Ariadne auf Naxos

The original meta-opera: the prologue to Richard Strauss’s bittersweet piece envisages an all-too-plausible scenario in which a new one-act opera has to jostle for prominence with a clowns’ cabaret and a firework display, because the “richest man in the world” is paying for it, and he prefers showgirls to opera seria.

Nixon in China

A milestone in 20th-century opera, the minimalist composer John Adams’s bitingly satirical work reimagined the 1972 encounter between the wily American President Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao. Mark Morris contributed the witty choreography, and there were telling contributions from the singers playing the leaders’ frazzled wives. Vocal fireworks are reserved for Madam Mao.

Cheryomushki

If you think plastic surgery is unlikely fodder for an operetta, then try housing policy: Shostakovich’s whimsical piece, usually translated as Paradise Moscow, is a Khrushchev-era tale of Muscovites outwitting unscrupulous apparatchiks to get apartments in a shiny newly-built tower block.

Così fan tutte

One of the biggest health fads of the 18th century — therapeutic hypnotism, courtesy of the quack-like Dr Mesmer — got the satirical treatment in Lorenzo da Ponte’s 1790 libretto, which sees the maidservant Despina don the guise of a spoof Mesmer by donning a moustache and waving a large magnet . The apparatus duly “revives” our heroes, Ferrando and Guglielmo.

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