The life and times of Don Pasquale

A learning tool for Glyndebourne opera using the best resources available…

We initially worked with Glyndebourne in 2010 when we created a microsite for them. In September 2015 we were approached to create this site for the education department.

An exciting new concept for Glyndebourne was for them to produce a learning tool for one opera per year – and our job was to create the first one, and then make it reusable within their Silverstripe CMS.

Working with Glyndebourne has many benefits, let’s face it, for a meeting venue it beats any business park. Having access to the resources of the education department and getting behind the scenes access was also pretty special.

The User Experience was designed to take a gentle approach by firstly introducing the concept of opera. This is achieved through brief chunks of text alongside a pictorial history, interspersed with audio and video demonstrations.

Once the ground work has been laid down, the site moves into a more detailed look at Donizetti, (the composer of Don Pasquale) and presents him in the context of 19th Century Italy. Presented as a timeline that emerges as the user moves down the page. This further encourages the user into digging deeper and finding out more. There are plenty of videos and other assets for the user to improve their understanding.

Once the site has built up a certain degree of understanding within the user, we then go in and explain the opera of Don Pasquale itself, detailing act by act – again with the support of video and audio excerpts.

This way of carefully choreographing the user experience has resulted in a valuable learning resource accessible for anyone. The great thing about it is that it can also be reapplied to other operas as and when required, since it’s all been built within the Glyndebourne CMS.