10 One-Act Operas Never to Miss if You Have the Chance

In honor of last season’s Trittico, a dream project of mine—I think Puccini’s great conception of three diverse-but-related one-act operas is one of the greatest of all Italian operas—I have been thinking of the huge range of single-act repertoire. Logic would have us think that in these times of shorter attention spans we might see a surge in popularity of shorter works, but one-act operas are generally unpopular with the operatic public. There are famous exceptions, of course, like Salome, Elektra, Cavalleria rusticana, Pagliacci, or the prologue to the Wagner Ring, Das Rheingold. Here are 10 marvelous one-act operas, each of which is well worth your time if you ever have the opportunity.  

The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s brilliant one-hour opera premiered near the end of WWI, in 1918, in Budapest. Of all of the rare one-acts, this is the one you are most likely to have experienced. Symphonic orchestras like to program it, partly because it has only two characters, but mostly because it is such an orchestral showpiece. Bartók created an intense psychological odyssey with this opera, and there is nothing quite like it. The central metaphor of Bluebeard’s Castle is represented by its famous seven doors—Judith, Bluebeard’s new wife, wants to open them, which he begs her not to do, as each represents a secret that should remain untouched and unseen. She insists on opening each door, and the audience is plunged into a harrowing journey. 

The American composer William Grant Still’s opera was composed during WWII but not premiered until 1963. The work is high melodrama, and an incredibly satisfying evening, with an inextricable part of this opera’s story being Still’s own personal journey. Born in 1895 in Woodville, Mississippi, the son of two teachers, he was remarkably prolific, and he came of age at the time of the Harlem Renaissance. His career straddled the worlds of popular music and classical, with his first symphony of five, “Afro-American,” premiered in Rochester in 1931, the first symphony by an African American composer performed by a major American orchestra. He arranged music for films, and contributed to the opening anthem of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, but was unable to attend because of racial laws. The hurdles he faced as a Black composer are unimaginable, yet his music remains to tell its own story: Still was a major composer with major gifts, and one can only look back in anger and longing at what he might have achieved in a more equitable world. That is the moving dramatic subject of Highway 1, USA.  

With music and libretto by the American composer Derrick Wang, who teaches both law and music at Johns Hopkins University, this opera is unique in the history of the form for a number of reasons. Wang was inspired to write it by the Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who sat on opposing sides of the political spectrum but shared a love for opera, and would often attend together. The opera dramatizes their relationship, but also sets to music several of their court opinions, with Scalia, the Constitutional Originalist, often singing in “old” operatic styles, and Ginsburg more often singing more progressive stylings. The opera is successful, though, for the reason any opera is successful: the score tells the story. Scalia/Ginsburg has been performed many times since its 2015 premiere, including an Opera in the Heights performance at Holocaust Museum Houston a few years ago. Both justices saw the opera and enjoyed it, though, true to form, Ginsburg found it more appealing than did Scalia. 

This 2004 opera by the Australian composer John Haddock is a masterpiece, deeply in need of being performed again. The score is ravishing, and the story very moving, recounting the historic 1943 disappearance of the American B-24 bomber Lady Be Good over North Africa, with the plane renamed Madeline Lee for the opera. It is a mesmerizing and haunting opera that touches on so many themes, as a crew sets out to find the lost airmen. The opera brings us into the world of dislocation, of what it means to be lost or found, and most especially, how we remember the fallen. It has never been performed in the United States, and it is high time. 

The first and one of the last operas commissioned specifically for television, premiering on NBC in 1951, and quickly becoming a holiday staple in the United States. Its composer and librettist, Gian Carlo Menotti, was inspired to write it after an afternoon contemplating Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Adoration of the Magi at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It tells a touching story of a young, physically challenged boy, Amahl, and his poverty-stricken mother, who are visited by the Three Kings on their way to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus Christ. It is an affecting and beautiful opera, a perfect introduction to the form for children and adults. It has also been phenomenally successful: since 1951 it has been licensed for performance more than 2,500 times, an unheard-of number. Because it was conceived for television, it has a running time of about 50 minutes, which would have allowed for 9 minutes of commercial interruption and 1 minute of station identification. On commercial television in 2026, programs must allow for 18 minutes of commercial interruption per hour.  

Tchaikovsky’s glorious 1892 one-act, with a libretto by his brother Modest, is a profound meditation on consciousness, and what it means to experience the world. Iolanta, blind from birth, is a princess but has no idea that she is, because she has never seen her surroundings; her royal family wants to keep her from ever knowing about her blindness, thinking she will be happier without that knowledge. A doctor eventually brings sight to her, though what it means to “see” is always in question. Iolanta is a magnificent opera, with a breathlessly beautiful score. It premiered on a double-bill with a new ballet that was written solely as a curtain-raiser for it: The Nutcracker. 

A WWI Metropolitan Opera commission, in 1916, for the Spanish composer Enrique Granados, which he based on melodies from a piano piece he had composed five years before, Goyescas premiered on a double bill with the popular Pagliacci. The work is an abstract set of scenes based on six paintings by the most important Spanish visual artist of the 19th century, Francisco Goya, and the score is of intense and unforgettable beauty. The opera is also a great gift to stage directors, who are handed an opportunity to immerse an audience in the vast, imaginative world of Goya. Granados tragically lost his life because of this opera. The President of the United States at the time, Woodrow Wilson, invited him to play at the White House, which he delayed his trip for. But on the return journey to Europe aboard the French ship Sussex, he and his wife drowned within sight of France when their ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the English Channel. It is almost certain that you know music from this opera, because a famous popular 1940s song, well-known still, is inspired by one of its tunes: “Bésame Mucho.” 

A marvelous opera by HGO’s beloved mentor composer, so important to our history, Carlisle Floyd. Premiered in 1972 for the soprano Phyllis Curtin, who was Floyd’s first Susannah nearly two decades before, Flower and Hawk is a monodrama—meaning it has a single singing character, like Poulenc’s famous one-act opera, La Voix humaine. Carlisle, smartly, wanted to capitalize on, but not in any way imitate, the success of the 1968 film The Lion in Winter, whose star, Katharine Hepburn, became the first actor in history to hold three Best Actress Academy Awards after winning for her portrayal of one of the great monarchs of history, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the queen of both France and England, and one of the most consequential women in history. Flower and Hawk dramatizes the death of Eleanor’s husband Henry II, who imprisoned her for 16 years in Salisbury, and her liberation as the bells announce his demise. The opera, Carlisle’s ninth, lasts under an hour, and is a magnificent showcase for a star soprano. Of all of his works, it is the one known the least that most needs knowing.  

This extraordinary 2011 opera by Tarik O’Regan, based on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel, is one of the most riveting of modern operas. Tarik was moved to compose it after seeing Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and drawing parallels between it and Conrad’s novel set in the Belgian Congo. Heart of Darkness achieves what so few serious operas in recent years have done: depicting in music the effects of violence, war, and imperialist thought, without directly depicting any of it. This is a magnificent psychological opera of enormous depth and power, and it deserves many more productions. HGO patrons will remember Tarik’s The Phoenix, composed for HGO in 2019, a bio-opera about Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. 

This delightful 1959 opera with music by Samuel Barber and a libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti, the team that invented the marvelous Vanessa for the Metropolitan Opera a year earlier, includes the bulk of its plot in its title. One wouldn’t think that a bridge game between two unhappy couples would make for a very riveting opera, but it does. Barber’s score is incredibly descriptive and beautiful, and brings us into universal emotions. Audiences love this opera because almost anyone can recognize themselves in the simple metaphor of a card game. And if you aren’t enjoying A Hand of Bridge, fret not: the opera is ten minutes long, one of the shortest operas ever composed. 

This has been a frustrating “top 10,” because one has to leave out so many. One-act operas are a very rich repertoire. There are many amazing operas I have omitted: Zemlinsky’s magnificent brief opera A Florentine Tragedy, or Poulenc’s La Voix humaine, Argento’s Postcard from Morocco, Michael Nyman’s marvelously quirky The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Rachmaninoff’s beautiful Aleko (the final aria of which one hears often on concerts and in auditions)… Must I stop before mentioning Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone, Henze’s Boulevard Solitude, Douglas Moore’s Gallantry, Strauss’s Capriccio or Daphne? I think, yes, I must.

(Oh, and Trial by Jury, by Gilbert and Sullivan!)