Three (brief) one Act operas by Sullivan here, but only one of them a collaboration with Gilbert. The Zoo – perhaps the most obscure – was written at the same time as Trial by Jury (the second G&S opera) and premiered just a few months after it, in June 1875, serving as the opener to an entirely separate, spoken …
Mozart’s Il re pastore (1775) stands in a line of artistic works which contrast the innocent pleasures of an existence at one with nature, with the tensions and artificiality of life at the centre of power (necessarily in the city). As the setting of an adapted libretto by Metastasio, its theme is typical of slightly earlier operas …
The assumptions of many nineteenth-century operas are often difficult now for contemporary sensibilities to countenance, with their heroines expected to behave impeccably in conforming with male expectations, and maligned or misunderstood if they don’t fall in line. Harry Fehr’s production of Bellini’s La sonnambula (1831) takes up the theme of sleepwalking not as a mere sensational or …
After the hiatus of a couple of years owing to disagreements among composer, librettist and their impresario, Richard D’Oyly Carte, Utopia, Limited (1893) marked a return to form by Gilbert and Sullivan in this work which proved to be their penultimate collaboration. Gilbert pulled no punches in satirising a range of English institutions – as depicted by …
