The Lodger

The Lodger is an opera in two acts composed by Phyllis Tate. The libretto is by David Franklin, after the 1913 novel of the same name by Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes. The opera was commissioned by the Royal Academy of Music, and the premiere took place there on 16 July, 1960.
The opera took three years to write, and the planning and libretto-writing took longer than the composing. Tate started with a synopsis, and after Franklin had turned it into a libretto, she acknowledged that "his great experience as a singer at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden has been of enormous help to me." Originally, the first scene would have lasted for eight hours, but "we managed to whittle it down so that the whole opera lasts a mere two and a quarter hours now."