Royal Ballet and Opera, Covent Garden

Tales of Love and Loss is not the name of one specific opera, but rather the title given to this triple bill in which all three works have been composed by women. It constitutes a Jette Parker Artist production, meaning the cast and creatives are drawn from the Royal Ballet and Opera’s programme to develop up-and-coming talent, and it is presented in the venue’s smaller Linbury Theatre to celebrate the scheme’s twenty-fifth anniversary. While the parallels can be...

The Turn of the Screw is a 1954 chamber opera by Benjamin Britten, with Myfanwy Piper’s libretto being based on Henry James’s 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 tells...

Saioa Hernández has found in the character of Gioconda the role upon which she is building a significant part of her career. She was the most eagerly awaited singer in this new production of La Gioconda, which has just opened at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, and this marks the sixth different staging of Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera in which the Madrid-born soprano has taken part. That is no small achievement, given that the work, though not a rarity, is performed relatively...

Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, with a libretto by Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, describes the establishing and subsequent implosion of a city that is designed to give people fun because, it is asserted, there is nothing else in the world on which to rely. Situated somewhere in America, it is initially founded by three fugitives (Leokadja Begbick, Fatty the Bookkeeper and Trinity Moses) who find themselves unable to flee any further from the pursuing...

Originally set in Naples, Così fan tutte of 1790 sees the philosopher Don Alfonso challenge two soldiers, Ferrando and Guglielmo, to prove that their respective fiancées, the sisters Dorabella and Fiordiligi, are faithful. He is certain that no woman ever is, but the younger men are so convinced of their own lovers’ fidelity that they agree to a wager with him. They will pretend to be called away to war and then return disguised as Albanians to try to win over the...

Boris Godunov is Modest Mussorgsky’s only completed opera, and widely considered to be his masterpiece. Its subjects are the eponymous Russian ruler, who reigned as Tsar from 1598 to 1605, and the False Dmitry I, who succeeded him almost immediately but was killed a year later. The Russian language libretto was written by the composer, and is based on Pushkin’s blank verse drama Boris Godunov as well as Nikolay Karamzin’s History of the Russian...