Alexandra Coghlan

We’ve cried wolf with Handel. Ever since the modern trend began for staging the composer’s oratorios we’ve hailed each one in turn as the composer’s ‘most dramatic’. We’ve said it of Theodora, Saul, perhaps loudest (and most persuasively) of Jephtha. The trouble is that now, nearly 40 years since we last saw Belshazzar on an English stage, this magnificent drama of warring armies and nations, grieving parents and defiant children returns and we’ve spent all our superlatives. So you’ll just have to trust me when I say that it’s really quite good. A narcissistic sybarite of a king rules over a land bloated with corruption, rife with factions.

Is it possible to write a feminist opera about Jack the Ripper? Composer Iain Bell thinks it is, and his Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel tries very, very hard to prove it. But while the result is respectful, topical and agonisingly, paralysingly sincere, it’s also a sheep in wolf’s clothing. You can’t have your victims and kill them too. You have only to look at the opera’s title, bent awkwardly round its central colon, to see the conflict. Front and centre you have Jack the Ripper — a marketing department’s darling, promising Gothic horror and lashings of gore. Following behind (in slightly smaller type) you have his victims, the drab, downtrodden women whose lives and voices the piece hopes, laudably, to restore.

Operas are like buses. Both are filled with pensioners and take ages to get anywhere, but more importantly they always seem to arrive en masse. You wait ages for a Magic Flute, then five come along at once. Opera North started us off in January, Welsh National Opera and English National Opera are currently following suit, with Scottish Opera and Glyndebourne covering the summer shift. It’s a mess and, when you consider that at least four of these are touring with inevitable overlap, a wanton, self-destructive splitting of an already small opera-going audience. With more Flutes than a school wind-band to choose from this season you can afford to be picky (assuming you haven’t already exhausted yourself with the three concurrent Katya Kabanovas).

It’s December, and while musical theatre is busy celebrating ‘warm woollen mittens’, opera, as usual, is far more interested in the tiny frozen hands inside them. Because nothing says Christmas quite like consumption, and I’m not talking turkey and mince pies. London’s opera companies are serving up a heaped sleighful of heartbreak this year. English National Opera is going traditional with La bohème, while the Royal Opera is thinking outside the snow-covered coffin with Carmen. There’s something for everybody, so long as it’s tragedy. ENO’s Bohème is the safe option, the show you take your granny to.

How do you solve a problem like Lucia? Murder, madness, abuse, possibly even incest, all set to a soundtrack of rollicking, rum-ti-tum tunes. Add to that a Scottish setting (nothing sabotages dramatic seriousness quite like a kilt, just ask Mel Gibson) and you have Gilbert & Sullivan in an Italian accent, Ruddigore with a cigarette and a suntan. Recently at the Royal Opera House Katie Mitchell tried to naturalise Donizetti’s opera into submission, but ended up tussling with a score she clearly didn’t trust and a cast who didn’t seem to trust her, giving her audience what she wanted Lucia to be, rather than what’s actually there.

Wolverhampton; Workington; Blackburn; Sheffield; Lancaster; Hackney. Every year English Touring Opera does what our national opera company doesn’t: packs up its props and takes to the road, bringing opera to the bits of the UK other companies don’t even think about reaching. And not just Traviatas and Toscas either, but properly interesting, often unusual, repertoire. With a core staff you can pretty much count on your fingers, and ticket prices that would scarcely buy you a sandwich at the Royal Opera House, let alone a seat, the whole operation is one of those minor miracles of the arts world — a company where a little bit of funding goes an awfully long way, and not just geographically. Then there’s the talent.

Yes, Oscar Wilde never wrote it. No, Strauss didn’t intend it. In fact, the composer famously demanded the Dance of the Seven Veils be ‘thoroughly decent, as if it were being done on a prayer mat’. But that doesn’t stop this striptease and musical money shot being the look-but-don’t-touchstone of any Salome. A blonde, blank-faced Barbie doll in gym knickers, vest and shiny trainers stands in a spotlight, a baseball bat in her hands. Strauss’s oboe begins its suggestive arabesques but Salome remains quite still, her eyes fixed impassive, unblinking on the audience. Eventually her hips begin to twitch, her back arches and she goes sullenly through the motions of sensuality, never breaking her gaze, defying us to find her desirable.

At the end of Act Two of Tosca there are some 30 bars of orchestral music — accompaniment to a very specific set of stage directions. During this time Tosca takes two candles and places them on either side of the dead Scarpia’s head. She then removes a crucifix from the wall and lays it on his chest. The tableau is a messy, bloody one, but the message is clear: here the politics of religion and the religion of politics are one and the same. A pietà or the body of a thug? A murderer or a Madonna? It’s all just a matter of spin. In a year of embattled Supreme Court nominations and moral muscle-flexing by our own DUP, Edward Dick’s new, 21st-century Tosca for Opera North relishes these slippery elisions and entanglements of church and state.

There is famously no door into the late-night diner of Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’. Its three silent patrons are trapped behind the plate-glass window — specimens of urban disaffection and isolation. In Richard Jones’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk it’s the windows that are so disquietingly absent. John Macfarlane’s designs propel the action of Shostakovich’s final opera through an endless enfilade of rooms. There are doors aplenty, and thresholds — of morality, sexuality and social status — are gleefully broached and breached, but each ultimately leads only to another domestic hell.

Janacek is the master of the operatic title. Think of the slippery, sleight-of-hand emphasis of Jenufa in its original Czech —Her Stepdaughter — or the elegant misdirection of The Beginning of a Romance. It encourages the suspicion that when Janacek christened his final opera, deliberately truncating the title of Dostoyevsky’s Siberian prison camp-inspired novel Notes From the House of the Dead, there was good reason. It’s a title that opens out a description into an implied question: From the House of the Dead to, where or what exactly? Where can you go, who can you cry out to, once you have crossed over into the underworld and witnessed its horrors? Where indeed.

A chaste act of adultery and a silent conversation: these are the encounters at the heart of Un ballo in maschera. On paper Verdi’s opera is a hot-blooded political thriller climaxing in a regicide, but in the watching it’s something entirely other. Just like the buoyant score, whose ‘aura of gaiety’ seems so at odds with the dark subject matter, the drama of Ballo is a sustained act of misdirection. The focus in this unusual piece is not on action and event but on absences, unspokens — the negative and not the photograph is what absorbs Verdi so compellingly here.