Rodney Milnes presents the first of three programmes exploring same-sex relationships in opera. The Age of Innocence
In the wake of the Wilde scandal,
Mrs Patrick Campbell said that it did not matter what people did in bed as long as they did not do it in the street and frighten the horses.
Indeed, no one was frightened before the Wilde case, which redefined homoeroticism as homosexuality, or before Freud got his teeth into the subject - people simply had feelings about each other regardless of gender. Opera nevertheless explored the subject, and Rodney Milnes begins with some innocent and not-so-innocent relationships in 17th- and 18th-century operas, including music by Charpentier, Gluck and Mozart. Producer David Gallagher