Monteverdi

Say what you like about Monteverdi, but he knew how to get his audience on side. ‘I greet you, heroes, princes,’ declares the personification of Music in the opening scene of L’Orfeo, and if you’re a Glyndebourne regular you’ll feel at home right away. ‘Many singers have celebrated you – and fallen short of the truth, which is too exalted for mortal vision.’ Why, thank you; and how true, how very true. Now, when’s the picnic? But seduction is what opera does. It’s what opera has done since the very beginning – and L’Orfeo, premièred in 1607 at the court of Mantua, is almost as close to the beginning as we can get.

You wouldn’t like Tamerlano when he’s angry. ‘My heart seethes with rage,’ he sings, in Act III of Handel’s opera – spraying coloratura about the stage like Silly String on a 1980s kids’ TV show. That’s the deal with baroque opera: the emotional register is extreme and you’re either in the moment or you might as well leave the theatre. Literal realism, clearly, is not the point – making it even more necessary for a modern director to sketch in some hint of a social or cultural framework in which we can locate and comprehend these hyper-real characters. The music is too hot and too strong to work as drama in a purely abstract setting. Pare it back too far and you’re left with five maniacs screaming at each other in a black box.