Culture

George Benjamin’s Written on Skin is a work of compelling fascination, all the more so in that it is elusive and possibly wilfully puzzling. I want to see it again as soon as possible, and of how many new operas can that be said? Actually, of three that have been premièred at the Royal Opera in the past decade — Adès’s The Tempest, Birtwistle’s The Minotaur and now this, though it has already been performed in Europe. Three apparent masterpieces of opera from England in a decade is impressive, indeed unprecedented. And they are all quite different, with Skin being the most opaque, though the experience of sitting through it, just over an hour and a half, mercifully without an interval, may be the most intense.

It was some time since I’d been to a performance of Mozart’s greatest though not his deepest opera, Le Nozze di Figaro, one of the works of which I can’t imagine ever tiring. And it is, despite some heavy vocal demands, an opera which normally suits students at the music colleges well. There weren’t any obvious grave shortcomings in the first night’s performance of it at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, but it annoyingly failed to achieve lift-off. Nerves may well have a lot to do with that: the playing of the Overture had enough problems of intonation among the winds, which later played beautifully, to suggest that.

I went to two of the most familiar operas in the repertoire this week, one in HD from the New York Met, the other at the Royal Opera. Both were given in decent if not, with some exceptions, outstanding performances. The experiences led me to think again about the differences between seeing an opera onstage in a theatre and seeing one ‘live’ in the cinema. Our intermission hostess, Renée Fleming, repeated the usual formula about how there is no substitute for actually being present in the theatre where the opera is taking place, but I wonder what she would say if challenged on that point.

I saw three operas this week, all centrally concerned with spurned women. That’s not surprising, given the general subject matter of the art form, but it sometimes makes me wonder why we prefer to see, and more importantly to hear, love-tormented women more than men. The only major exception to spring to mind is Wagner’s Ring, which gets under way with a dwarf teased and rejected by three mermaids. But even Alberich spends much more time elaborating on his plans for world domination than on lamenting lost love; the Ring is quite a big exception, but one still wonders why it is female suffering from despised love rather than the male version of the same complaint that excites operatic composers and their listeners so much.

This week has featured new productions at the Royal Opera and English National Opera of staples of the repertoire, both subjected to drastic rethinking. Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is the first production at the Royal Opera of the new Director of Opera, Kasper Holten, and on this showing I very much hope it will be the last. It has been reviewed coolly on the whole, but I haven’t read anyone being sufficiently abusive — adequately, that is, to the experience of sitting through a flawed but moving masterpiece that is systematically, though I’m sure involuntarily, slaughtered from the opening moments to the wretched close. This is an opera that Holten loves, and he has made clear that he learnt Russian to get to the heart of it.

I approach any production of Mozart’s last opera, La clemenza di Tito, in a state of acute trepidation: it’s not pleasant sitting bored through nearly three hours of one of your favourite two or three composers, one whom you regard as perhaps the most astonishing artist who ever lived. But that is how La clemenza di Tito has nearly always affected me — first, before it was revived in theatres, on a dodgy old Nixa recording, then, fairly often since, in various opera houses, its having now become a repertoire piece, something which was inconceivable only 40 years ago. Still, despite its canonisation, its defenders — its admirers still, significantly, regard themselves in that way — tend to strike one or another defiant or uneasy note.

The revival of Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Minotaur is the most significant artistic event at the Royal Opera since its première, almost five years ago. Unlike Thomas Adès’s more immediately accessible The Tempest, The Minotaur has not gone on to have an international career, though it unquestionably deserves one. With its ideal cast and direction, this production should tour the world’s major opera houses, demonstrating that at irregular but not too large intervals a new masterwork can still be forthcoming in this form, whose decline and decease has often been announced.

There is only one test that a performance of Verdi’s Otello has to pass: do you come out of the theatre drained, desperate at the suffering that human beings who love one another can nonetheless inflict, so that they torture or even kill the object of their love? Shakespeare’s play is about other things besides, indeed that may not be the major test of a production of it.

In one of his finest essays, Gore Vidal recalls that when he worked as a scriptwriter for MGM the Wise Hack always used to advise his toffee-nosed team that ‘shit has its own integrity’. If crap is what you’re producing, make sure there are no signs in it that that’s what you think it is. Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable fails that test, I think, as do the rest of his operas. And at the Royal Opera, where a new production by Laurent Pelly, shared with Geneva, is on display, there are plenty of indications that no one involved takes it seriously either.

2012 has been an undistinguished year in opera, at any rate in the UK. A combination of cutbacks and the promise of stops being pulled out next year for the bicentenaries of Verdi’s and Wagner’s births and the centenary of Britten’s has led to the big companies counting on our anticipation. Except that, in the case of Wagner, though oddly not of Verdi, the gun has been jumped. We have already had the Royal Opera’s Ring, four cycles of it in just over a month, so that there will be no staged Ring in London next year, only a concert version. It will be left to Longborough, for those who have the money, the time and the transport, to see it on stage, and judging from the individual parts that have been mounted in the past four years, the results should be tremendous.

Some operas become, thanks partly to the frequency with which they are produced, victims of their own popularity. The most obvious sufferer is Carmen, which is a no-winner for singers and directors alike. As soon as the curtain rises and you see lemon trees and swaying hips, your heart sinks and you spend the interval agreeing with everyone that it’s just another tired old cliché; while if the scene is a mortuary or a garage you complain — and fairly — that it’s wholly inappropriate for the drama and the music that gives it substance. Last time it was produced at ENO, in 2007, it failed on all scores and it’s almost unseemly to mention it.

I think I have developed a crush on Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, which is strange, considering that it is so evidently adorable a work that most opera-goers fall for it straight away. I have never been averse to it, in the way that I am to quite a lot of Donizetti’s work, but in the light of the last two performances I’ve seen, within a few weeks, it has risen in my estimation to the level of being a masterpiece. The first was the Met’s broadcast, delightful in all respects, but with an interestingly unusual balance of sympathy towards the characters. Now, at the Royal Opera, Laurence Pelly’s production is revived for the second time, the revival director being Daniel Dooner, who has been unusually active, unless my memory fails me.

As usual on the rare occasions when Vaughan Williams’s last and largest opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress, is performed, the new production at English National Opera has been greeted antiphonally, with cries of ecstasy mingled with indignation that it is so little performed from one side, and moans of boredom and weariness from the other. Though I am temperamentally disinclined or even unable to take a compromise position on almost any subject, in this case that is what I find myself doing. It seems to me that there are long stretches where The Pilgrim’s Progress is serene, noble, elevated, radiant and life-giving, others where it stalls, nothing much happens (in the music more than on stage) and it belies its title: progress is just what, sometimes, we don’t get.

About two of the operas I saw in Leeds this week there is a serious question as to whether or not they are comedies. The third, Gounod’s Faust, is clearly not meant to be; I’ll be writing about it next week. The new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni by Alessandro Talevi is jokey and fast — or, anyway, the arias and ensembles are fast, the recitatives less so — but it’s not particularly funny, and what humour there is would certainly not have been available to da Ponte and Mozart: peasants rocking and rolling in the finale to Act I, for instance.

There is no experience faintly comparable to sitting in an opera house at the opening of Wagner’s Ring cycle, knowing you will be watching and listening to the whole thing in the space of a week. The opening E flat, especially when it emerges as it does at the Royal Opera in total darkness, the pit as well as the auditorium, is thrilling beyond belief, and as the music slowly begins to move the sense of being in at the beginning and not knowing what will happen is overwhelming, however familiar you may be with the Ring. Wagner’s dynamic instructions are very specific — at no point in the prelude should the sound rise above piano, though that is a direction that no conductor, almost, obeys.

‘Tell a dream and lose a reader’ was one of Henry James’s most immediately practical if obvious pieces of advice to fellow authors. Dying in 1916, he didn’t have much chance to experience surrealism in its numerous manifestations, and one can’t imagine his responding positively if he had. For the abandonment of memory, of motive, of logic, of any of the categories by which we make sense of experience is gleefully embraced by surrealists — and by no one more thoroughly than Georges Neveux, in his play Juliette, or the key of dreams.

Glyndebourne’s last offering this season is one of the most stylish things it has done for a very long time, Ravel’s two brief operas directed by Laurent Pelly, who was responsible for its brilliant Hänsel und Gretel in 2008. It may seem odd that Ravel’s pair — though they were conceived quite separately, and years apart — don’t get done more often, but they both demand elaborate sets, and would just be boring if not unintelligible without them. Actually, I find L’heure espagnole, first performed in 1911, boring anyway, but that seems to be a minority view.