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"It was the nightingale and not the lark." This sentence, perhaps the most famous line in perhaps the most famous love story ever written, also found its way into Charles Gounod’s opera about Romeo and Juliet which first enthralled an audience at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1867.

Although the comic opera Cublai, gran kan de’ Tartari by Giambattista Casti with music by Antonio Salieri is apparently set in Cathay, the situation it portrays is actually that of European royal courts, especially the court of the Russian tsar. The central question raised by the authors, in the true spirit of the Enlightenment in Europe, is how those in power deal with the responsibility they have for their lands.

Sport, political theory and social criticism? Where, if not in an opera, could these three things be brought together? "L’Olimpiade" is one of the libretti by the grandmaster Metastasio that has been set to music most often. During the Olympic Games, two pairs of lovers must face many tough challenges, and not just sporting ones, before everything ultimately turns out well.