Nadine Sierra Heads an Outstanding Cast in Lucia di Lammermoor at the Royal Opera House

Iolanthe; or, The Peer and the Peri of 1882 is the seventh of Gilbert and Sullivan’s fourteen collaborations. It was their first work to premiere at the Savoy Theatre (although Patience had transferred there in 1881) and ran for 398 performances, while also appearing extensively across the United Kingdom and America. It concerns a Fairy named Iolanthe who marries a mortal man. Although this is a capital offence under Fairy law, the Queen of the Fairies curtails her punishment to...

Gran Teatre del Liceu has inaugurated the new season by putting Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin on stage in a new co-production between the Barcelona theatre, Den Norske Opera in Oslo, which premiered the production in 2020, and Teatro Real of Madrid that will present it next season. This new approach to this surprising intimate wonder – Tchaikovsky called it "lyrical scenes" rather than opera – based on the novel of the same name in verse by Aleksandr Pushkin,...

Composer George Benjamin and librettist Martin Crimp have already had two major successes on the main stage of the Royal Opera House. Written on Skin, which appeared at Covent Garden in 2013 and 2017, may now be the most frequently performed opera written in the twenty-first century, and it was followed by Lessons in Love and Violence in 2018.  Benjamin and Crimp’s first collaboration, however, was a chamber opera entitled Into the Little Hill in 2006, and it is to this...

Set in eighteenth century Spain, Giuseppe Verdi’s La forza del destino sees the Marquis of Calatrava oppose his daughter Leonora’s desired union with her South American lover Don Alvaro, believing he is not good enough for her. When, however, Don Alvaro surrenders himself to prove that he never violated her, he throws down his pistol and accidentally kills the Marquis when it goes off. Leonora’s brother Don Carlo sets out to avenge his father’s death but he and Don...

Das Rheingold is the first opera in Richard Wagner’s tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen or Ring Cycle. It sets in motion the story that plays out across the four operas, and establishes the central theme of power versus love. It sees the dwarf, or Nibelung, Alberich steal the gold that is guarded by the Rhinemaidens and forge it into a ring that makes the bearer all powerful. He is only able to do so, however, by renouncing love, which in the world we see before us no one has...

L’Incoronazione di Poppea, first performed in Venice in 1642, is unique in the history of opera, not because of its remarkable age or the high quality of its music, after all, there are other operas from the same years, and Monteverdi, the composer of the music, equalled and perhaps surpassed the level reached in this work in other immortal titles such as Orfeo or Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria. If L'Incoronazione di Poppea is a unique work, it is because of its...