Autumn 2010

English Touring Opera will produce and tour two operas setting texts by famous playwrights: Promised End (a setting of Shakespear’s King Lear edited by Frank Kermode with music by Alexander Goehr), a new opera, and The Duenna, an 18th century opera with a text by Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan (author of The School for Scandal and The Rivals) that was probably the most popular and profitable opera ever produced in England.

King Lear is the greatest of ‘family’ dramas, in which a king mistakes the fine words of two of his daughters for love and respect, and mistakes the plainspoken, loving words of his third daughter for contempt. At the same time his vassal the Earl of Gloucester makes a similar misjudgement of his sons. The terrible disappointment and suffering that ensues takes these two old men to the naked edge of their endurance, and causes them to pose stark questions about justice, love, and bare humanity.

Alexander Goehr is a composer of international renown. His operas have been performed all over the world after premieres in places like the Royal Opera House, the Hamburg Opera, and [see note]. Frank Kermode is one of the greatest living Shakespearean scholars, and a distinguished writer and critic in his own right.

Click here to hear some of Goehr’s music.

The Duenna is an utterly contrasting work, full of sparkling wit and musical charm. It too is concerned with fathers who are deceived in their daughters, but in this case our sympathies are all with the daughters, who are seeking to marry men of their own choice. Knowing that Sheridan eloped with the beautiful Elizabeth Linley against the will of her father (one of the composers of The Duenna), and that he never entirely abandoned the rakish behaviour his father-in-law so dreaded, makes this operatic double elopement a particularly savoury dish. Tuneful, sabre-tongued, light-hearted and irreverent, The Duenna is the jewel of Georgian England, almost forgotten now.