Shakespeare operas

Washington National Opera’s Artistic Director Francesca Zambello interviews director, Brenna Corner, about Verdi’s opera inspired by Macbeth.

Get an insider’s look at adapting a Shakespeare play for opera with this blog post by the dramaturg and libretto consultant for the new John Adams opera of “Antony and Cleopatra.”

Hamlet sings! A new opera version of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is onstage now at the Metropolitan Opera, with tenor Allan Clayton resuming the title role that he played for the opera’s world premiere at the Glyndebourne Festival.

What many consider to be the earliest known English opera shares its mythological subject with Shakespeare’s most popular published work during his lifetime: the epic poem Venus and Adonis. Here we see great artists from different centuries using different art…

Leah Crocetto (Desdemona) and Russell Thomas (Otello) in WNO’s Otello. Photo by Scott Suchman. I find it fascinating that Verdi’s last two operas were both inspired by Shakespeare: Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893), yet they are very different in story,…

“L’opera senza amore!” That was the Italians’ reaction to Verdi’s Macbeth when it premiered in Florence in 1847. Despite its immediate success and subsequent popularity, an opera that involved no great love affair struck audiences as an oddity.

Charles Gounod’s 19th-century opera “Roméo et Juliette” is a love story of heartbreaking tragedy, punctuated by four masterful duets. Matthew Shilvock of San Francisco Opera explains why the work is such a masterpiece.

There’s no other character from Shakespeare who has charmed the imaginations of opera composers and librettists more than Sir John Falstaff.

Shakespeare and opera is a winning combination, with the plays providing compelling dramatic material and a ‘name’ that would help sell tickets.