Georg Friedrich Haendel’s Partenope, which premiered at the King's Theatre in London on 24 February 1730, follows the structure and forms of opera seria. It can hardly be described as such, however, since it is so humorous in tone, while the music is relatively light textured. Its libretto was adapted by an unknown hand from one originally written in 1699 by Silvio Stampiglia, and the story’s frivolous nature led the opera company the Royal Academy of Music to reject the...

Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, with a libretto by Terrence McNally, premiered in 2000 at the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, and has appeared at The Metropolitan Opera. In spite of this, it has only ever enjoyed a smattering of outings in the United Kingdom, including a semi-staged performance at the Barbican in 2018, and productions by Welsh National Opera and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 2019 and 2023 respectively. In fact, Annilese Miskimmon’s new...

Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera Albert Herring, Op. 39, with a libretto by Eric Crozier, is based on Guy de Maupassant’s 1887 novella Le Rosier de Madame Husson, albeit with the action transposed to an English setting. Set around 1900 in Loxford, which is a fictitious town but typical of those to be found in East Suffolk, it sees Lady Billows and the community’s elite attempt to organise the annual May Day festival. They need to elect a May Queen, but the housekeeper...

Based on Prosper Mérimée’s eponymous novella, Georges Bizet’s Carmen of 1875, with a libretto by Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac, is the story of the ultimate temptress. A gypsy and cigarette factory worker in Seville, Carmen has the power to entice any man she chooses. Once they are besotted with her, however, she quickly moves on, leaving them heart broken and unable to accept what has happened.  In the opera Don José, an army...

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...

Mary, Queen of Scots, a commission by Scottish Opera that premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1977, is the first of Thea Musgrave’s four operas on historical figures. It is also the first for which she wrote her own libretto, with her starting point being an unpublished play by Amalia Elguera, who had previously written the libretto for Musgrave’s 1973 opera The Voice of Ariadne.  While there have been plays and operas about the character before, the majority have...