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...

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...

Giacomo Puccini’s Il trittico, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1918, is a triptych of one-act operas comprising Il tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi. The composer originally intended for each opera to reflect one part of Dante’s Divina Commedia, although in the event only the final work is based on the poem. As a result, the only theme that really underpins the operas is that they all involve, in one way or another, the concealment of a...

Written in 1998 to a libretto by Paul Bentley, Poul Ruders’s The Handmaid’s Tale is based on Margaret Atwood’s eponymous novel of 1985. This means that when he wrote it no-one had even heard of Bruce Miller’s television series that aired in 2017. English National Opera first staged the work in 2003, and then introduced a new production by ENO’s Artistic Director Annilese Miskimmon in 2022. This version has now returned, under revival director James...

Erich Korngold, who is more usually if somewhat unfairly associated with film scores, wrote Die tote Stadt at the age of 23. It is based on Georges Rodebach’s 1892 novel Bruges-la-Morte, which had already been turned into a play by the author. Korngold’s father Julius knew Siegfried Trebitsch, who had translated the latter into German, and Julius and Erich adapted the play into an opera, writing the libretto between them under the joint pseudonym of Paul Schott. Set in...

Written in 1998 to a libretto by Paul Bentley, Poul Ruders’s The Handmaid’s Tale is based on Margaret Atwood’s eponymous novel of 1985. This means that when he wrote it no one had even heard of Bruce Miller’s television series that aired in 2017. With some qualifications, the opera follows the same plot as the novel in painting a nightmarish vision of the early twenty-first century, which then still lay in the future. It is a world in which a supposedly...