Longborough festival opera

Vincenzo Bellini realised early on that as titles go, Le teste rotonde ed i cavalieri (The Roundheads and the Cavaliers) doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. He settled for I puritani instead, though he’d have been equally happy (or so he told friends) to name the whole opera after its lovestruck heroine Elvira. He admitted that the plot catches fire only after she loses her mind: the soprano who plays her has to be able to act, and she really has to be able to sing. ‘In opera, it is the singing that moves one to tears, that causes horror, that inspires death,’ as Bellini put it, and he practised what he preached.

King Arkel, in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, is almost blind, and he rules over a kingdom of darkness. Debussy’s score is so luminous that it’s easy to forget just how dark it supposedly is, this mythical realm of Allemonde – even despite the libretto’s references to gloomy caves, shadowy castles and forests that block out the sunlight. Many productions take their visual cues from the music rather than the words, providing endless opportunity for shimmering effects and the subtle play of light and shade. Jenny Ogilvie’s staging for Longborough Festival Opera doesn’t just embrace the darkness; it goes all in. Shadows texture the huge, brutalist wall of Arkel’s castle and occasionally – briefly – it’s pierced by shafts of sunlight.

Another week, another Wagner production at a summer opera festival. This never used to happen. When John Christie launched Glyndebourne in the 1930s, he hoped to stage the Ring. So he gathered a team of refugee musicians from Germany, who quickly assured him that it was impossible and he should stick to Mozart. The man who changed all that was Martin Graham, the plimsoll-wearing founder of Longborough Festival Opera, who died in April at the age of 83. Graham was irrepressible; a self-taught enthusiast. With no one around to tell him it couldn’t be done, he pushed ahead regardless, staging the Ring cycle twice in as many decades. And now look.

Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades is one of those operas that under-promises on paper but over-delivers on stage. It’s hard to summarise the plot in a way that makes it sound theatrical, even if you’ve read Pushkin’s novella, and I’ve never found a recording that really hits the spot. And yet, time and again, in the theatre: wham! It goes up like a petrol bomb. With a good production and performers, Tchaikovsky hurls you out at the far end feeling almost hungover – head swimming, and wondering where those three hours went. The cast and staging at Garsington are very, very good.

When Erich Wolfgang Korngold completed his third opera, Die tote Stadt, in August 1920, he’d barely turned 23. Yet such was his reputation that what followed was practically a Europe-wide bidding war for rights to the première. The young composer had his pick of companies and conductors (the Vienna State Opera tried and failed). In the end – almost unprecedentedly – Die tote Stadt was launched on the same night in two cities simultaneously. Audiences in Hamburg and Cologne both erupted into applause, but Korngold, who could be in only one place, had chosen Hamburg – where he was so dazed by the response that Richard Strauss, who was present in the audience, had to remind him to go up and take his bow.