Performed at Madrid's historic Teatro Real in 2018, Ivor Bolton conducts Benjamin Britten's opera based on Lytton Strachey's 1928 Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History. In her repeated clashes with the Earl of Essex-a longtime favorite of the queen who was ultimately put to death for treason-Elizabeth I is depicted as flawed and vain, human and sympathetic.
‘You could have a blow job aria – begins with words, ends with humming.’ Using the story of a public scandal, the librettist Philip Hensher inspired the 23-year-old British composer Thomas Adès to portray the fall of the libertine and notorious socialite beauty the Duchess of Argyll, remembered in history as the Dirty Duchess. Powder Her Face is inspired by a sex scandal in 1963 that shocked the British upper class.