With Rosie Clifford (mezzo) and Opera Prelude’s young artists, accompanied by Natalie Burch.

“Glitter and be gay, that’s the part I play” – so sings Cunegonde in Leonard Bernstein’s masterpiece Candide, lamenting the loss of her virtue in exchange for the superficial whirl of jewels, parties and high society. Opera has never been short of such figures – apparently blessed with every gift the world can bestow and yet privately struggling – both in operatic characters and in the singers themselves.

The first divas (and, indeed, divos) of the operatic world were the superstars of their age; precursors of the screen idols of the Silver Age of Hollywood, whose lives often produced uncanny similarities, they blazed meteoric paths through society before all too often sinking into obscurity.

From the singers catapulted to stardom by Mozart and Rossini to the legends of both stage and screen, and the characters who linked the two, join Rosie Clifford for a morning of glitz, glamour and vocal fireworks!