The Virgin Queen sings herself into ruin while her favorite boy toy loses his head—literally.
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.
Acting
Antonacci's Elizabeth—vulnerable, vain, devastating.
Direction
Lebard frames power like a cage.
Score
Britten's brass snarls at courtly cruelty.
Director
Stéphane Lebard
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Britten and librettist William Plomer smuggled queer subtext into courtly power dynamics—Essex as beautiful disaster, Elizabeth as woman trapped by crown.
The 1953 premiere flopped because Britten refused to flatter the actual Queen; this 2018 staging finally embraces the opera's bitter, humane honesty.
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