Bachtrack top ten: Opera in English

English is famous as a language of poetry, but is not generally considered a natural language for opera. For the form’s first three hundred years, Italian predominated even at the courts of English royalty, while French, German, Russian and even Czech all have bodies of work many times that of English; indeed, the language was almost absent from operatic repertoire.

Almost, but not entirely. Not long after opera’s earliest days, English composers started to create operas, some of which have stood the test of time and are now commonly performed, standing credibly alongside the Italian or French works of their era. In the 20th century, with the advent of Benjamin Britten, the English language gained a world-leading opera composer who created some of the most powerful pieces of music drama ever written, setting a new direction for the genre. From the later part of the 20th century and into the 21st, English has become the backbone of new repertoire, with many works from composers on both sides of the Atlantic frequently performed on stages across the world.

Focused on works written in England – a playlist of American opera is for another day – here is a sampler of ten English language operas, in chronological order, to demonstrate the immense variety that is available in our mother tongue. And in honour of St George’s Day, you’ll see that three Georges feature in this list!

1Henry Purcell: Dido and Aeneas (1688)

Dido and Aeneas was not the first English opera: experts argue between Sir William Davenant’s 1656 The Siege of Rhodes and John Blow’s later Venus and Adonis. The question is complicated by the various rules about what could and couldn’t be called an opera (many works now performed as opera were originally described as masques, semi-operas or oratorios). But the question is moot, because both scores are lost: Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is the first English opera whose music has survived. And it’s superb, filled with dramatic scenes and glorious melodies.

The most famous highlight is the closing number: Dido’s lament “When I am laid in earth”, performed in 2019 at the Paris Opera by Swedish mezzo Malena Ernman with the backing of the impeccable period ensemble Les Arts Florissants.

2George Frideric Handel: Semele (1744)

While Handel was not born in England, he spent most of his life in London. Generally, his works in Italian are described as operas and those in English are described as oratorios – but it can be hard to pin down the distinction, and works such as Saul, Theodora and Jephtha are commonly staged today. “Myself I shall Adore”, from Semele, is a fairly unique aria in being a love song to oneself: upon looking at herself in mirror given to her by Juno, Semele has become enraptured by her own beauty and tells the world about it in glorious coloratura – here sung with relish by Louise Alder with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists.

3Thomas Arne: Artaxerxes (1762)

With Handel’s death in 1759, the baton of English opera passes to Thomas Arne. His Artaxerxes was probably the first English opera to provoke a riot, when a performance was interrupted by a protest against the abolition of half-price admissions at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. The full opera is rarely performed today, but Artaxerxes’ sister Mandana’s aria “The soldier, tir’d of war’s alarms” was a popular high-wire showpiece for 20th century sopranos. Here is a young Joan Sutherland lighting up the fireworks.

4Arthur Sullivan: The Pirates of Penzance (1879)

Let’s admit it: 19th-century English operas are a rare breed. Names like the Irishman Michael William Balfe or the American William Henry Fry have not left a great impression on operatic history, and English operas by English composers are rarer still.

Rare, that is, until the emergence in the 1870s of the “Savoy Operas” by librettist W S Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan. Gilbert’s satirical brilliance combined with Sullivan’s musical talent to produce fourteen comic operas which remain dearly loved to this day. To his great chagrin, Sullivan did not enter posterity as a serious opera composer: his one grand opera Ivanhoe is hardly ever performed.

Gilbert and Sullivan operas are full of winning melodies, some of them very lovely, but they are best known for their high speed patter songs. Probably the most famous is a proper English language tongue-twister: “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” from The Pirates of Penzance, probably the only opera aria to feature the words “differential calculus” and “square of the hypotenuse”. It's sung here in 2015 by Andrew Shore with English National Opera.

5Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes (1945)

When living in the United States during the Second World War, Benjamin Britten came across George Crabbe’s long poem The Borough and was consumed by the poem’s setting in Britten’s native Suffolk and its themes of loneliness and the cruelty of crowds. He felt an overwhelming need to turn it into an opera, and the resulting Peter Grimes was groundbreaking: a psychological drama that is still captivating audiences across the world.

But Peter Grimes isn’t just tragedy or psychodrama: it is also a vivid evocation of the sea in all its capricious forms (Britten’s subsequent large-scale opera Billy Budd would do the same). And although many of the events in the opera are corruscating, a great deal of the music is of staggering beauty, as in this rendition of “Now the Great Bear and the Pleiades”, by Allan Clayton at the Met in 2022.

6Benjamin Britten: The Turn of the Screw (1954)

We’ve generally kept to the rule of one opera per composer in this playlist, but Britten is too important a figure to leave that rule unbroken. With his chamber opera The Turn of the Screw, he expanded the opera genre to take in that of gothic horror, setting Henry James’ novella about a pair of children and their new governess in a haunted country mansion.

As with Britten’s other operas, the music is always ravishing regardless of how dark the events may become. In this clip from Garsington Opera in 2019, Sophie Bevan plays the Governess, early in the opera as she waxes lyrical about her new home and the lovely children in the “Tower aria”.

7Jonathan Dove: Flight (1988)

With Flight, Dove and librettist April De Angelis took opera into the realms of current affairs, setting a fictionalised version of one of the strangest news stories, the Iranian refugee Mehran Karimi Nasseri who was marooned airside at Charles De Gaulle Airport for 18 years. It’s an opera that defines categorisation. Mostly, it’s a light-hearted hilarious comedy, but the Refugee has a heart-rending back story which is revealed in the lyrical beauty of the aria “Dawn”. In this 2021 performance at Seattle Opera, the Refugee is sung by counter-tenor Randall Scotting.

8Mark-Anthony Turnage: Anna Nicole (2011)

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Festen, based on Thomas Vinterberg’s cult Danish movie, has been the standout opera event of 2025 so far – but we couldn’t find any performances on video that were readily available for you to watch. So instead, here is a clip from Anna Nicole, Turnage’s previous large scale work for Covent Garden, which tells the tale of Anna Nicole Smith, who escaped poverty, with the substantial help of silicone, to become a Playboy centrefold and marry a billionaire. It’s a rags-to-riches story with a very dark heart (Smith’s son and she herself both died of drug overdoses) and it’s fair to say that it split the critics with its combination of classical operatic vocals and jazz-rock inflected music centred on the performance of drummer Peter Erskine.

Make up your own mind with Eva-Maria Westbroek revving it up with “Partay!”.

9Thomas Adès: The Exterminating Angel (2016)

Festen was not the first recent Covent Garden opera based on a cult movie: Thomas Adès chose to adapt Luis Buñuel’s 1962 El ángel exterminador. But where Festen is uncompromisingly and unflinchingly realistic, The Exterminating Angel is surreal and blackly comic, with a gloriously eclectic cast of improbable characters. The music is eclectic also, but there’s room for some gorgeous lyricism, as in Blanca’s aria “Over the Sea”, sung here by Christine Rice at the Met in 2018.

10Sir George Benjamin: Picture a day like this (2023)

And finally, the latest offering from the composer-librettist pairing of Sir George Benjamin and Martin Crimp, whose operas have been extraordinarily successful in the last couple of decades, with countless performances in houses across the world.

Like their previous two operas, Written on Skin and Lessons in Love and Violence, Picture a Day Like This was premiered at the Aix Festival. But it’s a very different animal indeed: a one act small-scale opera which packs an emotional punch out of all proportion to the modest forces it requires – although it does require an exceptional artist in the main role, which is exactly what it had in the shape of Marianne Crebassa.

Truly, we are living in an exceptional time for English language opera – and that’s without mentioning John Adams, Philip Glass and the many other composers working on the other side of the Atlantic. If your native language is English and you want to hear opera in your own language (and you prefer not to hear opera in translation), there’s plenty out there for you.

Upcoming productions of operas mentioned include WNO’s Peter Grimes (30th April to 4th June), Adelaide Opera’s Flight (8th–10th May), Royal Opera’s Semele (30th June to 18th July), Royal Opera’s The Turn of the Screw (19th–28th September), and Teatro San Carlo’s Picture a day like this (24th–26th October).