Carmen, Royal Academy Opera, 19 November 2025

Susie Sainsbury Theatre, Royal Academy of Music

Images: Craig Fuller

Carmen – Charlotte Clapperton
Don José – Woogyeom Kim
Micaëla – Madeleine Perring
Escamillo – Harrison Robb
Zuniga – Theodore McAlindon
Moralès – Alexander Hopkins
Frasquita – Abigail Sinclair
Mercédès – Amy Porter
Remendado – Joseph Hancock
Dancaire – Joel Robson
Lillas Pastia – Joshua Furtado-Mendes

Director – Harry Fehr
Designs – Yannis Thavoris
Lighting – Jake Wilshire
Video – Matt Powell
Movement – Victoria Newlyn

Royal Academy Opera Chorus

Royal Academy Sinfonia

Christopher White (conductor)

A few rays of Andalusian sun would not go amiss right now in the dark, dismal, last half of November. Short of that, Carmen at the Royal Academy offered an alternative: quite an undertaking even for an enterprising conservatoire opera scheme. Given the ways in which voices develop, ‘big’ nineteenth-century repertoire – the description begs questions, yet still holds – tends to be avoided in student performance. Just as young professional voices tend for the most part to steer away from Verdi and Wagner in favour of Mozart, early music, and some modernist repertoire, so do they from Carmen. One can debate whether that is a good thing. Many factors come into play, not least the desire to gain experience in roles for which they might be asked to audition. It made for a nice surprise, then, when the Royal Academy named Carmen as its end-of-term show, all the more so when given with such confidence by all concerned. 

A smaller theatre helped, of course; when does it not? But there was nothing intrinsically small-scale to the performances; rather, they felt suited to the venue. Intimate, perhaps, but only in the sense that the RAM’s Susie Sainsbury Theatre benefits from its size in enabling all to see and hear the performances at relatively close range. Carmen may be an opéra-comique – as we arguably inform ourselves a little too much – but it generally plays to large houses, is performed by large forces, and Bizet was going to write those orchestral recitatives himself anyway for Vienna, death meaning that they instead were composed by his friend Ernest Guiraud. Tragedy need not be large-scale, but this is no piece of froth. Christopher White and the Royal Academy Sinfonia may likewise have been small in scale (strings 4.4.3.3.2) but they did not come across as such, whether in dash, vigour, or a sheen that would have put many a larger (and older) orchestra to shame. White’s pacing of the four acts stressed dramatic immediacy without ever sounding rushed, offering space where needed. This is an opera of the moment, though, and sounded as such. 

Don José (Woogweom Kim) and Carmen (Charlotte Clapperton)

As is generally the case, a mixture of orchestral recitative and dialogue was used, wisely cut, given length and the difficulties of speaking as well as singing in French. Just as in a larger house, some found the language more of a challenge than others, but there was some genuine excellence in that respect and nothing too grievous. If French dialogue was not tenor Woogweom Kim’s greatest strength, it came and went, and vocally he truly came into his own in the second act, a Don José of ardour and vulnerability in tandem. Charlotte Clapperton’s Carmen surely revealed a star in the making: growing like her co-star, fully holding the stage as any Carmen must, through voice and dramatic presence. Madeleine Perring’s sweetly sung Micaëla and Harrison Robb’s already dark Escamillo made much of their roles, as indeed did the rest of the cast, including an enterprising, accomplished chorus depleted by seasonal ailments yet never sounding like it. 

Harry Fehr’s production updated the action and made the occasional nod to contemporary mores. Micaëla’s bag made it clear she was no fun of bull-fighting, which seemed very much in character. It told the story straightforwardly, highlighting in interesting fashion the crucial role of fate, alternative paths portrayed on video, without distracting from the principal action. Once again, then, an excellent evening of opera at the Royal Academy.

Le nozze di Figaro, Opéra national de Paris, 15 November 2025

Palais Garnier

Images: Franck Ferville - OnP
Figaro (Gordon Bintner), Susanna (Sabine Devieilhe), Count Almaviva (Christian Gerhaher)

Figaro – Gordon Bintner
Susanna – Sabine Devieilhe
Count Almaviva – Christian Gerhaher
Countess Almaviva – Hanna-Elisabeth Müller
Cherubino – Lea Desandre
Marcellina – Monica Bacelli
Dr Bartolo – James Creswell
Don Basilio – Leonardo Cortelazzi
Don Curzio – Nicholas Jones
Barbarina – Ilanah Lobel-Torres
Antonio – Franck Leguérinel
Two Bridesmaids – Sima Ouahaman, Daria Akulova

Director, designs, video – Netia Jones
Lighting – Lucy Carter
Choreography – Sophie Laplane
Dramaturgy – Solène Souriau

  
Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris (chorus master: Alessandro Di Stefano)  

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris

Antonello Manacorda (conductor)

Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro took a while to come to the stage. Completed in more or less the form we know it by 1778, it was accepted, little more than a stone’s throw away from the Palais Garnier for performance by the Comédie-Française in 1781, but its reading before the French court had Louis XVI personally intervene to prevent it. Following revisions, including the action’s transposition from France to Spain, Louis was persuaded by the Queen and his brother the Comte d’Artois (the future, notoriously reactionary Charles X) to permit a private performance in 1783 at Gennevilliers including members of the French royal family. Overruling the censor, Louis thereafter permitted its Paris public premiere the following year at the Théâtre Français on the opposite side of the river. Royal prevarication could be seen as symbolic of Louis’s reign as a whole, encapsulating in its way one of many themes in the history that led only five years later to the outbreak of the Revolution. (So too, of course, did the play itself, Napoleon’s celebrated description – ‘C’est dejà la Révolution en action!’ – serving even today to frame many a review, whether of Beaumarchais or Da Ponte and Mozart. Box-office receipts were the highest France had yet seen; the controversy ultimately did it no harm, quite the contrary. Given the place it holds in French history – not only French literary and dramatic history – the play continues to hold the stage in Paris and France more generally, though Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera has largely, if not entirely, eclipsed it elsewhere. It somehow therefore seemed a little strange – alternatively, a glimpse into reception and transformation – to hear it in Italian rather than French, for what I realised must be my first Nozze di Figaro in France, its billing as Les Noces di Figaro (rather than Beaumarchais’s Mariage) both clue and complication. The Paris Opéra would give it in French between 1793, in Beaumarchais’s own re-adaptation, and 1973, when Giorgio Strehler’s new staging, conducted by Georg Solti, would be the first to employ Da Ponte’s original Italian. 

Dr Bartolo (James Creswell), Marcellina (Monica Bacelli)

Netia Jones’s production takes its leave from that history; from a decision in some, though not all, ways to eschew it; and from the MeToo movement, less distant in 2022 than it now seems during the Trump Restoration. (Come back Charles X, all is forgiven?) The setting is backstage at the Palais Garnier, playing with the idea that opera houses in general and this one in particular come close to an eighteenth-century estate. Not having been backstage there, I learned only from Jones’s programme note that set designs, including ‘the celebrated armchair’, were reproductions of their counterparts there, dressing rooms the focus of the action—as they will in houses prove the focus and locus of dressing (and undressing). Indeed, at the close, we see a glimpse, back of ‘backstage’, and thus theatrically in front of it, of the auditorium itself. I do not think it especially matters; the framing’s the play’s the thing, and this clearly has more general reference. Staircase and all, this house has after all particular resonance in the popular imagination as an archetype, the institution itself having a longer ‘representative’ history we can take back almost as far as we like, even beyond the age of Meyerbeer, Scribe, et al. (and Wagner). Not for nothing do descriptions of changing operatic tastes more often than not use the building’s survey of celebrated lyric composers (and others) as an illustrative case in point. 

House hierarchies can, like their landed ancien régime counterparts, prove ‘challenging’, as contemporary HR-speak would have it. Indeed, outside politics and big business – I recall a splendid Guildhall School production transposing the action to a US election campaign – there may be few better equivalents. This can be portrayed lovingly, as in Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos, although there is no reason why that should not be challenged a little more, love the work though many of us may. (We love Figaro too, after all.) But that has never been the point of either opera or play, the former here sometimes supplemented by projections of Beaumarchais, for whom the cliché tends to be that his play is more ‘political’ than Mozart-Da Ponte. (It is not always so simple as that, but such is the way with generalisations. That does not make them entirely without worth.) We can reasonably be sure, though, that reports we have of abusive behaviour are only the tip of the iceberg and casting, let alone treatment, of singers has long offered an unusually egregious instance. Artistic collaboration rests even more than many other forms on personal, often highly unequal relationships: not quite a society of orders, but with several points in common. There has clearly been a ‘scandal’ at the house we see, in which the characters prepare for a performance of the opera they are previously creating; at least, the costumes they occasionally don suggest that it may be. Cherubino’s costume being several sizes too big for him, the Count’s too small – it would doubtless once have fit – offer straws in the wind for the future as well as the present. Play and opera have always done that too. 

Cherubino (Lea Desandre), Count Almaviva

But to return to the implied preceding scandal, it is clear that, as in the Count’s reassurance to all that he has foregone his feudal right, sexual harassment and worse will not be tolerated; or rather, it is clear that that is the line, shown in red to us all as Figaro cannily papers – aided by Jones’s rapid video multiplication – the walls during the Act I chorus with posters unambiguously saying ‘NO’ to such behaviour. That, however, is the easy part. Actual behaviour generally lags behind, and certainly does here, from the Overture onwards, the Count patting a ballerina on the bottom before closing the dressing room door. During the opening scene, we can also see him, next door (of course) to Figaro and Susanna, being interviewed, doubtless dispensing the public, enlightened house line, just as our Enlightenment honnête homme would have done as governor of Andalusia.

Countess Almaviva (Hanna-Elisabeth Müller), Susanna,
Figaro, Antonio (Franck Leguérinel), Count Almaviva

Presented as a more rounded character than is often the case, Don Basilio is here very much in on the act: a self-regarding and entitled music-master whose conducting of the chorus is full of exaggerated gesture and absent of musical substance, in sharp contrast to Figaro when he leads them in. The latter’s presence clearly irks his alleged musical (and social) superior who, in a nice touch, carries with him a score of Così fan tutte, ready for ‘that’ line. He later emerges from the bathroom in nothing more than a towel to harass an auditioning singer. So much for things having changed, as the Count will show at greater length. 

That Figaro’s role is as a hairdresser offers a welcome reminder of the barber of Seville’s origins, though his skills are clearly multifarious. Susanna (like Barbarina) steps forward from the corps de ballet to remind us not only of the sexism and objectification dancers face, but of their particular role in French lyric theatre. The particular treatment of female dancers by historical patrons (the Jockey Club, for instance) comes to mind, but what of the present? And not only there: who, in Britain, could forget the Johnson government’s notorious invention of ‘Fatima’, a ballerina whose ‘next job could be in cyber (she just doesn’t know it yet). Rethink. Reskill. Reboot’? An opera house requires diversity in every sense, or it simply cannot function. 

Don Basilio (Leonardo Cortelazzi), Susanna 

The treatment of Marcellina is also interesting, not least given the particular brand of misogyny levelled at ‘older’ women. (No one refers to the Count as an ‘older’ man.) Beaumarchais’s Marceline, inveighing against male exploitation of women, is partly restored via projection, and in a wonderful closing touch she dispenses with the Count’s services (that is the Count playing the Count, as it were). Rather than a woman, he has, in that unlovely phrase, been traded in for a younger model. Will the house see a new regime, under Marcellina? It is a nice thought, though we probably no more believe it any more than we believe the Count will never stray or abuse his social standing again. It was a pity, then, that we lost her aria—as so often we do. Might not restitution have begun there? 

On the other hand, if Revolution, or at least revolution, is just around the corner, who knows? In an alternative history of the Opéra, the 1960s proposals of Jean Vilar and Pierre Boulez might have been accepted, a ‘new’ Opéra would have opened in a series including the latter conducting the French premiere of Moses und Aron, a new work by Berio, and the Monteverdi Vespers—and the Solti/Strehler Figaro: who knows? We cannot change the past, but we can strain to change the future. Characterisation, including a reassessment of characters that draws upon their authorial past as well as their reception, can have consequences. Even Don Curzio, whom often one hardly notices, was given a helping hand by an additional, second-act appearance, collecting signatures for the trial to come. This was repaid that with a freshly sung performance one did note, not least in the recognition sextet, from Nicholas Jones. 

Count Almaviva

The production, then, was fortunate to have a fine cast of singing actors to bring this to life. Susannas, notoriously, have much to do—and are not necessarily the highest credited for doing so: a point with gendered as well as other social implications. Sabine Devieilhe certainly did a fine job both in her own right and as source of so many dramatic connections, her portrayal as finely sung as it was acted. Gordon Bintner’s performance as Figaro at times suggested a few first-night nerves: nothing grievous, but a sense that all would come together very soon. There was no doubting the broader brush of his portrayal, though, nor its contribution to the greater whole. Christian Gerhaher presented a moving descent into something approaching age and infirmity, his plea for forgiveness showing a man quite broken. He had been figuratively wounded earlier, at least as early as his audibly hurt ‘ma far burla simile / è poi crudeltà’ in the second act: not a hint of exaggeration, but a seasoned use of language. Hanna-Elisabeth Müller’s Countess offered a dignified yet spirited, beautifully sung Countess, equally at home in the serenity of her arias as in busy ensembles. Lea Desandre’s livewire Cherubino and Monica Bacelli’s impressive, take-no-prisoners Marcellina, and Ilanah Lobel-Torres’s unusually ‘present’ Barbarina, proved proper foils, at least on this folle journée, for the likes of Leonardo Cortelazzi’s similarly present Basilio and James Creswell’s sharply drawn, predatory Dr Bartolo. 

If Antonello Manacorda’s conducting did not plumb the depths, nor did it maintain an initially hard driven approach that might have tended unduly down either Rossinian or ‘period’ paths. To my ears, it would have done better to pay greater attention to harmony, but then who amongst our conductors really understands or at least conveys its role in Mozart, and Beethoven, now that Daniel Barenboim is semi-retired? There were no ‘period’ mannerisms, for which one must nowadays be grateful, but it ventured beyond the pleasant less often than one would have liked—and Mozart demands. Taken purely as orchestral playing, the Orchestre de l’Opéra national de Paris shone as so often it does in this repertoire. Few, if any, opera performances are perfect; how can they be when they stem from a society so imperfect? If the opera shows ‘la Révolution en action’, it is a revolution whose coming we, like so many before us, still await.

Philharmonia/Hrůša - Mahler, 13 November 2025

Royal Festival Hall

Symphony no.7

Philharmonia Orchestra

Jakub Hrúša  (conductor)

A little light relief here for Jakub Hrúša, in between Covent Garden performances of The Makropulos Case. That Mahler and Janáček should sound very different will hardly surprise, though the distance between Kalischt and Hukvaldy is not necessarily so great, even in compositional terms. There has long been something – have been some things, for let us not essentialise – special about the ears many Czech musicians bring to Mahler; one has only to think of Rafael Kubelík, let alone the Czech Philharmonic. Hrúša’s way with Mahler is different, indeed different from any I can recall hearing, yet full of interest and created with a collaborative determination that knows not only what it wants but how to get it. The Philharmonia must also, of course, be credited with that accomplishment. Most successful readings of the Seventh Symphony, at least in my experience, tend to rest on bringing coherence to what, rightly or wrongly, many find a tendency that pulls in the opposite direction. Highly contrasting examples would be Daniel Barenboim’s surprising – and surprisingly successful – treatment of the work in dark, post-Brahms fashion and Pierre Boulez’s more brazenly modernist, yet no less steely command of line, timbre on equal terms with rhythm and harmony. A reading that was merely incoherent would be little more than that. One that revelled in rather than attempted to solve its enigmas, perhaps with more than one might expect of Boulez’s musical hindsight, yet imbued with other varieties of its own, was what we heard here: crazier than Barenboim, arguably more so than Boulez too, and more theological to my mind’s ear than, say, the quite different house-of-horrors readings of Leonard Bernstein. 

The opening of the first movement already signalled something intriguingly different. Slow in tempo yet febrile, it drew one in, brass vibrato somewhat Slavic, and more generally dark in orchestral tone (definitely more Barenboim than Boulez—or Bernstein, for that matter). Here, it seemed was an extended fin-de-siècle orchestra experiencing twentieth-century hallucinations that, over the course of the symphony as a whole, would increasingly wrest control from a fast-vanishing past. Basic tempo firmly established, deviation, be it early flexibility or later abrupt change, registered in relation to that; much the same could be said for the whole symphony. The performance’s spirit compelled too: marionettes from the earlier ‘Rückert’ symphonies danced, yet abstracted, even automated, harbingers of a future that might not be desired, but could not be averted. The ‘world’ of a Mahler symphony – think of his celebrated exchange with Sibelius – has many mansions, historical, geographical, and otherwise. Unusually prominent at times, to my ears anyway, were premonitions not of the over-invoked Shostakovich, but of his more interesting compatriot, Prokofiev, lying in a future somewhere between The Fiery Angel and Cinderella. Wind tattoos functioned likewise, provoking if anything still greater unease. In more ‘traditional’ vein, vistas I might foolishly have imagined might no longer astonish me still did, the aural lens stretched a little or more than a little at times, testing yet never abandoning overall coherence, whether in rapt, near-suspended animation at the close of the development or something more furious in a recapitulation of depth and breadth. 

The first Nachtmusik’s opening horn calls have been delivered more flawlessly, but so what? The sense was there. (I mention this only because Beckmessers may otherwise assume I did not notice.) More to the point, they initiated a sardonic, Nietzschean serenade on the cusp of the nihilist and the diabolical, subjectively ambiguous and the more powerful for it. Lyrical cellos suggested a world all the more alienated as a result. Cowbells on- and offstage sounded a desiccated memory of their presence in the Sixth Symphony. Dances were swung, yet with knowledge of what was to come: a Weill future already, disturbingly present. The Second Symphony’s faithful were despatched to purgatory, or worse. Aufersteh’n? If you say so, but not only Klopstock was dead. The Scherzo seemed firmly rooted in that other place. It snarled in defiantly post-Nietzsche fashion, even as it (aptly) danced. Zarathustra’s realm, hell, purgatory, or somewhere else? Why choose? Except it did, the Devil’s lair increasingly apparent: no monolith, but all the more frightening for its variegation. Perhaps – shudder – this hell was our earth. There was to be heard a distinctly Schoenbergian rage, disciplined by remnants of Prokofiev’s motor-rhythms, particularly when one peered between the cracks. 

More strange bedfellows were encountered in the second Nachtmusik, Adagietto strings taking a walk on the wild side, joined by guitar, mandolin, and the rest, to pass the Eighth Symphony, even Pierrot, to the unmistakeable world of Schoenberg’s Serenade and contemporary Webern. An orchestra (in large part, or so it sounded) of soloists tended to parody, in a world that had nothing left to parody, that strong initial grounding of the symphony’s opening as crucial as ever. Music appeared to pose a theological conundrum Mahler’s St Anthony might have blanched at: one for the fish, perhaps. And so, to the finale, to ask further unanswered, unanswerable questions. It blared and blazed, sang and danced, tracing a path between old and new that transformed before our ears. It was not the last word, nor did it try to be; indeed, its modernity lay in its provisionality, exhausted and exhausting, yet exhilarating in a restored radicalism whose nods to Mozart and Wagner did anything but clarify. It ate itself as it laughed (or mocked). Nietzsche or nihilist? Again, why choose? Angels on acid or devils on ambrosia? Perhaps they were instead on horseback. The Wunderhorn St Martha may not be the cook after all.               

                               

The Makropulos Case, Royal Opera and Ballet, 10 November 2025

Royal Opera House

Emilia Marty – Ausrine Stundyte
Krista – Heather Engebretson
Albert Gregor – Sean Panikkar
Baron Jaroslav Prus – Johan Reuter
Dr Kolenatý – Henry Waddington
Vítek – Peter Hoare
Count Hauk-Šendorf – Alan Oke
Janek – Daniel Matoušek
Stage Door Woman – Susan Bickley
Security Guard – Jeremy White
Hotel Maid – Jingwen Cai

Katie Mitchell (director)
Vicki Mortimer (set designs)
Sussie Juhlin-Wallén (costumes)
James Farncombe (lighting)
Sasha Balmazi-Owen (video)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Jakub Hrůsá (conductor)

 

Image: The Royal Opera / Camilla Greenwell

If the Royal Opera and Ballet’s new Makropulos Case does indeed prove to be Katie Mitchell’s final opera production, we should think of it more as a culmination than a farewell. If the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk, the outlines of Mitchell’s operatic work – part, to be sure, of her broader theatrical work, but a distinctive part – may now seem clearer to us all. Rightly or wrongly, for I can lay no claim to oracular status on this or any other question, they certainly do to me following this superlative evening, dramatically and musically, in the theatre, a splendid addition to the company’s Janáček series? May we hope for a Mr Brouček, even a Šárka or an Osud? Hope dies last, as the ambiguous, even oracular, saying has it. 

And death lies at the heart of this work, as does life—as does their cyclical relationship both in Janáček’s work as a whole and this production, in turn both in its overt presentation and in its broader, metatheatrical, even symbolic frame. One might say the same of women, their role in society, and their role in opera, Mr Brouček’s Excursions the great exception, for even From the House of the Dead has one feel their absence. The Makropulos Case is centred, of course, around a great female singer, a great survivor, a woman seemingly infinitely blessed, but in reality, if not infinitely, then gravely cursed. She is literally the creation of men, in some ways figuratively too. I say ‘a woman’ and of course she is, but as such and as a human, she deserves to be named: Emilia Marty, Elena Makropulos, and the rest. (We may, if we wish, recall Kundry’s many names and incarnations. Wagner was not a feminist; to claim so would be anachronistic nonsense. But his works are not without feminist themes and, more to the point, opportunities—as well as themes and opportunities that are anything but. The same, of course, may be said of Janáček.) Mitchell takes a further step: this woman is queer, standing in no need of men, whatever the history with which she has been furnished (by them) may claim. She has fond memories; she has produced numerous ‘bastards’ with them, but now does not care for them (men or children). 

Now forty-plus = or so she claims and appears – EM seeks women on ‘dating’ apps. With a technological bent very much of our time, the opera begins, app and text message communications, courtesy of Sasha Balmazi-Owen, running parallel to, interacting with, and sometimes undercutting the work ‘itself’. Krista and Janek intend to rob her, the former (‘they/them’) ensnaring her prey 200 metres distant and securing an invitation to her hotel room. The proceeds, whose net worth Janek instantly checks online as Krista photographs them, include an eighteenth-century medallion and a rare, early twentieth-century playbill. Yet ultimately, Krista falls for EM, mesmerised as her male admirers, yet apparently feeling and sharing something deeper. Rather than absconding to Berlin with her (former) lover, she shoots him: shades of Lulu, perhaps, yet with the crucial distance that this is no blank canvas onto which male fantasies are projected. This is women in love, by women, for women.

Surtitles are contemporary English in tone, without becoming paraphrase. Additional communications fly across the ether: ‘Berlin or bust’, popular abbreviations, emojis, and so on. Like anything else, use of text messages – also here telephone calls, audio and video – can be a cliché, a gimmick, and too often is. Here, unlike in, say, Simon Stone’s tedious, extravagant, and tediously extravagant Cherubini Médée – if ever there were an opera crying out for the Mitchell touch… - or Kirill Serebrennikov’s silly Marriage of Figaro, it serves a useful dramatic purpose, both straightforwardly and more metatheatrically in its extension of live cinema to new realms in successful pursuit of Mitchell’s longstanding and, in this case, unapologetically queer subversion of the male gaze both generally and in specifically operatic guise. For when the diva comes at long last to die, she is not so much a creature of opera, but opera itself. Has the director killed the genre or let it die? More significantly, has it in its death, which may yet permit of rebirth though not artificial prolongation, at last been liberated of the male gaze. On an optimistic reading: yes, at least in part. The elixir is bequeathed to Krista as a gift of what appears to be love, but does it remain a poisoned chalice; can it be cleansed?

Janácek’s score naturally invites some degree of optimism, its increasingly rapt lyricism, orchestral motifs coalescing, combining, and expanding into something greater, brought home in wondrous, golden immediacy by Jakub Hrůsá at the helm of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. That Hrůsá is the real thing no one who has heard him will doubt, but this proved a significant achievement even by his standards, as intellectually as it was emotionally involving. The same must be said of Ausrine Stundyte’s all-encompassing assumption of the title role, rightly permitting of various readings whilst ever sure of its direction. No wonder the rest of her world lay in her thrall. All contributed something to the greater whole, showing what the world of opera can and should be. I shall note Sean Panikkar’s typically ardent, lyrical Albert Gregor, Peter Hoare’s sharply characterised Vitek, Heather Engebretson’s sparky Krista, and, in another tribute, conscious or otherwise, to the best of an opera company and its progress of time, Johan Reuter ‘moving up’ from, say, Orest and Birtwistle’s Theseus to Baron Prus, and Susan Bickley from numerous Covent Garden roles (and her ENO Dido with Mitchell) to the cameo of the Stage Door Woman. It was, though, a collaborative effort, as production, conductor, work, and any future for the genre demand.

From that ENO After Dido, Purcell’s jewel forming part of a greater theatre piece, through a Salzburg Al gran sole carico d’amore I imagine I might understand better now than I did in 2009, live cinema again offering a feminist corrective or at least enhancement to Luigi Nono’s project of telling European revolutionary experience from the standpoint of female revolutionaries,  the woman’s revenge of Written on Skin and queer love of Lessons in Love and Violence, the postdramatic feminism of The Blue Woman, and important reassessments such as her Aix Ariadne auf Naxos and Pelléas and Covent Garden Theodora, a path becomes traceable towards this Makropulos Case. Is it the end of the line? That should not really even be the question; it is certainly an important, musicotheatrically riveting contribution, one I am keen to see again, should I be able. 

Cathérine Clément notoriously described opera as the ‘undoing of women’. Perhaps, if one is extremely selective—and one treats it only in terms of libretti. Go back to Monteverdi’s Poppea or forward to Rebecca Saunders’s recent operatic debut and it seems anything but. Nevertheless, that book or at least its title remains, whether we like it or no, part of operatic discourse. Carolyn Abbate’s review said most, perhaps all, of what need be said about it. And here, as it must, that theory is realised in practice, without in any sense jettisoning necessary critique. Actually existing opera houses and their ways are, or can be, another thing. This is not in any sense intended to refer to the Royal Opera House in particular; indeed, its relatively recent, highly publicised appointment of an intimacy coordinator marked an important step forward in one respect. I know no details of the opera-world misogyny Mitchell has endured – her recent interview lies behind a Murdoch paywall – and I do not intend to speculate. What I can say is that operatic works, historical and contemporary, and performances offer greater scope for critique and, dare I say it, redemption than the day-to-day activities of any company will. This year’s greatest musical centenary, that of Pierre Boulez, reminds us of the necessary utopianism of his celebrated 1967 interview with Der Spiegel.

New German opera houses certainly look very modern—from the outside; on the inside, they have remained extremely old-fashioned. To a theatre in which mostly repertory pieces are performed one can only with the greatest difficulty bring a modern opera—it is unthinkable. The most expensive solution would be to blow the opera houses into the air. But do you not think that that might also be the most elegant solution? 

In turn, that echoes a Wagner’s diary entry from 1849.

8 May (Monday) Morning once again by roundabout route via barricades to Town Hall. At S. Anne Barricade guard shouts “Well, Mr Conductor, joy’s beautiful divine spark’s made a blaze.” (3rd perf. 9th Symphony at previous Palm Sunday concert; Opera House now burnt down. Strange feeling of comfort.

 

This latest death  will not destroy our opera houses and companies, nor even leave them peacefully to die, but should at least ask us whether that would be advisable. Is this, rather than opera as the undoing of women, then, women as the undoing and possible rebirth of opera? It might, considered in utopian fashion, constitute an act of operatic reform or revolution to be compared with the work composers such as Wagner, conductors such as Boulez, directors such as Stefan Herheim, and singers such as Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, noting ruefully and purposefully the gender balance of historical examples, whilst recalling Boulez’s own caution that, although Wagner’s Bayreuth project was in almost every respect right and necessary, it has not had the slightest effect on the day-to-day life of our benighted operatic culture. And yet, it has, for our revolutionary-reformers continue to offer a critique of patriarchy, of heteronormativity, and of capitalism many of us continue to heed. To do more than criticise, we must all play our part. The Royal Opera and Ballet has done so too, staging Janáček’s opera (incredibly) for the first time and supporting a new way forward. The Royal Opera and Ballet has done so too, staging Janáček’s opera (incredibly) for the first time and supporting, among many other things in its necessarily mixed economy, some seeds of a new way forward.