David Timson

Verdi's Falstaff repays careful study with real pleasure. It is opera's happiest irony that the great Italian master should cap a career – distinguished for its blood-and-thunder tragic masterpieces – with the greatest comic opera in the Italian repertory. The genius of Shakespeare is harnessed (in a miracle of compression) by master-librettist Boito to give the eighty-year-old Verdi a superb libretto, on which he lavished more wonderful tunes...

La sonnambula was written by Bellini as a vehicle for two of the supreme singers of his age and accordingly is a fine example of the school we call bel canto, where beauty of voice and the virtuosity of the singers is integral to conveying the emotions in the soul of the composer. The fact that Bellini was one of the great melodists, writing long, beautiful vocal lines, that he was a master orchestrator and that he could write stirringly for the chorus...

Così fan tutte contains some of Mozart's most sublime music. On one level, the opera is purely a social anecdote about young people falling in and out of love; but Mozart was a supreme sensualist and a great humanist, and invested the tale with all his understanding of humanity and young love. In this title, David Timson refutes the charge that Mozart squandered his genius on a work full of trivial nonsense and proves this 'miraculous yet problematic'...

Pagliacci may be the most completely compelling short opera in the repertory and owes much of its impact to a brilliant story based, it is said, on true life and told through the device of a play-within-a-play. The action is set in Calabria in the deep south of Italy where the jealousies and illicit passions of a troupe of strolling actors precisely intersect with the play they are performing – to both touching and tragic effect. Leoncavallo was...

La Traviata owes its enduring popularity to a superb story of young love and fatal sacrifice, set to music by Italy's master melodist at the peak of his powers. Interest and poignancy are added by the fact that this is a true story – the baritone 'heavy' is Alexander Dumas who wrote The Count of Monte Cristo. But it is the central figure, the heroine Violetta, the archetypal 'whore with the heart of gold' who dominates the piece. It is her opera...

Don Giovanni has long been regarded as Mozart's supreme theatrical achievement. The subject seems unpromising – the last day in the life of the notorious womaniser Don Juan – but the skill of the librettist allied to the genius of Mozart at the very peak of his powers has created a work which is not only highly entertaining but reflects an incredible understanding of the human condition.

Rigoletto is simply wonderful entertainment. It is uncanny to listen to the opening ten minutes or so and recognise a dozen superb tunes. It is also much more – a daring (for its time) attack on aristocratic privilege, a tender love story, and an impassioned appeal on behalf of the disadvantaged, all set to music of such wealth and beauty that, with its sister operas La traviata and Il trovatore, it has almost defined Italian opera for 150 years....

Rossini's comic operas, like The Barber of Seville, are better known than his tragedies though he wrote in fact many more tragedies than comedies. One of them, his last, William Tell, is actually credited with launching the whole age of Grand Opéra. Tancredi is an early work – indeed his first smash hit – and it established his international fame. It has all the youthful verve of the comedies allied to a sure dramatic sense, and several of the...

Left unfinished after Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Mystery of Edwin Drood centers on Edwin Drood's uncle, John Jasper, and his love for Rosa Bud, Edwin's fiancee. Set in the dark, fictional cathedral city of Cloisterham, the novel is awash with guilt, disguise and mystery. It contains some fine writing, and just before his death, Dickens left an indication of where the plot was going, which is included.

Fidelio is a work like no other. Beethoven's only opera is about the joy of married love – by a man who never knew that pleasure. It is about heroism by a man who was often mean and petty in his human relations; it is about freedom by a man who was a prisoner of his own deafness; and ultimately it is about joy by a man who experienced precious little of it. Maybe there is a divine logic to that: feelings the artist could not experience but could...