Many of Oliver Messel's best designs were for operas at Glyndebourne, the opera house built onto John Christie's private house just outside Lewes, in Sussex. His imaginative and lavish costumes and sets informed by historical styles proved an effective complement to many productions, especially Mozart and Rossini operas. He also designed programme covers, working variations on his designs for the productions on which he had worked that year. This design, for the 1956 season's programme, features Papageno in Mozart's opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). As a birdcatcher, his costume is covered with feathers and he holds an open birdcage as birds fly around his head.

Oliver Messel (1904-1978) was Britain's leading theatre designer throughout the 1930s, '40s and '50s, mastering every aspect of entertainment - ballet, drama, film, musical, opera and revue - as well working in interior decoration and textile design. His lavish, painterly and romantic concepts were perfectly in tune with the times and earned him an international reputation. By 1960, however, that style was becoming unfashionable, and Messel gradually abandoned theatre and built a new career designing luxury homes in the Caribbean.