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Her Majesty's Theatre is a West End theatre, located in the Haymarket, in the City of Westminster. The present building was designed by Charles J. Phipps and was constructed in 1897 for actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who established the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at the theatre. In the early decades of the 20th century, Tree produced spectacular productions of Shakespeare and other classical works, and the theatre hosted premií¨res by major playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw, J. M. Synge, Noel Coward and J. B. Priestley. Since World War I, the wide flat stage has made the theatre suitable for large-scale musical productions, and the theatre has specialised in hosting musicals. The theatre has been home to record-setting musical theatre runs, notably the World War I sensation Chu Chin Chow^[1] and the current production, Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, which has played continuously at Her Majesty's since 1986.

The theatre was established by architect and playwright John Vanbrugh, in 1705, as the Queen's Theatre. Legally, serious drama unaccompanied by music was forbidden in all but the two London patent theatres, and so this theatre quickly became an opera house. Between 1711 and 1739, more than 25 George Frederick Handel operas premií¨red here.^[2] In the early 19th century, the theatre hosted the opera company that was to move to the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, in 1847, and presented the first London performances of Mozart's La clemenza di Tito, Cosí¬ fan tutte and Don Giovanni.^[3] It also hosted the Ballet of her Majesty's Theatre in the mid-19th century, before returning to hosting the London premií¨res of such famous operas as Bizet's Carmen and Wagner's Ring Cycle.

The name of the theatre changes with the gender of the monarch. It first became the King's Theatre in 1714 on the accession of George I. Most recently, the theatre was known as His Majesty's Theatre from 1901 to 1952, and it became Her Majesty's on the accession of Elizabeth II. The theatre's capacity is 1,216 seats, and the building was Grade II* listed by English Heritage in January 1970. Really Useful Group Theatres has owned the theatre since 2000.

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Witold Lutosławski was one of the major European composers of the 20th century, and possibly the most significant Polish composer since Chopin. Lutosławski studied piano and composition in Warsaw, and during World War II he made a living in that city by playing the piano in bars. In the late 1940s and early 1950s his music was banned as formalist by the Stalinist authorities. In the last three decades of the century he became the pre-eminent musician of his country, and was presented with a large number of international honours, awards and prizes. Lutosławski's early compositions were overtly influenced by Polish folk music; from the late 1950s onwards he developed his own characteristically dense harmonies and innovative aleatory techniques. His works include four symphonies and a Concerto for Orchestra; he also composed concertos and song cycles for renowned musicians including Mstislav Rostropovich, Peter Pears, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. He was also a notable conductor of his own music.

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• ... that the sculpture Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science (pictured) depicts what historians have described as "the modern fantasy of (female) nature willingly revealing herself to the (male) scientist"?
• ... that T. S. Eliot's Paradiso-like poems of the Four Quartets (Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding) are modeled on the structure of his Inferno-like poem The Waste Land?
• ... that architect Henrik Bull designed several churches, but his most widespread works were coins designed for Norges Bank?
• ... that Mexican writer Juan José Arreola's short story The Switchman can be interpreted as a satire of the Mexican train system?
• ... that U.S. singer-songwriter Phil Ochs described nearly every way to evade the draft in "Draft Dodger Rag"?

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Walter Pitkin, Art of Rapid Reading, 1930

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