After his initial breakthrough with Der Ferne Klang in 1909, Franz Schreker’s successful opera career was about to crumble before his eyes. Rightwing hecklers marred the premiere of Der Schmied von Gent on 29 October 1932 in Berlin. Within a couple of years, the Austrian Jewish composer fell from being lauded as the future of German opera to having his ‘degenerate’ work banned and losing his prestigious teaching positions. 

Was there ever a more precocious talent than Mozart? He wrote Il sogno di Scipione when he was 15 years old. Yet it was his fifth dramatic work for the stage.

Mozart’s first serious German opera is, in fact, a Turkish one. Die Entführung aus dem Serail is a tricky affair to stage nowadays, seeing how it imagines the East through the prism of Western sensibilities.

As its title suggests, the opera The Bartered Bride by Czech composer Bedřich Smetana does not herald a particularly pleasant story for our protagonist. And yet Mařenka comes first in our ranking of strong female opera figures.

How do you adapt a novella into an opera for the stage, when the author has left it deliberately unclear whether some of the ghostly characters actually exist?