Arne: Artaxerxes / The Mozartists; Ian Page

A composer inextricably linked with London’s Covent Garden, Thomas Arne’s greatest opera, Artaxerxes, was premièred at the Theatre Royal on 2 February 1762. The young Mozart almost certainly attended a performance when he came to London in the mid-1760s, and Haydn was also acquainted with the work, enthusiastically exclaiming that he “had no idea we had such an opera in the English language.”