Spectres of the feast

Robert Thicknesse on Opera

What Italian opera signified to the Habsburg court

Just two decades after the premiere of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, the Soviet Union paid a New York opera company to stage performances there. The year was 1956 and the Cold War was well underwa

Music was the antidote to stuffy court life that Marie Antoinette craved. Henrietta Bredin explains how the doomed Dauphine reinvigorated the French opera scene

Alexandra Wilson charts opera’s wild vicissitudes of fortune under both Labour and the Conservatives

In other circumstances, it would be heartening to see an opera getting national attention. Yet once again, the recent buzz around Covent Garden concerns politics rather than performances. The latest f