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Rossini’s The Barber of Seville at the Royal Opera House, London, September 2016.
Will you make the cut? ... Rossini’s The Barber of Seville at London’s Royal Opera House in 2016. Photograph: Alicia Canter/the Guardian
Will you make the cut? ... Rossini’s The Barber of Seville at London’s Royal Opera House in 2016. Photograph: Alicia Canter/the Guardian

Will you get the Rheingold or be dragged to hell? Try our opera and song quiz

This article is more than 3 years old

From song texts to silver roses, pit your wits against our opera critic with these 12 questions about vocal music on stage and off

  1. 1.Henri Duparc's L'Invitation au Voyage is a setting of which poet?
  2. 2. How many women did Don Giovanni seduce in Turkey?Nicholas Crawley (Masetto), Clive Bayley (Leporello), Christopher Purves (Don Giovanni) and Mary Bevan (Zerlina) in Don Giovanni, English National Opera 2016
  3. 3.Which historical figure, depicted in Tannhäuser, was the author of the poem that Wagner eventually took as the source for Parsifal?
  4. 4.In 2016, New York’s Metropolitan Opera staged Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin. When was the last time an opera by a woman was produced on the New York stage?
  5. 5.Which of Strauss's Four Last Songs does not have a text by Hermann Hesse?
  6. 6.Which composer wrote an overture for Alexander Ostrovsky's play The Storm?
  7. 7.In Mozart's Così fan tutte, what does Despina use to cure Guglielmo and Ferrando of supposed arsenic poisoning? English Touring Opera’s February 2020 production of Così fan tutte
  8. 8.In his Memoirs, Berlioz describes 'breaking down utterly' when he read the works of a writer, who 'first kindled my smouldering imagination'? Which writer is he referring to?
  9. 9.Where was the first performance of Britten's The Turn of the Screw in September 1954?Nicholas Watts (Peter Quint), Tim Gasiorek (Miles) and Sarah Tynan (The Governess) in The Turn Of The Screw , Opera North 2020.
  10. 10.To which of his song cycles does Mahler refer in his Second, Third and Fourth symphonies?
  11. 11.Which of Stravinsky's stage works has a libretto by Jean Cocteau?
  12. 12.In Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, what does the page boy Mohammed retrieve from the inn just before the curtain falls? Octavian (Kate Lindsey), Herr Faninal (Michael Kraus) and Sophie (Elizabeth Sutphen) in Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne 2018

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