I puritani, with a libretto by Count Carlo Pepoli, was Vincenzo Bellini’s final opera, as he died just eight months after its premiere in January 1835. Based on Têtes Rondes et Cavaliers, an historical play by Jacques-François Ancelot and Joseph Xavier Saintine, it is set during the English Civil War, although the specific episode described is fictitious. In fact, the narrative was always intended to be a commentary on the political climate of 1830s Paris following the...

Camille Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila, which premiered in Weimar in 1877, is the only one of the composer’s operas to be regularly performed today. In describing how the Israelite Samson is duped by the Philistine Dalila into divulging the secret to his strength, thus enabling him to be weakened and blinded, the story comes from Chapter 16 of the Book of Judges. However, it concentrates on certain elements and downplays others, ignoring the heroic deeds that earned...

Premiering in 1945, with a libretto adapted by Montagu Slater from a section of George Crabbe’s 1810 narrative poem The Borough, Peter Grimes focuses on the type of outsider figure that always fascinated Benjamin Britten. Originally set in a nineteenth century Suffolk coastal village, it focuses on the clash between Grimes, a hard working fisherman who dreams of wealth and respect, and a narrow-minded and repressive community who will never judge him kindly, irrespective of what...

Tales of Love and Loss is not the name of one specific opera, but rather the title given to this triple bill in which all three works have been composed by women. It constitutes a Jette Parker Artist production, meaning the cast and creatives are drawn from the Royal Ballet and Opera’s programme to develop up-and-coming talent, and it is presented in the venue’s smaller Linbury Theatre to celebrate the scheme’s twenty-fifth anniversary. While the parallels can be...

The Turn of the Screw is a 1954 chamber opera by Benjamin Britten, with Myfanwy Piper’s libretto being based on Henry James’s eponymous novella of 1898. Told across a Prologue and sixteen scenes, with each of these being preceded by a variation on the twelve-note ‘Screw’ theme, it has been described as one of the most dramatically appealing of all English operas. Set in an English country house in Bly, originally in the middle of the nineteenth century, it tells...

Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, with a libretto by Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, describes the establishing and subsequent implosion of a city that is designed to give people fun because, it is asserted, there is nothing else in the world on which to rely. Situated somewhere in America, it is initially founded by three fugitives (Leokadja Begbick, Fatty the Bookkeeper and Trinity Moses) who find themselves unable to flee any further from the pursuing...