Giuseppe Verdi’s The Sicilian Vespers of 1855, set to a French libretto by Eugène Scribe and Charles Duveyrier from their 1838 work Le duc d’Albe, tells of the French occupation of Sicily in the thirteenth century. Prior to the opera’s opening the Sicilian patriot Jean Procida was exiled and the French conqueror Guy de Montfort, who became the island’s governor, violated a Sicilian woman who subsequently had a son called Henri. At times the Sicilians are...

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...

Charles-François Gounod’s Faust, with a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, premiered at the Théâtre Lyrique on the Boulevard du Temple in Paris on 19 March 1859. It underwent several revisions over the following decade, including the insertion of a ballet into Act V to meet the expectations of grand opera, and was extremely popular in the nineteenth century. It was the work with which New York’s Metropolitan Opera opened for the first time on...

Although Georg Philipp Telemann is acclaimed as one of the greatest Baroque composers, and one of the most prolific ever in terms of volume of output, his operas have been somewhat neglected. This performance of Pimpinone, or, to give it its full title, Die Ungleiche Heirat zwischen Vespetta und Pimpinone oder Das herrsch-süchtige Camer Mägden (The Unequal Marriage Between Vespetta and Pimpinone or The Domineering Chambermaid), represents the first time that Covent Garden...

It is exactly one hundred years since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published in 1925. It received generally positive reviews, but some critics felt it compared unfavourably with his previous novels This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922), and it was not a great commercial success. In fact, when Fitzgerald died in 1940 he believed himself to be a failure and that his work would soon be forgotten. However, during World War II the Council on...

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, 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,...