Sounds and sweet airs: Shakespearean operas quiz

Falstaff, based on The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV, parts 1 and 2. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

1. 

   Which Italian tenor sang the title role in Verdi’s Otello more than 400 times and was buried in his Otello costume?

   1. Luciano Pavarotti

   2. Enrico Caruso

   3. Mario del Monaco

   4. Francesco Tamagno

2. 

   In Thomas Ades’s opera The Tempest, Caliban’s original speech “The isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs” becomes which glorious aria?

   1. “Twangling instruments will hum”

   2. “This noisy place”

   3. “Friends don’t fear”

   4. “Friends do fear”

3. 

   In cutting and rearranging the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to make the play work as an opera libretto, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears made one mistake with the plot. Did they:

   1. Forget to cure Tytania of her infatuation with Bottom

   2. Forget to cure Bottom of his ass head

   3. Forget to wake up the lovers; the opera ends with everyone still asleep in the forest

   4. Forget to marry off the mortals before Theseus sends them all to bed

4. Wagner’s second opera was a flop when it premiered: it was performed once in 1836 then cancelled the next night when only three people showed up. Wagner himself later called it “a sin of my youth”… What’s the opera, and on which Shakespeare play is it based?

   1. Die Feen (The Fairies), based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream

   2. Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), based on Measure for Measure

   3. Männerlist größer als Frauenlist oder Die glückliche Bärenfamilie (Men are more cunning than women or The Happy Bear family), based on Twelfth Night

   4. Die hohe Braut (The High-born Bride), based on The Taming of the Shrew

5. 

   For the Paris version of Verdi’s Otello, premiered at the Theatre de L’Opera in 1894, Verdi added what to the opera’s third act?

   1. Live animals

   2. A raffle

   3. A Punch and Judy précis of the plot

   4. A ballet

6. 

   The text of Hans Abrahamsen’s sublime song cycle Let Me Tell You — composed in 2013 for the soprano Barbara Hannigan — strings together the lines of which female Shakespeare character?

   1. Juliet

   2. Lady Macbeth

   3. Ophelia

   4. Desdemona

7. 

   Which two Shakespeare plays form the basis of Verdi’s Falstaff?

   1. The Taming of the Shrew

   2. The Merry Wives of Windsor

   3. Much Ado About Nothing

   4. King Henry IV

8. 

   On New Year’s Eve 2011, Placido Domingo played his first-ever god role and finally achieved on-stage status to match the deified heights of his career. The production was Jeremy Sams’s pasticcio This Enchanted Island — a mash-up of The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream plus bits of Handel and Vivaldi. It premiered at the Metropolitan Opera. Which god did Domingo play?

   1. Apollo

   2. Neptune

   3. Cupid

   4. Dionysus

9. Where and when was the first UK performance of Berlioz’s 1862 opera comique Béatrice et Bénédict?

   1. London, 1863

   2. London, 1963

   3. Glasgow, 1936

   4. Cardiff, 2001

10. 

    Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream contains just one line of text that doesn’t come directly from the Shakespeare play. Is it:

    1. Lysander to Hermia: “Compelling thee to marry with Demetrius”

    2. Hippolyta to Theseus: “Thou art foxier than all our subjects put together”

    3. Tytania to Puck: “more of thy trippy herb, good sir”

    4. Bottom to nobody in particular: “methinks this wall must fall”

11. “No one but a barbarian or a Frenchman would have dared to make such a lamentable burlesque of so tragic a theme”. The words of a London critic for the Pall Mall Gazette in 1890 — but to which opera did he refer?

    1. Béatrice et Bénédict by Hector Berlioz

    2. Hamlet by Ambroise Thomas

    3. Le Marchand de Venise by Reynaldo Hahn

    4. Roméo et Juliette by Charles Gounod

12. 

    Among the cast of Jonathan Kent’s 2009 production of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen at Glyndebourne was a corps de ballet of:

    1. Bonking rabbits

    2. Humping voles

    3. Rutting hedgehogs

    4. Banging badgers

Solutions

1:C, 2:C, 3:D, 4:B, 5:D, 6:C, 7:B, 8:B, 9:C, 10:A, 11:B, 12:A

Scores

1. 10 and above.

   “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” (Twelfth Night, Act II, v)

2. 0 and above.

   "Lord what fools these mortals be" (Midsummer Night's Dream, Act III, iii)

3. 5 and above.

   "Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt.” (Measure for Measure, Act I, iv)