Michael Volpe continues his monthly dispatch on staging a world premiere

The first British staging since 1926 of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari's mafiosi opera takes the crown for lurid incident and spectacle

Ludus Baroque performs Bach's B Minor Mass in Canongate Kirk (canongatekirk.org.uk, 8 Aug), while Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre Grenoble survey Schubert's symphonies at the Usher Hall (usherhall.co.uk, 14 and 15 Aug).

The audiences for this immense work ought to be disappearing. In fact, they're growing

The action is grittier, the stakes (and skirts) raised higher, and the orchestral noises louder than anything else of its time: if Puccini’s realist operas are verismo then Wolf-Ferrari’s 1911 I gioielli della Madonna is verissimo.

The Handmaid's Tale author has spent 15 years penning her operatic debut

Richard Wagner's festival city sings with dramatic history, says Adrian Mourby

From the day she burst onto television screens as a Big Brother contestant in 2002, Jade Goody’s life resembled one long soap opera.

There is no entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for William Webster the younger, founder of the Blackheath Halls, Blackheath Conservatoire and now defunct Blackheath College of Art.

Production chronicles the story of a divisive new toll road scheduled to slice through a village

The tenor thanked well-wishers for the flood of supportive messages

The Royal Opera House is to follow in the footsteps of the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company with the transfer of a production to London’s West End for the first time.

Why did Angela Gheorghiu look so uneasy taking her curtain calls at the revived Rondine's first night? It couldn't just have been her unflattering wardrobe for Act 3. One had the sense that there was, for her, some underlying problem with her part, or with the production, or even with the opera itself. Puccini was never satisfied with this un-categorisable hybrid, and he was still tinkering with it at the end of his life.

Remember when not watching TV was something to boast about? It was never exactly true, of course, not if you counted sitcoms and documentaries, but there was still some kudos to claiming your mind was on higher things. Those days are over.