Opera

Phrenology, eh? It’s cobblers, plainly, but Robert Schumann didn’t know that and his biographer Martin Geck tells how in 1846, near Dresden, he submitted to a full once-over from Europe’s leading cranium-fondler Robert Noel. Noel clearly knew his patient, because his analysis echoes what anyone who knows Schumann’s music might say about the personality of this supreme romantic. Noel detected ‘sense of form – modesty – strength of purpose’. Touchingly, he also detected ‘anxiety that stands in the way of happiness’. Then the clincher, the observation that grabs straight at the heart of any Schumann fan: ‘emotional through and through’. Well, we Schumann-lovers will take all the back-up we can get.

The long days wane, summer fades and sure enough, the big international guest orchestras begin to land at the BBC Proms. A rare catch this year was the Proms debut of the orchestra of the New York Metropolitan Opera, under its music director Yannick Nézét-Séguin. Debut? No, I couldn’t quite believe it either. What with the regular Radio 3 broadcasts from the Met, and all those live cinema relays, the Met Orchestra almost feels like part of the family. Certainly, there must be few overseas orchestras whose live performances are more familiar to British audiences. No question, though, there’s always something rather festive about hearing a great opera orchestra in concert.

The Three Choirs Festival always feels so nourishing, so eternally English, that you sometimes forget how much history has been made there. It was in Gloucester in 1910 that the young Herbert Howells and Ivor Gurney heard the world première of Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia while Elgar, in rented digs, tried out his Violin Concerto with Fritz Kreisler. Three years later you’ve got Sibelius despatching Aino Ackte to première Luonnotar, and Saint-Saëns, at 77, playing Mozart by day, then cracking out his celebrated musical impersonations at the post-show party. Apparently his Cosima Wagner was quite the knockout. The point is that there have been moments when the musical universe pivoted around this quiet cathedral close.

Ah, so that’s where the kangaroo comes in! Garsington Opera produces a souvenir mug each summer decorated with cartoons of that year’s operas. Buy yours early enough, and you get a ceramic preview of the season – in the case of Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a drawing of a kangaroo. True, Barry’s operas are famously anarchic. But quite where a marsupial was supposed to fit into Oscar Wilde’s comedy was unclear until halfway through Act One. Suddenly, there it was: fuzzy and large as life, lolloping dolefully across the stage. Because? Well, because someone said ‘Australia’, silly. That’s how it works.

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).

Nature smiled on the opening week of Opera Holland Park’s new season. There’s no better advertisement for semi-outdoor opera than an unseasonal heatwave, and it brought its own authenticity to Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, in a new production by Martin Lloyd-Evans. The wooden cabins and trestle tables of the set had a parched look and you could imagine the smell of pines and sagebrush as the evening grew dark in real time. And never more so than in the final scenes, where Puccini’s gunslinging heroine Minnie gets her man and the world flushes red and gold as they venture off into the sunset. True, you needed to factor out the squawking of the Holland Park peacocks – and the blizzard that Puccini specifies in Act Two – but the point stands.

English National Opera’s first production created in Manchester is Angel’s Bone, a one-act opera by Du Yun and the librettist Royce Vavrek. It was premièred in 2016 in New York and subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize, but we shouldn’t hold that against it. Musically, at least, it’s certainly more interesting than recent US imports like Jeanine Tesori’s Blue – worthy, sub-minimalist Yankslop addressing the fashionable issues of the day. (It’s funny how the classical music world imagines that the way to reach British audiences in 2026 is to programme stuff that was relevant to Americans in 2016.) It was a pretty horrible experience nonetheless. Daytime TV-fixated suburbanites Mr and Mrs X.E.

There’s a photo of Paul Hindemith with the pianist Artur Schnabel on hands and knees, surrounded by model railway track. Huge railway enthusiast, Hindemith, you see: he laid sprawling networks through the rooms of his Berlin apartment (before the Nazis drove him out), and organised marathon operating sessions with friends. Anyway, for various reasons, this knowledge makes me warm to him in a way that his music only erratically manages. It’s not that it’s impossible to like (although this is a man whose idea of a crowd-pleaser is called Symphonic Metamorphoses of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber). But there can be few composers whose effect is so hard to anticipate.

This year’s Jette Parker Artists showcase is a triple bill of modern-ish operas; a cleverly assembled trittico of one-acters, linked by a theme of bereavement. That sounds bleak until you consider that Puccini’s Trittico was originally inspired by The Divine Comedy, and who bothers about that today? Anyway, the three operas that make up Tales of Love and Loss are far from dispiriting in their overall effect. Like Puccini, Talia Stern – who directs all three – has gone for two tragedies plus a raucous, palate-cleansing comedy. And like Gianni Schicchi, the final laugh-fest (Elena Langer’s Four Sisters) plays out around a barely cold corpse and sends you into the night feeling uneasy, but undeniably entertained. The Puccini parallels stop there.

On the first night of Welsh National Opera’s new Flying Dutchman, the company’s co-directors walked on stage to salute their departing music director Tomas Hanus. There were cheers, of course; Hanus has been a courageous MD and his Wagner was thrilling. But no one has been appointed to succeed him, and that morning WNO had announced a 2026-27 season that amounts to a near-total artistic collapse, with just two full-scale operas. A major international company has been reduced to a community arts provider, and a Pollyanna press release announcing ‘a powerful statement of renewal’ did nothing to quell the feeling that the lights are going out on Cardiff Bay. It’s not just Cardiff, either.

Never let it be said that The Spectator fails to follow up an arts story. Long-term readers will recall that in the edition of 6 March 1711 Joseph Addison investigated the supply of live sparrows for the first production of Handel’s Rinaldo. ‘What, are they to be roasted?’ he asked, reasonably enough. No, they were ‘to enter towards the end of the first Act and to fly about the Stage’. Still, you need to keep an eye on these theatrical types and although there was certainly birdsong in the latest revival of Rinaldo – the end-of-term opera at the Royal Academy of Music – I can report it was recorded. No sparrows were cooked in the making of this opera. Mind you, Handel purists took a bit of a battering.

Covent Garden’s new Ring cycle has reached Siegfried, and once again, you can only marvel at Wagner’s Shakespeare-like ability to anticipate modern preoccupations. Want to talk about the manosphere? Well, here’s opera’s most profound study of the playful, disruptive, world-making energy of the adolescent male psyche. The least interesting thing that you can say about Siegfried is that he’s an impulsive oaf. Well, duh. Have you never met (or if you’re really unfortunate, been) a teenage boy? Wagner could hardly make it more clear. Siegfried’s upbringing has been toxic. He has been isolated from humanity, and his only inkling of love has been brutally transactional.

Bring me my bow of burning gold; or failing that, the opening notes of Elgar’s Second Symphony. That’s how I’ve always imagined them anyway, those three swelling B flats –  a mighty drawing back of the bow before Elgar propels his arrows of desire into the restless heart of this greatest of British symphonies. Thinking back, though, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt quite that tension in a live performance – not from Pesek in Liverpool or Barenboim at the Proms, and not from this most recent encounter, with Mark Wigglesworth and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in Bristol. So where am I getting it from? Recordings, presumably, and the long-embedded imprint of two boyhood idols, John Barbirolli and Vernon ‘Tod’ Handley.

By the end of Siegfried, the third opera in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the king of the gods is in freefall. In the first opera, Das Rheingold, Wotan is a confident protagonist; a world-builder. In Die Walküre, we’ve seen him discover the limits of power, and felt his heart break. Now, in Siegfried, he’s a haunted figure; the solitary Wanderer, searching the world for answers that his all-powerful wisdom can no longer supply. He confronts the young hero Siegfried, and his law-giving spear shatters on the sword of a reckless, clueless boy. ‘All he can say is, “Go, then.

Some people like art to have a message. So here’s one, delivered by Katsushika Hokusai near the end of Dai Fujikura and Harry Ross’s new opera The Great Wave. ‘Remember art won’t change the world,’ sings the great painter (as incarnated by the baritone Daisuke Ohyama), and for that line alone I’d gladly have given the show five stars, if the Spectator did anything as barbaric as award stars. Words to live by, at least if you’re an artist; and the very private bliss of a life devoted to creativity is the heart, mind and dramatic engine of The Great Wave. Is that enough to sustain a full-length opera?

Gianandrea Noseda conducted the London Symphony Orchestra last week in a programme of Stravinsky, Chopin and Borodin. The Stravinsky was a relative rarity – the divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss – and Chopin’s F minor concerto was played by Seong-Jin Cho, a pianist with a large following and a soaring reputation. Full disclosure: I was there for the Borodin, his Second Symphony of 1877. What a masterpiece, and what a man! Alexander Borodin was a scientist of international standing and a campaigner for women’s rights. Deeply in love with his wife, and an inveterate rescuer of stray cats, he was, he confessed to Liszt, ‘only a Sunday composer’. ‘But after all,’ replied the wizard of Weimar, ‘Sunday is a special day.

Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov is back at Covent Garden, and there are ninjas. This isn’t a spoiler. There hasn’t been a note of music at this point, and it’s almost the first thing you see. A ginger child in a weird mask is playing with a spinning top when the black-clad assassins stalk on and slit his throat. Cue gasps. Well, the director is Richard Jones, after all; quirky, garish and occasionally macabre is what he does. And the (alleged) murder of a child pretender to the Russian throne is the horror that drives the entire plot, at least in the first (1869) version of the opera, which is what we’re given here.