Based on Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel The Bride of Lammermoor, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor of 1835, with a libretto by Salvadore Cammarano, is set in Scotland. The Ashton and Ravenswood families have a long-standing hatred of each other with the former family now owning the estate that previously belonged to the latter. The Ashtons have themselves fallen on hard times, however, leading the Master of Lammermoor Enrico to insist that his sister Lucia marry the...

Based on Prosper Mérimée’s eponymous novella, Georges Bizet’s Carmen of 1875 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, however, they are besotted with her she quickly moves on, leaving them heart broken and unable to accept what has happened. In the opera Don José, an army corporal, has almost everything he could ever desire. He has the sweet, loving...

Giant, with music by Sarah Angliss and libretto by Ross Sutherland, was commissioned by Britten Pears Arts and first appeared at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2023. It explores the relationship between the eighteenth century British surgeon John Hunter and Charles Byrne who, measuring seven feet, seven inches (judged by his skeletal remains) was known as ‘The Irish Giant’. Following Byrne’s death in 1783, Hunter arranged for his body to be stolen while it was on its way to...

The Flying Dutchman, which premiered in Dresden in 1843, is the fourth of Richard Wagner’s thirteen operas, and considered to be his first mature one. This is because it is the first still to be regularly staged, with Wagner himself having ruled that the three that preceded it should never be performed at his Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. The composer had been inspired to write the opera following a stormy sea crossing he made from Riga to London in 1839, and the story is taken from...

Based on the Sophocles tragedy, Richard Strauss’s Elektra of 1909 represents the first of his several collaborations with librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who in this instance had already written an eponymous play. It is the second of Strauss’s two highly modernist operas, and deploys dissonance, chromaticism and extremely fluid tonality to an even greater degree than his first, Salome.  The opera is expressionistic in every sense since the adaptation of the...

Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, with a libretto by his sister Adelheid Wette, is based on the eponymous fairytale that was recorded by the Brothers Grimm and published in 1812. It follows the Grimm version of the story reasonably closely, although there are a few notable differences including the fact that the Mother here is not intent on losing the children in the forest so that she and her husband might survive the hard times. She sends them there to collect berries as a...