English composer Edward Lambert was born in Twickenham in 1951 and studied at Oxford and the Royal College of Music. Having trained as a pianist and conductor, his first posts were at the Wexford Festival and the Landestheater of Schleswig-Holstein. He returned to London to work on the music staff of the Royal Opera where he also became involved in its innovative and extensive outreach programme of the 80s and 90s. His compositions were heard at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music (Mass for Four Voices) and the Bath Festival (Chamber Concerto). Several chamber works followed as well a growing catalogue of vocal and choral pieces (Rossetti Requiem, Te Deum, Shelley’s Hymn, The Inarticulate Burr). For the Newbury Chamber Choir he arranged medieval and renaissance works (An Opera of Daniel, The Visit to the Sepulchre, A Wedding in Florence and the carols of Brighter than the Sun). His first chamber opera was Caedmon on a text by Christopher Fry given by the Royal Opera at the Donmar Warehouse in 1989. He returned to the genre with Six Characters in Search of a Stage (Pirandello) for the production of which in 2014 he founded The Music Troupe. Since then he has written 20 operas from The Catfish Conundrum (2014) to Twelfth Night (2025) and Erwachen (August Stramm, 2026). Six are based on texts by Lorca (Opera with a Title, The Parting, Buster’s Trip, The Butterfly’s Spell, The Cloak & Dagger Affair and In Five Years’ Time). The Duchess of Padua resurrects a neglected Gothic drama by Oscar Wilde; Swellfellow the Tyrant is a satire by Shelley; Masque of Vengeance derives from a Jacobean revenge tragedy; there have been collaborations with Max Waller (The Art of Venus), Norman Welch (Apollo’s Mission, The Burning Question, The Last Siren and The Rapture) and Leo Doulton (Last Party on Earth). The Music Troupe has produced many of these works for the annual Tête-à-Tête: The Opera Festival while others have been shown in Brighton, Berkshire, Yorkshire, and Manchester as well as London.