Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow (or Die lustige Witwe) is an operetta that was immensely popular on its premiere in 1905, and has continued to cause much amusement in opera houses ever since. Based on Henri Meilhac’s play L'attaché d'ambassadeof 1861, it tells of one Hanna Glawari who is a merry widow because, when her husband died, he left her a fortune of twenty million francs. She comes from the small Balkan principality of Pontevedro whose economy is...

A Midsummer Night’s Dream of 1960 is Benjamin Britten’s operatic take on Shakespeare’s eponymous play. It follows the original story reasonably closely, although it focuses on certain aspects of the plot and downgrades the prominence of others. Robert Carsen’s classic production for English National Opera premiered in 1995. A new version by Christopher Alden was actually introduced in 2011, but Carsen’s was so impossible to keep down that it now returns to...