The Duenna (Gerhard opera)

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The Duenna (La Dueña) is a three‑act opera by Robert Gerhard, using a libretto by the composer after Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 comedy The Duenna. Gerhard wrote it between 1945 and 1947. It premiered on BBC radio in 1949 and was well received. He revised it in 1951 for the ISCM Festival in Wiesbaden, but critics did not like the use of popular tunes in the work. The music is partly atonal, reflecting Gerhard’s study of Schoenberg, and some audiences found it challenging. The work is described as a sequence of set pieces with echoes of Spanish folk music, and it marks Gerhard’s final extended engagement with his Spanish roots.

Performance history includes a February 1949 BBC broadcast conducted by Stanford Robinson, with Joan Cross in the title role and a cast that featured Peter Pears and Denis Dowling, among others. A planned Wiesbaden staging was canceled, but a concert performance occurred at the 1951 ISCM festival, conducted by Franz-Paul Decker. The first English-language stage production outside the UK was staged in 1992 at Madrid’s Teatro Lirico Nacional and at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu, conducted by Antoni Ros‑Marbà. Opera North gave the British stage premiere in 1992, conducted by Ros‑Marbà, in a performing edition by David Drew, with a notable cast; there was no studio recording. The Bielefeld Opera presented the work in 1994 under Geoffrey Moull.

Plot (set in Seville, Spain, in the 18th century, between dawn and evening): Merchant Don Jerome plans to marry his daughter Luisa to the wealthy Portuguese Jew Don Isaac, thwarting Luisa’s true love, Don Antonio. Luisa’s sister-like ally, her Duenna, aids in a plan of disguises and schemes to outwit her father. Through a tangle of mistaken identities and changes of clothes, the real Luisa tries to find Ferdinand, who loves Clara, while Luisa (in disguise) draws Isaac closer and helps bring Antonio back into her life. The lovers’ plans and deceptions eventually resolve, and the couples—Luisa with Antonio and Clara with Ferdinand—are joined, with all the plots revealed to Don Jerome.