Opera

Henrietta Bredin on boats, trains, planes that transport singers around the stage

Opera, so they say, has the power to transport the listener on wings of sound to places beyond the imagination — on a good night, at any rate. But just to keep singers, and directors, on their toes, a number of composers have, over the years, been tickled by the notion of writing specific modes of transport into the opera’s storyline.

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Justin Brierley

The surprising truth about the West’s Christian revival

Puccini was car-mad, so you’d think he might have put one of his favourites into an opera. His first purchase was a De Dion-Bouton 5 CV in 1901, and some years later he commissioned a special off-road number from Lancia, for hunting trips. But the students in La Bohème are too poor to own a car, so the transport featured in his work is confined to the barge in Il tabarro, setting for torrid adultery and violent revenge among the stevedores of Paris.