X-Nico

unusual facts about Royal Opera House, Covent Garden



1808 in the United Kingdom

20 September - The original Theatre Royal, Covent Garden in London is destroyed by fire along with most of the scenery, costumes and scripts.

Ambrose Godfrey

Initially Becher and Godfrey had got along well and they shared lodgings in Covent Garden.

Berkeley Smith

Amongst his achievements there, he set up the relay of opera from Glyndebourne and Covent Garden.

Bruce Boyce

He then went on to other roles, including Il conte in Marriage of Figaro under Erich Kleiber at the Royal Opera House; he sang in the English Opera Group, the London Opera Club and continental Europe.

Charles Sackville, 2nd Duke of Dorset

After a second grand tour to continental Europe in 1737 and 1738, he returned to England in January 1739 and staged an opera, Angelico e Medoro, with music by Giovanni Battista Pescetti from a libretto by Metastasio at Covent Garden.

David Harsent

His work in music theatre has involved collaborations with a number of composers (but most often with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, the opera Gawain being their most notable collaboration) and has been performed at the Royal Opera House, Carnegie Hall, the Southbank Centre, The Proms, the Wiener Kammeroper, and broadcast on BBC Two, Channel 4 and Trio (USA).

Eastern Market, Melbourne

Two years later and the Eastern Market, wrote The Argus, was called 'our Covent Garden' (a reference to the famous market at Covent Garden in London established by the Duke of Bedford in the 1600s).

Edward Middleton Barry

The Covent Garden work was hugely influential in Barry’s appointment to design the Royal Opera House in Valletta, Malta (1866), bombed by the Luftwaffe during the Second World War.

Elena Langer

Her work has been performed at the Royal Opera House, Zurich Opera, Carnegie Hall, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theatre.

Farmers Club

Its inaugural meeting on 9 December 1842 was held in a pub, the Hereford Arms, in King Street, Covent Garden.

Félia Litvinne

During the course of the next three decades she appeared at the Academy of Music in New York, at the Paris Opera, at La Scala in Milan, at the Rome Opera, at La Fenice in Venice, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in London and at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels.

Francesco Maria Bonini

In 1897-1898 he made appearances at the Amazon Theatre in Brazil, the Valletta Royal Opera House in Malta and at the Cairo Opera House in Egypt.

François Coppée

For the Crown was performed at Covent Garden as a prize-winning opera The Cross and the Crescent with music by Colin McAlpin in 1903.

George Anne Bellamy

She participated in the rivalry for popular favor in Romeo and Juliet in 1750, playing with Garrick at Drury Lane, while Barry and Mrs. Cibber played at Covent Garden.

Giovanni Martinelli

Cavaradossi in Tosca, was his debut role at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in London, and for his first American engagement in Philadelphia, in 1913.

Graeme Danby

Graeme Danby (born 23 May 1962 in Consett, County Durham, England) is an operatic bass who has performed at several of the world's leading opera houses, notably the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and the English National Opera.

Håkan Hagegård

Hagegård studied at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and has performed on stages around the world, including Carnegie Hall, the London Royal Opera House, La Scala, the Metropolitan Opera, the Sydney Opera House, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Vienna State Opera (Così fan tutte conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt), and the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm.

Harlequin Cock Robin and Jenny Wren

Gilbert's pantomime opened on the same night as rival shows at the Drury Lane Theatre, Covent Garden, Sadler's Wells, and eight other London theatres.

Harold or the Norman Conquest

Opera in four acts with music by the British composer Frederic H. Cowen with a libretto by Edward Malet, edited by Frederic Edward Weatherly, adapted into the German by L.A. Caumont, and first performed at Covent Garden, London on 8 June 1895.

High House, Purfleet

The Royal Opera House opened the Bob and Tamar Manoukian Production Workshop, a scene-making facility for their opera and ballet productions on the High House site in December 2010.

Jeff Rich

He attended school in Hackney at Upton House Comprehensive, and whilst there he appeared in the opera Tosca at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

John Taras

Taras was principal dancer in de Basil's company and regisseur for their Covent Garden and Paris seasons.

Joseph Gungl

In 1853 he became bandmaster to the 23rd Infantry Regiment at Brno, but in 1864 he moved to Munich, and in 1876 at Frankfurt, after having conducted with great success a series of promenade concerts at the Covent Garden in London in 1873.

Jussi Björling

On 15 March 1960, Björling suffered a heart attack before a performance of La bohème at London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

Liudmyla Monastyrska

In 2011, she appeared at Covent Garden, where she successfully stepped in for Micaela Carosi as Aida early in the season, with Fabio Luisi as the conductor.

Lollie Alexi Devereaux

Lollie Alexi Devereaux (born October 31, 1981) is a Vancouver, BC based French actress, opera singer, dancer and writer best known for her work with L’Opéra de la Bastille (Bastille Opera) (Paris, France) and Royal Opera House (London, UK).

Mark Morris

He has worked extensively in opera, directing and choreographing productions for the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Opera, English National Opera, and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, among others.

Metropolitan Buildings Office

Buildings in this category included royal palaces, bridges, embankments, wharves, gaols and prisons, the Mansion House, the Guildhall, the Royal Exchange, the British Museum and Covent Garden Market.

Miles Jacobson

Born in 1971 and raised in Watford, Jacobson spent more time on music than education when at school, singing or playing at the Royal Opera House, Royal Albert Hall, the Barbican and St Martin-in-the-Fields during this time.

Nicholas Thomas Dall

He painted some excellent scenes for Covent Garden Theatre, and his engagements in that branch of art prevented him from painting many pictures.

Nicolai Ghiaurov

1962 marked Ghiaurov's Covent Garden debut as Padre Guardiano in Verdi's "Forza del Destino" as well as his first appearance in Salzburg in Verdi's "Requiem," conducted by Herbert von Karajan.

Nikolai Tcherepnin

He conducted performances with the Ballets Russes in Berlin, Monte Carlo, Paris, Rome, and the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London.

Peach Melba

In 1892, Nellie Melba was performing in Wagner's opera Lohengrin at Covent Garden.

Reginald Spofforth

He composed about 75 glees, also three books of nursery rhyme settings and many songs and duets, including songs for various stage performances at Covent Garden in the 1790s.

Richard Verreau

He made his debut at the Royal Opera House in London, as the Duke in Rigoletto, in 1957, other roles there included: Alfredo in La traviata, Rodolfo in La bohème, Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly.

Right to light

In the centre of London near Chinatown and Covent Garden, particularly in back alleyways, signs saying "Ancient Lights" can be seen marking individual windows.

Robert Dodsley

This was followed by a satirical farce called The Toyshop (Covent Garden, 1735), in which the toymaker indulges in moral observations on his wares, a hint which was probably taken from Thomas Randolph's Conceited Pedlar.

Rosina Buckman

She then returned to New Zealand, toured Australia and debut in London with La boheme at Covent Garden.

Royal Opera House, Valletta

The proposal was ostensibly shelved until after the general elections of 2008 and on 1 December 2008, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi revived the proposal with a budget of €80 million.

Speed the Plough

Speed the Plough is a five-act comedy by Thomas Morton, first performed in 1798 at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden to great acclaim.

Stafford Dean

Of particular note was his performance as Pooh-Bah in the BBC production of Mikado, and his outstanding rendition of the role of Alfonso d'Este in the 1980 Covent Garden production of Donizetti's opera Lucrezia Borgia.

Štefan Margita

His career has also taken him to the stages of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, the Teatro Comunale Giuseppe Verdi, the Dallas Opera, the Teatro Real, Oper Frankfurt, Theater Basel, the Teatro di San Carlo, the Theatro Municipal in São Paulo, and the New National Theatre Tokyo among others.

Stephen Courtauld

Courtauld was financial director of Ealing Studios, a trustee of the Royal Opera House in London's Covent Garden, and provided financial support for the Courtauld Galleries in Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum.

Thomas Erskine, 6th Earl of Kellie

James Boswell borrowed five guineas from Erskine on 20 October 1762, and on 26 May 1763 took him on a visit to Lord Eglinton's in London, where the overture the Earl composed for the popular pastiche The Maid of the Mill (at Covent Garden in 1765) became exceptionally popular.

Turandot Suite

It was made into a full-colour feature film with the same name by Joseph Menchen and Michel Carré with some of the original named cast, which premièred at Covent Garden with a continuous symphonic score by Engelbert Humperdinck on 21 December 1912.


see also

London Boy Singers

Many of its singers took part in other events, including working with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the English Opera Group (including a tour of the USSR in 1964) and many individual operas and other engagements.

Marcus Lloyd

Having attended a local comprehensive school, he went on to study Physics at Worcester College, Oxford and drama writing with playwright Bernard Kops while supporting himself working in the cloakroom of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.