King Priam King Priam King Priam is an opera by Michael Tippett, to his own libretto. The story is based on Homer's "Iliad", except the birth and childhood of Paris, which are taken from the "Fabulae" of Hyginus. The premiere was on 29 May 1962, at Coventry. The opera was composed for an arts festival held in conjunction with the reconsecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, for which Benjamin Britten also wrote his "War Requiem", which was first performed in the Cathedral the day after the premiere of "King Priam". The first Covent Garden performance was on 5 June, conducted by John
History of Coventry Spence and contains the tapestry, "Christ in Majesty" by Graham Sutherland, and the bronze statue "St. Michael and the Devil" by Jacob Epstein adorns the exterior wall. As a result of postwar redevelopment, Coventry now shares in the stereotype of 1960s architecture: concrete and brutalist. The development of Coventry's central business district was unnaturally restricted through the construction of a major orbital ringroad in the early-1970s, leading to a hodge-podge of "mixed use" city zones with no clearly defined functions, aside from the cathedral quarter and a dated 1950s shopping precinct. The construction of the Cathedral Lanes shopping complex in