Written in 1975 and first performed by Dame Janet Baker at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1976, Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra was his final vocal work. He assembled the libretto from parts of a translation by Robert Lowell of Jean Racine’s 1677 play Phèdre, and the cantata sees the eponymous woman contemplate her death as things have completely fallen apart with her husband Theseus. This is due to her lust for his son and her stepson Hippolytus, who has died as an indirect...

In 2020 director Joe Hill-Gibbins did not have much luck with his new staging of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro for English National Opera. Premiering on 14 March of that year, it was set to run until 20 April, but enjoyed no more than its first performance after COVID-19 saw all UK theatres close the following week and a formal lockdown declared on 23 March. What is technically therefore the production’s first revival at the Coliseum is in reality the first time it will...

Set in Ancient Egypt, Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida of 1871, with a libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni, centres on a love triangle between Radamès, Amneris and Aida. As a Princess of Egypt and the daughter of the King, Amneris believes that her feelings for the Chief of the Guard Radamès ought to be reciprocated, and is horrified when she discovers that he and Aida, an Ethiopian slave, are actually in love. When Aida’s father Amonasro is captured in battle, with the...

Claus Guth’s staging of Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa was one of the first artistic casualties of COVID-19. It was set to appear at the Royal Opera House in March 2020, but it never did so because the pandemic led to the venue’s closure. It finally premiered in September 2021, and proved to be well worth the wait. If anything, this first revival of the production, by Oliver Platt, is even more accomplished than the initial outing, thanks to the strength of both...

Premiering in 1893, 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...

The Pirates of Penzance; or, The Slave of Duty is the fifth Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration, and premiered in New York City on 31 December 1879. It made its London debut on 3 April 1880, and was warmly received with the critical consensus being that it represented a significant advance on the duo’s earlier works. The Herald in New York suggested that ‘the new work is in every respect superior to the Pinafore, the text more humorous, the music more elegant and more...