The Black Spider (opera)

[2] The work was first performed in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral on 6 March 1985, with tenor Armistead Wilkinson and children of the Frank Hooker School;[2] it lasts around one hour and a quarter.

[3] It was produced at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 1995,[4] and Welsh National Youth Opera performed the work at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff in May 2022.

[6] The opera exploits the collision of two plots and switches back and forth between a Polish legend of the Middle Ages, adapted from Die Schwarze Spinne by Jeremias Gotthelf, and a contemporary newspaper cutting about a curse on the opening of the Tomb of Casimir IV Jagiellon in Wawel Cathedral, Kraków.

[2] The earlier story tells of villagers oppressed by a wicked landlord, the Count Heinrich, and are given the task of carrying an entire beech forest to the mountain-top where he lives.

Finally the disaster is stopped when Christina catches the spider in her cousin Caspar's guitar, and rushes to Kraków to bury it in the tomb of the recently deceased King Casimir IV.

In the modern story, inspired by a 1983 news report in The Times, excavations are taking place at the tomb of Casimir IV, in Wawel Cathedral, Cracow.