Opera

‘It’s generally agreed that in contemporary practice, this opera proposes significant ethical and cultural problems,’ says the director Lindy Hume in the programme book for her new production of Madam Butterfly, and if you’ve just shelled out 75 quid in the expectation of attractive scenery and luscious tunes, that’s you told. In truth, it’s rarely advisable to read what a director thinks about their own work, at least until after the show, when it can serve as a bemusing footnote to the evening’s entertainment. Ah, so that’s why they were wearing pink beehive wigs! If a director is any good at their job, it’ll come across on stage without any need for commentary.

Malcolm Arnold composed his opera The Dancing Master in 1952 for BBC television. It never appeared, the problem being the source material — William Wycherley’s 1671 farce The Gentleman Dancing Master. Jokes about wedding nights and ‘scarlet foppery’ might have flown in the reign of Charles II but the New Elizabethans at Broadcasting House were altogether more shockable. ‘Too bawdy for family audiences,’ was Auntie’s official verdict, leaving The Dancing Master largely forgotten until a premiere recording late last year, and now — conducted by John Andrews and using almost the same cast — its first ever professional production, at the Buxton International Festival.

Comedy’s a funny thing. No, seriously, the business of making people laugh is as fragile, as mercurial as cryptocurrency — a constellation of shifting risk factors, many beyond control, any of which can kill a joke deader than Dogecoin. Opera is already at a disadvantage. Timing — comedy’s accelerant of choice — is predetermined, dictated by the demands of unwieldy choruses and slow-moving sets, pinned down to the second by a score whose creator may be anything but a natural comedian. Just ask Verdi, whose early farce Un Giorno di Regno was such a comprehensive flop that he gave up the genre altogether for almost an entire career. But at 75, all but retired after a sequence of bloody tragedies, the composer returned for one last shot at comic victory.

When you think of Handel’s Amadigi (in so far as anyone thinks about the composer’s rarely staged, also-ran London score at all) it’s as a magic-opera. Sorcerers and sorceresses do battle in a fantasy land not found on any map. The stage directions alone are enough to stir the commercial loins of any 18th-century impresario. Enchanted palaces are ‘split asunder’, caves transformed into ‘beautiful palaces’, monsters ‘ascend from the bowels of the Earth’ and a chariot ‘descends covered in clouds’.

At the turning point of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier, all the clocks stop. Octavian has arrived at the house of the teenage bride-to-be Sophie von Faninal as bearer of the silver rose — the symbol of a love that is simultaneously as artificial and as eternal as any human creation can be. Sophie smells real roses; yes, says Octavian, there is a drop of Persian fragrance amid the silver petals. ‘Like a heavenly, not an earthly rose’, sings Sophie: and her voice soars higher and purer than anything we’ve heard so far, suspended in stillness while Strauss’s orchestra shimmers around her. The thing is, in Bruno Ravella’s new staging for Garsington Opera we already know the rose’s secret.

At the first night of Glyndebourne Festival 2021 there was relief and joyful expectation as Gus Christie made his speech of welcome. Never mind the hit to takings from the closed bar and the necessarily half-empty auditorium; never mind the scaled-back orchestra and abridged score. The new production of Katya Kabanova provided the thirsty opera-goer with a long cool drink of world-class music and heavily symbolic staging. Janacek’s exploration of a yearning female psyche has parallels with Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. It lives or dies by its lead, and the Czech soprano Katerina Knezikova excelled as Katya.

It’s my new lockdown ritual. Switch on the telly, cue up the menu and scroll down to where the vintage movies gather — Film 4, or the excellent Talking Pictures TV. Then search through their early-hours offerings, and press ‘record’ more or less at random. Gainsborough costume flicks; Rattigan adaptations; anything with John Mills in a submarine — it’s all good. Then, next day, trawl through the catch to see what’s surfaced, and who wrote the music. On a good night you might get Vaughan Williams in 49th Parallel, Richard Rodney Bennett in Billy Liar or — bewilderingly — the fire-breathing serialist Elisabeth Lutyens, keeping herself in cigarettes and brandy with scores for The Skull or Dr Terror’s House of Horror.

I’m still waiting for the Royal Opera to step up. Nearly a year into the Covid crisis and what do they have to show for it? One stonking concert staging of Ariodante, a couple of gala-ish performances and some operatic scraps. Where’s the creativity? Where’s digital ingenuity, the willingness to experiment, reinvent, adapt? Where, frankly, is opera? When companies with a far greater reliance on box office than the heavily subsidised Royal Opera can do their bit — look at Grange Park’s tireless stream of content, ENO and Scottish Opera’s various car-park Bohèmes, English Touring Opera’s monodramas and song cycles, Glyndebourne’s Offenbach-in-the-garden — it’s hard not to feel frustrated.

In classical music circles, Christmas arrives with the overture to Handel’s Messiah. Or so they’ll tell you. In truth, festivities kick off when you hear a ping from your phone and glance down at your inbox: OMG — you have to hear this! There follows, as tonic follows dominant, a link to YouTube and the 2014 Christmas in Vienna Medley — the occasion, still barely fathomable to anyone who believes that we share a common European culture, when a quartet of opera singers in full evening dress, and shimmying on the spot like a vicar at a Sunday School disco, attempted to cover George Michael’s ‘Last Christmas’. But not this year. Oh no.

Covid has been many things to the arts — most of them unprintable. A plague, a scourge, a disaster from which many institutions and artists won’t recover, it has also been a great equaliser. Suddenly there’s space to be heard, silence to be filled. In a digital world no one cares about the size of your stage. All you need is a laptop and a good idea and you’re competing alongside the Met or the Royal Opera. In the case of the Virtual Opera Project it was a shed and a homemade green-screen. Oh, and a cast, chorus and creative team of well over 100. And did I mention the London Philharmonic Orchestra?