First Rate Music Making in Handel’s Giustino at the Royal Ballet and Opera, Covent Garden

George Frideric Handel’s Giustino, HWV 37 has an Italian language libretto, the origins of which lie in one created by Nicolò Beregan in 1682. That was first set to music by Giovanni Legrenzi the following year, and was subsequently used by Tomaso Albinoni in 1711 (though his opera is now lost) and Antonio Vivaldi in 1724. The version that Handel used had been adapted from Beregan by Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI’s court poet Pietro Pariati in 1711.  The opera...

Gioacchino Rossini’s La Cenerentola, performed here in English as Cinderella, is based on the traditional fairytale. While many versions of it exist, the one that is most widely known in the English speaking world was published in French as Cendrillon by Charles Perrault in his Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697. Unlike Perrault’s version, however, Rossini’s steers clear of the more supernatural elements, and many have argued that this reflects the...

The use of a narrative, discursive or argumentative strategy based upon making animals speak is almost as ancient as culture itself. From Aesop to Disney, passing through La Fontaine and Orwell, the device of granting human language to animals has been employed in various ways and for various purposes, yet almost always with an educational aim - education meant in its broadest sense. In one way or another, we are all children of Disney. How many childhood tears, crucial to our emotional...

Giuseppe Verdi’s The Sicilian Vespers of 1855, set to a French libretto by Eugène Scribe and Charles Duveyrier from their 1838 work Le duc d’Albe, tells of the French occupation of Sicily in the thirteenth century. Prior to the opera’s opening the Sicilian patriot Jean Procida was exiled and the French conqueror Guy de Montfort, who became the island’s governor, violated a Sicilian woman who subsequently had a son called Henri. At times the Sicilians are...

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...

Fairy tales and witches are often – sugar-coated in disguise – terrible narratives full of anguish, loneliness, and fear. Beneath the barely concealed veneer of culture, they pulse with our “dark sides”, our most disorderly desires, alien to any moral framework. This is why it is so educational and necessary to tell these stories to our children from an early age, so they can name and shape their fears to grow up healthy. We must give a name and face to our fears...