Glyndebourne

It’s impossible to say what Rossini would have made of Glyndebourne’s production of Il turco in Italia, but you can bet on one thing – he’d have brought the mother of all picnics. His love of food and drink was heroic; it’s believed that more recipes have been named after Rossini than any other musician. He didn’t mess about, either, berating his Paris grocer when a promised consignment of Neapolitan macaroni turned out to be an inferior Genoese product. ‘If he knows as much about music as he does about pasta, he must be a great composer,’ commented the oblivious shopkeeper. Well, that’s the story, anyway (I thought the source was Stendhal but it turns out to be Ben Trovato).

Through the grey downbeat years of postwar austerity, we nursed cheering fantasies of a life more lavishly colourful and hedonistic. Oliver Messel fed them: born into Edwardian privilege, the epitome of well-connected metropolitan sophistication, he doubled up as interior decorator and stage designer, creating in both roles a unique style of rococo elegance and light-touch whimsy that sweetened and consoled – ‘a gossamer world of gilded enchantment’ as Roy Strong soupily put it. ‘Marie Antoinette would have felt at home in any of his settings.’ Like his rival Cecil Beaton, Oliver Messel sums up an era Posterity has not been kind to Messel.

‘Here time becomes space,’ says Gurnemanz in Act One of Parsifal, and true enough, the end of the new Glyndebourne Parsifal is in its beginning. We don’t know that, at first: the sickbed image that’s glimpsed during the prelude doesn’t resolve itself until the opera’s closing scenes. In between, characters appear on stage in multiple forms, at different ages – past and future selves attendant on the present, whatever ‘present’ means in Monsalvat. Wagner, after all, makes it clear enough that time in the Grail Domain moves in mysterious ways, and his whole musical strategy reinforces that truth.

A classic opera production ages like wine. When David McVicar’s staging of Handel’s Giulio Cesare first opened at Glyndebourne in 2005, Michael Tanner – writing in these pages – loathed it. ‘A quite hateful betrayal’ was how he described a production that is now widely regarded as a classic. It would be easy to brandish those words now he’s gone – ha ha, no one ever erected a statue to a critic – ignoring the truth that any first night review can only ever be a snapshot, and that the big story back then was the hyperactive, neon-lit debut of Danielle de Niese as Cleopatra. Tanner did predict that de Niese would do well out of it, though no one guessed that she’d end up marrying the owner of the theatre.

In 1905, shortly before the world première of The Merry Widow, the Viennese theatre manager Wilhelm Karczag got cold feet and tried to pull it. He offered Franz Lehar hard cash to withdraw the score, and when that failed, he rushed it on under-rehearsed, using second-hand sets from an older show. Or so the story goes anyway. Karczag couldn’t know that within a decade The Merry Widow would become the most successful piece of musical theatre in human history up to that point: an all-conquering global brand that gave its name to hats, corsets, cigarettes and a rather nice cocktail (equal measures gin and vermouth, splashed with absinthe, Bénédictine and bitters, in case you’re curious). In the 1920s an American firm even marketed Merry Widow condoms.

There are certain things that you don’t expect at the opera. Laughter, for example. Proper laughter, that is; not the knowing sort that ripples politely across the auditorium five seconds after the punchline appears in the surtitles. We’re talking unconstrained laughter; laughter that gives you an endorphin rush and sends you straight online to tell your friends that they must see the show. But that’s Cal McCrystal’s whole business. He’s the director who devised James Corden’s delirious plate-spinning capers in the National Theatre’s One Man, Two Guvnors and whose face (in motion-capture) provided the elastic expressions of a small Peruvian bear in Paddington. ‘I want every production I do to be the funniest I’ve ever done.

Are you supposed to laugh at the end of Don Giovanni? Audiences often do, and they did at the end of Mariame Clément’s new production at Glyndebourne. It’s usually the bit where Donna Anna’s fiancé Don Ottavio suggests that they get married sharpish, and she immediately asks him for a year’s delay. Readers of Middlemarch will know that a year’s formal mourning after the death of a close relative was a common pre-modern convention, and Mozart’s writings suggest that he (if not his librettist) questioned neither the sanctity of marriage nor the reality of Hell. That doesn’t bother many modern directors, though, and if they’ve presented Anna as a kickass girl boss and Ottavio as a clingy milksop (not that hard, to be fair) it generally gets a reliable guffaw.

One morning in the 20th century, Thérèse wakes up next to her husband and announces that she’s a feminist. Hubby, who’s been in either of two world wars, just wants his bacon for breakfast. Too bad: declaring herself male, Thérèse has already detached her breasts and hurled them spinning into the middle-distance. But they keep hanging around, great pink wobbly orbs floating just above her head. She takes out a gun and blasts them to shreds. Renaming herself Tirésias, and with her husband trussed into a moob-enhancing corset, she sets out to run the world, leaving the men to work out how to make babies alone. Babies (we’ve been told by an evening-suited Prologue) being an urgent national requirement. More fizz, anyone?

You’ve got to hand it to Dame Ethel Smyth. Working in an era when to be a British composer implied an automatic cultural cringe towards the continent, she didn’t miss a beat when Henry Brewster, the librettist of her 1906 opera The Wreckers, chose to write in French. The incoming music director at Covent Garden was the Frenchman André Messager; perhaps, Smyth reasoned, ‘to compose this opera in French would be the best chance of a performance in England of an English opera!’ Good call: 116 years later, you get the distinct impression that the opportunity to première the unheard French version of the opera (it’s been done numerous times in English) may have tipped the balance for Glyndebourne.

Think back to when you were 12, and the sensation of re-opening your favourite book. (This is The Spectator; I’m assuming you were all bookish 12-year-olds.) The Silver Chair, perhaps, or The Phoenix and the Carpet — some fantastic alternative world, anyway, filled with characters who felt like old friends. The lumbering iron giants, powered by fire and water. The scary-funny vegetable-monster. The terrifying but magnificent queen, and her eerie batsqueak of sexual-ity. And of course, the bit where pillows turn magically into birds and flit about the room. This new project from the designer/director team Barbe & Doucet initially feels like being pulled into one of those beloved classics. We’re in a grand hotel circa 1900, and it looks fabulous.

It was bucketing it down in Venice, yet the beach was heaving. Families, lovebirds, warring kids, a yappy mutt, all strewn across a sandy expanse, basking on beach towels. Balls were bounced, crosswords filled, timelines scrolled. Out of this idleness, songs would bubble up, light billowy airs — speaking now to suncream mundanities, now to geological anxieties — whisked up to our ears as if on a cooling breeze. We were in the Lithuanian Pavilion inside a dilapidated former military storehouse in a corner of north Venice, being given a god’s-eye view on an extraordinary new opera, Sun & Sea (Marina), by a Lithuanian trio: composer Lina Lapelyte, director Rugile Barzdziukaite, and writer Vaiva Grainyte.

‘Outside this house the world has changed. Life is swifter than before; there is no time for idle gestures.’ Anatol, in Samuel Barber’s opera Vanessa, doesn’t pretend to be a romantic hero. The son of Vanessa’s old flame, he’s arrived by night at the remote mansion where she’s waited for 20 years with her elderly mother and niece Erika. He seduces the niece, beguiles the aunt and alienates the grandmother, but at no point is he anything less than honest. ‘I cannot offer you eternal love, for we have learned today such words are lies’, he sings, and Barber, remarkably, takes him at face value. Anatol’s music is lyrical and open; a shaft of light in Barber and his librettist Menotti’s claustrophobic world.

The femme fatale was invented in France. A giddy, greedy child in her first incarnation, as the antiheroine of Abbé Prévost’s L’Histoire du Chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731), she had no voice of her own. Reshaped as a sphinx by Alfred de Musset, made over as a gypsy by Prosper Mérimée, plumped out with fashionable sentimentality by Massenet and mordant sensuality by Puccini, her function was to beguile and elude, to want something that those who wanted her were unable to give her, then die. In Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande even that wanting is stripped away. ‘Ne me touchez pas!’ sings Mélisande, but Golaud, made ugly and old for want of love, cannot or will not listen.