Welcome to the theatre
Opera is theatre, music, poetry and scenography all at once. Love, jealousy, betrayal, death, revenge, redemption. Choose a composer and begin the journey.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
An absolute genius who died at 35, leaving behind works that still seem impossible: too beautiful, too perfect, too human. His characters laugh and suffer together, often in the same musical phrase.
Giuseppe Verdi
The Italian composer par excellence, who transformed opera into pure human drama. His characters burn: fathers who lose children, women who die for honour, heroes destroyed by jealousy. Verdi is raw emotion.
Giacomo Puccini
The last great master of Italian opera. Puccini has the supreme gift of melody: his arias get inside you and never leave. His female characters are unforgettable, and almost always die. Puccini knows how to break a heart.
Gaetano Donizetti
Prolific, lightning-fast, brilliant: Donizetti wrote over 70 operas. His melodies are among the most immediate and moving in the bel canto tradition. He knew how to make audiences laugh and weep — often in the same opera, sometimes in the same aria.
Richard Wagner
The most controversial composer in music history. Wagner did not write 'operas' — he called them 'music dramas' and conceived them as total works of art where music, text, scenography and gesture fuse into a single experience. He changed the history of Western music forever. Loving or hating him is almost obligatory.
Richard Strauss
Not to be confused with Johann Strauss of the waltzes: Richard Strauss is a world apart — superhuman orchestrations, dizzying harmonies, female characters of a psychological complexity unprecedented in opera. Scandalous in his lifetime, venerated after his death.
Other Masters
Rossini, Bellini, Bizet — composers who left immortal works. A barber of Seville, an irresistible Carmen, a Celtic druid priestess: stories every bit as compelling.