Well, one lovelorn shepherd - Leukippos, who is killed by Apollo in a fit of jealous anger.

Another shepherd is Pedro in d'Albert's Tiefland - who is forced to marry Marta, the mistress of Sebastiano, a landowner, so that he can have her nearby once he is married.  It ends up with Marta falling for Pedro and Pedro killing Sebastiano and heading back into the mountains with Marta - the Tiefland of the title refers to the sordid goings-on of the valley folk in comparison to Pedro's innocent live in the mountains.

Incidentally, d'Albert was born in Glasgow to an English mother and a French father and studied under Stainer at the Royal College (although his music is very much better than that might suggest) and later with Liszt; I wonder when the Pomp and Circumstance brigade at TOP will claim him for Britain.

Correct, Don B.

Some clues:

The story of the miraculously healed shepherd is also Russian.
The person guided by a shepherd in a French opera is a Spanish person.
The taciturn shepherd in another French opera is one of the few operatic shepherds who actually has some sheep with him.

There are some good ones here including some operas that I've never even heard of!

I think Tirsis was meant to be disguised as a shepherd while Atalanta was disguised as your generic peasant, but I can't find my programme now The other disguised Handel toff was in an earlier year's Handel Festival "discovery" and was of Egyptian extraction.

Well, the Pelleas shepherd isn't exactly voluble (though what more could he say in the circs?).

Apollo and Hyacinthus certainly sounds as if it should feature shepherds but I don't know it at all either. The one I had in mind is (slightly) more mature work, this time with a sub-Virgilian plot, and featuring many prancing shepherds and shepherdesses IIRC.

APOLLON ET HYACINTH (titled in French - but the libretto is in Latin throughout) might sound bucolic and pastoral, but it's not about shepherds.  It's a about an accidental death at a sporting challenge (discus-throwing), with a philosophical epilogue about the acceptance of death. The main parts (Apollo, Hyacinth (ehem, it's a male role), and Melia, his sister) are for trebles - Mozart's fellow-students at the Hochschule.  The King (tenor), and two Priests of Apollo (basses) were presumably sung by the schoolmasters?  A strangely sober work for the 11-year-old Mozart to have essayed, but rather effective.  Whoever reworked the libretto for Mozart (from the original fable by Ovid) thoroughly deleted the homoerotic nature of the relationship between Apollo and Hyacinth, which might have added piquancy to the tale otherwise  (Hyacinth is killed by Apollo's discus - allegedly because Zephyrus, God Of The Winds, was jealous of their intimacy and blew the discus off course).  Zephyrus is punished at the end.


King Ebulas - Dmtiry Khromov, Apollon - Svetlana Rossiyskaya

(The Helikon Opera production above set the tale as a Victorian Parlour Story-Telling Reenactment of the fable.  The ending hinged on Russia's most popular chocolate meringue brand being named "Zephyr" - they get their revenge on Zephyrus at the end by... eating the meringues )

Gosh, you can't see what's in front of your eyes, can you?  But with the power of lateral thinking,and two different types of nice Italian Rosato later, I've noticed what Ruth and Reiner know perfectly well, and if Tony Watson was still with us he would have spotted like a flash, although you, dear harpy, might be not so au fait:

Phyllis and Strephon in Sullivan's Iolanthe are a Dresden shepherdess and shepherd (and in the case of the later, a fairy down to his waist.)

The resident sommelier informs me that the first bottle was really a very, very light rosso.

That's a lot of shepherds! I think you've got all the ones I was thinking of, except for the other Handel toff in shepherd guise (Tolomeo), the British one with a person brought up by a Germanic shepherd (Judith Weir's Blond Eckbert) and the early Mozart/Virgil shepherdfest (Ascanio in Alba). ETA the early baroque one I had in mind is Minerva disguised as a shepherd in Ulisse

Perhaps (following last night's Messiaen extravaganza) after we've exhausted the supply of shepherds we could do angels, angelic characters and angelic/heavenly/divine voices? I don't think it's such a fertile field as shepherds though if we allow oratorios there might be a few.