University College Opera The brainchild of the conductor Anthony Addison, (UCL's then Director of Music), University College Opera gave its first performance in 1951 with an all-student production of Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas", followed by Mozart's "Bastien und Bastienne". Even in its earliest years, the company's annual repertoire concentrated on rarely performed operas including: Nicolai's "The Merry Wives of Windsor" (1952), Bizet's "Don Procopio" (1955) and Lortzing's "Der Wildschütz" (1958). In 1961, the company staged its first UK premiere, Moniuszko's "Halka". During its first 17 years, UCOpera's performances took place in the old gymnasium at University College. With the opening of the college's
Comic opera style was widely imitated by their contemporaries (for example, in "Dorothy"), and the creators themselves wrote works in this style with other collaborators in the 1890s. None of these, however, had lasting popularity, leaving the Savoy Operas as practically the sole representatives of the genre surviving today. Only recently, some of these other English light operas have begun to be explored by scholars and to receive performances and recordings. The first opera presented in Russia, in 1731, was a comic opera (or "commedia per musica"), "Calandro", by an Italian composer, Giovanni Alberto Ristori. It was followed by the comic operas