The Duenna

The Duenna is a three-act comic opera, mostly composed by Thomas Linley the elder and his son, Thomas Linley the younger, to an English-language libretto by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. At the time, it was considered one of the most successful operas ever staged in England, and its admirers included Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt and Lord George Byron (Byron called it "the best opera ever written").

First performed in the Covent Garden Theatre on 21 November 1775, The Duenna was performed seventy-five times in its first season, and was frequently revived in Britain until the 1840s. In total, 256 performances of the opera had been held in London from its opening in 1775 to the end of the eighteenth century. Another 194 performances occurred in the capital during the nineteenth century, with the last known London representation happening in January 1851 (there were some subsequent Dublin performances in 1853). The opera was first performed in Jamaica in 1779, and subsequently spread round the English-speaking world. Soon after its first London performance, representations sprang up in British provincial theatres, though these often used invented dialogue (Sheridan's original text was not published until 1794) to link the published songs and musical numbers. In Autumn 2010, English Touring Opera performed the complete opera in venues around the UK, beginning in the Linbury Studio Theatre within the Royal Opera House as part of ROH2's Autumn season – bringing the opera back to its Covent Garden home. Two modern operas based on Sheridan's libretto have been performed: Sergei Prokofiev's Betrothal in a Monastery (composed 1940-1), and Roberto Gerhard's version of 1945–7.

After the triumph of The Rivals, and having effectively chosen the life of a playwright over that of a lawyer, Sheridan needed a commercial success to cement his position economically and culturally. To do this he skilfully used to his advantage the resources available to him at the time. He judged correctly the popular trend in the last quarter of the 18th century theatre towards operas, pantomime and music.

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