About the work
Powder Her Face is a chamber opera in two acts by Thomas Adès to a libretto by Philip Hensher, scored for four singers and fifteen instrumentalists. It premiered on 1 July 1995 at the Cheltenham Music Festival in an Almeida Opera production, with Jill Gomez in the title role; Adès was 23 at the time.
Plot
The opera traces a duchess whose story follows the 1963 divorce scandal of Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll, from young debutante in the 1930s to a penniless old woman evicted from her hotel. Eight scenes and an epilogue interweave flashbacks of her marriages, affairs and the public morals scandal.
Cultural significance
The opera is regarded as Adès's breakthrough and became known for an explicit, musically depicted act of fellatio that a British classical radio station judged unsuitable for broadcast. Musically it draws on Berg's "Lulu" as well as Weill and Britten, and established Adès's reputation as an opera composer.