Julian Anderson: Thebans (world premiere), English National Opera, 3 May 2014

Coliseum

Oedipus – Roland Wood

Creon – Peter Hoare

Tiresias – Matthew Best

Jocasta – Susan Bickley

Stranger from Corinth, Haemon – Anthony Gregory

Shepherd – Paul Sheehan

Messenger, Theseus – Christopher Ainslie

Antigone – Julia Sporsén

Polynices – Jonathan McGovern

Eteocles – Matt Casey

Pierre Audi (director)

Tom Pye (set designs)

Christof Hetzer (costumes)

Jean Kalman (lighting)

Lysander Ashton (video designs)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Dominic Peckham)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Edward Gardner (conductor)

There can be no doubting the ambition to this, Julian Anderson’s first opera, with a libretto ‘by Frank McGuinness after Sophocles’. Its three acts adapt not just one play from Sophocles’s Theban trilogy, but all three. Starting in the past – as the opening curtain informs us – the first act entitled ‘The Fall of Oedipus’, we move to the future, ‘Antigone’, before concluding with the present, ‘The Death of Oedipus’. Initially, I found myself sceptical about the reordering, wondering what lay behind it other than a desire to be different; however, when the third act came, I felt the sense – prior to reading these words from Anderson, in an eloquent programme note – that the act was ‘all about endings … the mysterious, timeless atmosphere of this sacred wood’ at Colonus lending ‘a special and quite different mood … which would be impossible to place anywhere but at the end’. There did indeed seem to be a finality arising from subject matter and treatment, perhaps even from Sophocles having written it last.

McGuinness’s libretto is in many respects highly skilful; it packs a great deal in, without necessarily seeming to do so, not least in sometimes lengthy passages of narrative. There is what we might consider to be real poetry in it, though sometimes there are clichéd phrases – ‘done and dusted’, for instance – which seem in context slightly to jar rather than carrying knowing weight. Perhaps, though, I simply misunderstood, and the task of writing words intended to be sung, whilst at the same time not knowing what the music will be, is not an easy one.  I was not entirely convinced by the suddenness of the ending, whether in terms of words or music. Antigone was seemingly cut off in mid flow, shortly after the strangely anti-climactic death of her father: that anti-climax more a product, I think, of the music’s tailing off than the libretto. It was, however, clearly intended as such, Anderson claiming that there ‘are no clear answers’ in Sophocles, McGuinness, or his own contribution. Perhaps, again, more would become apparent upon a second hearing. At any rate, the Lear-like quality to this scene came across with considerable power, not only in terms of Antigone’s faithful love, but also the haunting by death. I can imagine it being objected that this is as much drama 'about' drama as the thing itself, but in practice, the telescoping, the selection of particular points in time, and the enabling of those points to encompass more of the action, works well. In any case, the Theban plays are so much part of our collective consciousness, that we do not always have to start from the very beginning.

 

Anderson’s own contribution proved, for me at least, more variable. His writing is, it hardly need be said, highly accomplished, the composer’s virtuosic command of the orchestra never in doubt. The first act in particular meanders. Perhaps one might claim that to be the point; but whilst timings in the programme put it at the length of the second and third acts combined, it seemed, if anything, longer still. Although those latter acts are tauter, even there I found it difficult to discern an individual voice. It is certainly not a ‘difficult’ work; a great deal of the musical language is tonal in quality, not necessarily a problem, but is it perhaps a problem that much of it sounds as if it might have been written by a Stravinsky imitator not so very much less than a century ago? At any rate, the contrast, however unfair, with the blazing originality of Œdipus Rex, is not a little glaring. Maybe composers feel that the time for problematisation of opera is over; if so, on this evidence, it is not entirely clear that they are right to do so.

 

That said, there are interesting touches and, indeed, rather more than that. Microtonal sliding, for instance, disrupts or at least questions the otherwise stultifying metrical regularity – clearly a deliberate choice – in Creon’s Act II police state, as well as responding to the narrative we hear introduced from outside. Tiresias’s otherworldly strangeness registers not only in his gender-bending scenic portrayal, but also in the alterity of his tuning. Indeed, in some respects, his prophetic truth and its musical portrayal seem to haunt the third act all the more, when he is not even present on stage; I have no reason to think that such a comparison were intended, but I was put in mind of the overpowering presence of Wotan in Götterdämmerung. At any rate, Anderson’s portrayal of ‘everything – including Oedipus himself – gradually becoming part of nature and leaving civilisation altogether’ is impressively achieved. I had the sense that if the findings of the second and third acts had been read back into a revised version of the first, a tauter, more integrated, structure might well have emerged.

 

Edward Gardner seemed, insofar as it is possible to tell with a work one does not know, to conduct a splendidly authoritative performance, rhythms razor-sharp, layerings of colour ever-discernible. The ENO Orchestra deserves the strongest of plaudits in that respect too. Similarly the chorus, which plays an important role throughout, whether seen, as in the first two acts, or unseen, as in the third, its ambiguous offstage identity – does, for instance, Oedipus imagine the gods, or are they all-too-divine? – a clear dramatic advantage. Dominic Peckham’s choral training clearly paid off as well as Pierre Audi’s onstage blocking; there was a true sense of identity and credibility, both corporate and, especially in the first act, individual.

 

Audi’s staging does its job very well. There is a proper sense of place to each of the three acts, even if the jackbooted totalitarianism of Creon’s state arguably errs on the side of predictability. (Perhaps, though, that is the fault of the work as much as the staging.) Lighting from Jean Kalman sets off the relatively simple yet powerful work of the design team (Tom Pye’s sets and Christof Hetzer’s costumes) to excellent effect. Composer and librettist could hardly have asked for more for a premiere.

 

The cast acquitted itself with honour too. Despite having fallen victim to a throat infection, Roland Wood offered a tirelessly committed performance as Oedipus, his acquisition of wisdom genuinely affecting. Peter Hoare’s Creon was properly nasty, an excellent foil for the humanity of Julia Sporsén’s Antigone. (Here I could not help but think of Wagner’s analysis of the myth in Oper und Drama, Creon’s state falling victim to the anarchistic love-curse of this progenitor of Brünnhilde.) Susan Bickley’s Jocasta was as well sung and acted as expected, leaving one wishing that she had more to do. Christopher Ainslie, having previously appeared as the Messenger, truly came into his own as the third act Theseus, the purity of his counter-tenor voice as startling in its liminality as his bronzed appearance, the latter a clever stroke indeed from the production team. Matthew Best startled in quite very different way as a deep-voiced transsexual Tiresias: insistent, impatient, and defiantly ‘different’.

 

ENO, then, should be congratulated upon its efforts. With the best will in the world, it would be difficult to speak of this opera in the same breath as works by Benjamin or Birtwistle. By the same token, when one recalls in horror the latest offerings from Judith Weir and Mark-Anthony Turnage – whatever happened to the composer of the visceral Greek? – the contrast is equally apparent. A new work requires excellence in staging and performance; that it certainly received.  
 

Don Giovanni, English National Opera, 17 October 2012

The Coliseum

Don Giovanni – Iain Paterson
Leporello – Darren Jeffery
Donna Anna – Katherine Broderick
Don Ottavio – Ben Johnson
Donna Elvira – Sarah Redgwick
Commendatore – Matthew Best
Zerlina – Sarah Tynan
Masetto – John Molloy

Rufus Norris (director)
Ian MacNeil (set designs)
Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)
Paul Andreson (lighting)
Jonathan Lunn (movement)
Finn Ross (projections)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Fitzpatrick)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Edward Gardner (conductor)

Zerlina (Sarah Tynan), Don Giovanni (Iain Paterson), Donna Elvira (Sarah Redgwick)
Images: Richard Hubert Smith

 

Some especially puerile, needlessly irritating, marketing, involving pictures of condom packets – oddly chosen in so many ways, since few people find contraceptives especially erotic, and Don Giovanni would seem an unlikely candidate to have employed  them – had attended the run-up to this revival of Rufus Norris’s production of Don Giovanni. In 2010, it registered as the worst staging I had ever seen: a fiercely contested category, when one considers that it includes Francesca Zambello’s mindless farrago across Covent Garden at the Royal Opera – now, may the Commendatore be thanked, consigned to the flames of Hell. (Kasper Holten, Director of Opera, is said to have insisted, having viewed it in horror, that the sets be destroyed, lest it never return.) There were grounds for the odd glimmer of hope; Norris was said to have revised the production in the face of its well-nigh universal mauling from critics and other audience members alike. Yet the marketing did little to allay one’s fears, especially when reading the bizarre description on ENO’s website of a ‘riveting romp [that] follows the last twenty-four hours in the life of the legendary Lothario’. Something really ought to be done about whomever is involved in publicising productions; for, irrespective of the quality of what we see on stage, they  more often than not end up sounding merely ludicrous: in this case, more Carry On Seville than one of the greatest musical dramas in the repertory. Even if one were willing thus to disparage Da Ponte – and I am certainly not – does Mozart’s re-telling of the Fall in any sense characterised by the phrase ‘riveting romp’?

How, then, had Norris’s revisions turned out? Early on, I felt there was a degree of improvement. The weird obsession with electricity – certainly not of the musical variety – had gone, but not to be replaced by anything else. Certain but only certain of the most bizarre impositions had gone, or been weeded out, yet not always thoroughly enough. For instance, there was a strange remnant of the already strange moment when, towards the end of the Act Two sextet, people began to strip off, when Don Ottavio – an ‘uptight fiancé’, according to the company website – carefully removed his shoes and socks. No one reacted, and a few minutes later – I think, during Donna Anna’a ‘Non mi dir’ – he put them back on again. Otherwise, the hideous sets and other designs remain as they were, though one might claim a degree of contemporary ‘relevance’ in that Don Giovanni’s dated ‘leisure wear’ now brings with it unfortunate resonances of the late Jimmy Savile. Alas, nothing is made of the similarity. The flat designed as if by a teenage girl, full of hearts and pink balloons, remains; as does the building that resembles a community centre. Leporello still appears to be a tramp. There are no discernible attempts to reflect Da Ponte’s, let alone Mozart’s, careful societal distinctions and there is no sign whatsoever that anyone has understood that Don Giovanni is a religious drama or it is nothing. Norris has clearly opted for ‘nothing’.

 

There is, believe it or not, a villain perhaps more pernicious still. Jeremy Sams’s dreadful, attention-seeking English translation does its best to live up to the ‘riveting romp’ description. A few, very loud, members of the audience did their best to disrupt what little ‘action’ there was by laughing uproariously after every single line: the very instance of a rhyme is intrinsically hilarious to some, it would seem. A catalogue of Sams’s sins – sin has gone by the board in the drama itself – would take far longer than Leporello’s aria. But I no more understand why the countries in that aria should be transformed into months – ‘ma in Ispagna’ becomes ‘March and April’ – than I do why Zerlina was singing about owning a pharmacy in ‘Vedrai carino,’ or whatever it became in this ‘version’. It is barely a translation, but nor is it any sense a reimagination along the brilliant lines of the recent gay Don Giovanni at Heaven; it merely caters towards those with no more elevated thoughts than Zerlina going down on her knees, about which we are informed time and time again, lest anyone should have missed such ‘humour’. The lack of respect accorded to Da Ponte borders upon the sickening.

Edward Gardner led a watered-down Harnoncourt-style performance. At first it might even have seemed exciting, but it soon became wearing, mistaking the aggressively loud for the dramatically potent. Where was the repose, let alone the well-nigh unbearable beauty, in Mozart’s score? A peculiar ‘version’ was employed, in that Elvira retained both her arias, whereas Ottavio only had his in the first act. On stage, Prague remains preferable every time, despite the painful musical losses its adoption entails; sadly, few conductors seem to bother.

Donna Anna (Katherine Broderick), Zerlina, Leporello (Darren Jeffery),
Masetto (John Molloy), Don Ottavio (Ben Johnson)

Iain Paterson remains bizarrely miscast in the title role, entirely bereft of charisma. Darren Jeffery’s Leporello was bluff and dull in tone. (How one longed for Erwin Schrott – in either role, or both!) Katherine Broderick was too often shrill and squally as Donna Anna, and her stage presence was less then convincing, shuffling on and off, without so much as a hint of seria imperiousness. Her ‘uptight fiancé’ was sung well enough, by Ben Johnson, though to my ears, his instrument is too much of an ‘English tenor’ to sound at home in Mozart.  Sarah Redgwick’s Elvira was probably the best of the bunch, perhaps alongside Matthew Best’s Commendatore, but anyone would have struggled in this production, with these words. Elvira more or less managed to seem a credible character, thanks to Redgwick’s impressive acting skills, quite an achievement in the circumstances. Sarah Tynan made little impression either way as Zerlina, though she had far more of a voice than the dry-, even feeble-toned Masetto of John Molloy: surely another instance of miscasting.

ENO had a viscerally exciting production, genuinely daring, almost worthy of Giovanni’s kinetic energy. It seems quite incomprehensible why anyone should have elected to ditch the coke-fuelled orgiastic extravagance of Calixto Bieito – now there is a properly Catholic sensibility – for Rufus Norris. whose lukewarm response at the curtain calls was more genuinely amusing than anything we had seen or heard on stage. Maybe the contraceptive imagery was judicious after all.

Tristan und Isolde, Welsh National Opera, 2 June 2012

Millennium Centre, Cardiff

Tristan – Ben Heppner

King Marke – Matthew Best

Isolde – Ann Petersen

Kurwenal – Phillip Joll

Melot – Simon Thorpe

Brangäne – Susan Bickley

Shepherd – Simon Crosby Buttle

Yannis Kokkos (director, designs)

Peter Watson (revival director)

Chorus of Welsh National Opera

Orchestra of Welsh National Opera

Lothar Koenigs (conductor)

Wagner famously declared to Mathilde Wesendonk that only mediocre performances of Tristan could save him, the power of the work being such that it would otherwise be banned. ‘Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, – I cannot imagine it otherwise.’ Alas, he – and we – must endure the opposite problem; when, at least in the theatre, do we ever have the chance to find out. It is difficult enough to find an orchestra with the requisite body of sound, let alone a conductor with the skill to communicate the melos of Wagner’s miraculous, treacherous score. Daniel Barenboim comes close, but the only conductors I have heard live truly to fulfil that heroic task have been Bernard Haitink and Semyon Bychkov. As ever, one longs for Furtwängler. I am delighted to report that Lothar Koenigs did a more than reasonable job, a distinct improvement upon his Proms Meistersinger. Moreover, the orchestra sounded far better here than it had done in the vast expanses of the Royal Albert Hall. I should be dishonest if I said there were no occasions on which the lack of a greater body of strings did not register, even on occasion painfully so, but far more often, I was taken aback at the degree of success with which the strings punched above their weight. The WNO woodwind section often excelled itself, clearly delighting in some interesting highlighting of lines often overlooked. (Barenboim often does something similar, in a nod to his experience with the orchestral sonorities of French music.)

To return to Koenigs, there was little here that seemed arbitrary, and if Wagner’s vast architectonic forms did not always register as they do in the finest hands, sections thereof possessed conviction, shape, and direction. Particularly impressive were the more menacing sections, for instance the violence one hears upon the arrival of Marke and Melot at Kareol, and Kurwenal’s response. Sadly, much of the good work was undone by the near-criminal cuts imposed upon the score. If I remember correctly, that in Act Two was not the so-called ‘traditional’ excision, but it was no less disorienting, the very heart of Wagner’s drama, verbal as well as musical, treated with disdain. (And yes, I am well aware that, conductors I revere, Haitink included, have acted similarly, though not always so.) The cut in Tristan’s monologue was worse still; indeed, its shock was so disorienting that I could not tell you precisely what was done; tonally, as well as verbally, it made no sense whatsoever. Doubtless the cuts were made for vocal rather than interpretative reasons, but they are no more excusable for that, which brings me to my next point.  

For, if conductors almost always fall short, their part almost seems the easiest to fulfil. What of the cast, and especially what of Tristan? I have never heard a singer up to its demands, at least not in the theatre. We all know what happened to Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld – or rather, we all tend to know the legend. At any rate, the days of a Windgassen, let alone a Suthaus, let alone a Melchior, seem to be gone forever. That said, some Tristans fare better than others. I had been heartened by reports from the first night, suggesting that Ben Heppner’s voice had rallied. (His 2009 appearance at Covent Garden was not a happy experience.) For the first act, the least challenging for the part, that just about seemed to be the case. One might even have made a claim for ruggedness as part of the character. And, to be fair, there were moments during the agonies of the third act monologue in which Heppner’s struggles – not just in terms of his vocal difficulties – proved moving, if perhaps more appropriate to Peter Grimes than to Tristan. Heppner really does not do erotic. I defy anyone, however, not to have found painful in the worst sense the swathes of the score in which there were not so much intonational problems as an inability to sing, apparently even to hear, the correct notes at all. There were certainly plenty of occasions when he was more than a tone out of kilter with the score. Moreover, the bareness in many registers of the voice, even when in tune, now sadly seems quite beyond repair.

That said, if one inevitably harks back to Nilsson, Flagstad, et al., Ann Petersen’s Isolde was more than creditable. There is neither the Lieder-singer’s detail that Nina Stemme brings to the role, nor the searing intensity of the unforgettable Waltraud Meier, but this young pretender is far from negligible. She sang intelligently, and for the most part with good command of line, though her tuning, especially during the second act duet, was not always so good as it might have been. Susan Bickley’s Brangäne was again an intelligent portrayal, alert to musical and verbal requirements, though oddly, the interjections from her second-act watch proved rather on the tremulous side. Phillip Joll’s Kurwenal was at best gruff, more often, I am afraid to say, merely crude. I almost always find myself saying that King Markes rarely disappoint; yet, if it would be exaggerated to say that Matthew Best’s assumption disappointed, his lament often lacked focus.

If, somehow, one had succeeded with respect to conductor, orchestra, and soloists, whatever, then, would one need to do successfully to stage the work? It needs staging; of that I have no doubt. And yet, it seems to need so little. Abstraction has in my experience always worked best, though one should not be prescriptive about it. Herbert Wernicke’s properly Schopenhauerian understanding impressed at Covent Garden under Haitink, only to be replaced by some typical reductionism from the dread Christof Loy. (At best, one can simply express relief that Loy’s effort was not quite so appalling as his Salzburg Frau ohne Schatten.) There are doubtless some who will applaud Yannis Kokkos’s apparent lack of any idea concerning the work, beyond presenting a diagonal onstage. It is only, however, if one compares this production to the likes of Loy’s that one could feel anything approaching relief. By all means do very little, but do not fetishise the stage directions, the realm of the day in those most nocturnal, metaphysical of dramas. I could not care less whether one sees a ship or not during the first act, though there is no harm in doing so. However, when, at the end, one is faced with sailors upon the masts, to no apparent purpose, one at best thinks the stance more appropriate to townsfolk rioting in Nuremberg, and in reality cannot help to be irritated by the naïveté of it all. Likewise the appearance of soldiers with Marke and Melot; they might have contributed something dramatically, I suppose, but on this occasion they certainly did not. There was no threat, merely distraction. The production has doubtless served its purpose after a fashion, but should surely now be replaced, though, given the potential horrors of a replacement, one can well understand the trepidation that might be felt in going ahead.

Don Giovanni, English National Opera, 6 November 2010

The Coliseum

(sung in English)

(Images: Donald Cooper)

Don Giovanni – Iain Paterson
Commendatore – Matthew Best
Donna Anna – Katherine Broderick
Don Ottavio – Robert Murray
Donna Elvira – Sarah Redgwick
Leporello – Brindley Sherratt
Masetto – John Molloy
Zerlina – Sarah Tynan

Rufus Norris (director)
Ian McNeil (set designs)
Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)
Mimi Jordan Sherin (lighting)
Jonathan Lunn (movement)
Finn Ross (projections)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Merry)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Kirill Karabits (conductor)


I was unsure whether things could get much worse for Don Giovanni, following the Deutsche Oper’s new production from Roland Schwab. They could and they did. Rufus Norris’s debut as an opera director lacks even the occasional glimpses of coherence vouchsafed in Berlin. The setting seems to vary, or is it just unclear? We seem in general to be somewhere mid-twentieth-century: perhaps the 1950s, I thought, though it did not really seem to matter. A vulgar flat, apparently done up by a teenage girl – full of hearts and pink balloons – sometimes does service as a setting; sometimes there is a wall; and at one point it appears that the action has shifted to a community centre. Nicky Gillibrand’s costumes are as mixed as Ian McNeil’s sets, and often simply hideous. Leporello appears to be a tramp, though I could not work out how this might fit with anything or anyone else.

There is no sense of danger, nor indeed any sense of who these people might be and why we should show any interest in them. I wondered whether the metallic semi-circle that often hovered in the air might be a reference to a circle of the Inferno. Perhaps it was, but when it came to the Stone Guest Scene, it did not seem to act as such; instead, Don Giovanni touched it and appeared to be electrocuted. (There were occasional 'electrical' sounds throughout, to uncertain purpose.) Moreover, whereas everything previously appeared to be presented – it was almost impossible to be sure – as something bordering on desperately unfunny farce, that all suddenly disappeared during the Stone Guest Scene itself, when some orange-clad monk-like figures arrived on stage. It was a challenge – and a challenge that did not seem worth the effort –to connect what we saw on stage with the libretto, let alone Mozart’s music. I never thought I should find myself saying this, but I actually preferred Francesca Zambello’s vacuous Royal Opera offering. What a pity, then, when ENO had a truly extraordinary production on its books from Calixto Bieito, a production that scintillatingly grappled with the prospect of a life and a society on the edge of the most terrifying abyss. This seemed to cross the worst of Zambello with the sub-farcical reductionism of Barrie Kosky’s dreadful Marriage of Figaro for the Komische Oper, Berlin. To add insult to injury, a blinding blue light, reflected – accidentally, I assume, though surely this ought to have been checked – from a stage mirror made sitting through part of the first-act finale a physical ordeal. Various patrons, when able to distract themselves from heavy-duty coughing, were compelled to hold their programmes over their faces. In the circumstances, perhaps that was not so great an ordeal.

Musically, there was more to enjoy. Kirill Karabits conducted a generally well-mannered performance, rarely exciting but with an attention to musical values sadly lacking in the stage direction. Phrasing was carefully handled; tempi were mostly well chosen and notably lacking in weird variation or other would-be iconoclasm. The ENO Orchestra played beautifully, especially its woodwind, though it could often sound a little under-powered: a large space such as this really needs more strings. In any case, this is a vigorous score, indeed a dæmonic one; beauty is necessary but not sufficient. The Stone Guest Scene, however, and its presentiment at the beginning of the Overture, were taken faster than I have ever heard: an eccentric and unwelcome contrast, even allowing for the fashionable nature of an alla breve reading.

Unfortunately, Iain Paterson proved wholly lacking in charisma in the title role. Granted, the production did him no favours, but even so, there was not the slightest sense of menace or allure in his reading. He seemed utterly miscast. One does not have to be Christopher Maltman, let alone the stupendous Erwin Schrott, though it certainly helps, but one needs to suggest and rather more than suggest what the attraction might be. Likewise, Brindley Sherratt’s Leporello was hamstrung by the production, yet his delivery – not least the all-purpose ‘regional’ pronunciation – was often coarse and his general assumption of the role unconvincing. John Molloy’s Masetto too often sacrificed pitch to rhythm, most glaringly when he first appeared on stage. Some may also have found his 'Irish' – or was it West Country, for it seemed to vary?  – delivery irritating and unnecessary.

The rest of the cast was pretty good, however. Sarah Redgwick was a late substitute for the ailing Rebecca Evans. Save for a little trouble with coloratura in ‘Mi tradì’, one would never have known. She alternated between pride and vulnerability, convinced on stage insofar as the production would permit her, and presented a properly Mozartian vocal line. Katherine Broderick’s Donna Anna evinced all of those virtues and more: an outstanding performance, which made me long to hear her in Italian. The accuracy and warmth of her second-act aria put a recent Salzburg Festival incarnation to shame, even if focus could sometimes wander. Sarah Tynan's Zerlina was finely sung and sexy too. Robert Murray was a sincere Ottavio; the role is thankless, but his delivery did not lack beauty of tone. Matthew Best was a powerful, sonorous Commendatore; again, if only he had been afforded a different setting…

If, however, I were given to violent thoughts when it came to the production, they became positively – negatively? – terroristic when enduring Jeremy Sams’s translation. I do not think I have previously encountered a translation that so wilfully draws attention to itself and away both from libretto and score. At least bad, it is full of jarring colloquialisms and forced, cringe-worthy rhymes, with occasional, bizarre reversions to something more literal. (Perhaps they were intended to be ‘meaningful’, but it was difficult to discern any pattern.) Much, however, was wholesale reinvention. Leporello’s Catalogue Aria lost any indication of geography, let alone the correct numbers. Italy, France, and Spain were all gone, replaced by months of the year. Why? Was it solely to annoy? Some of us happen to consider Lorenzo Da Ponte a more than able librettist; might he not perhaps be accorded a little more respect than that? Somewhere the word ‘spreadsheet’ appeared too, which elicited widespread hilarity amongst a particularly noisy audience. (It was difficult for someone to walk on stage, however nonchalantly, without provoking hysterical guffaws from some.) At another point – I forget when, but am pretty sure it was somewhere during the first act – a ‘jacuzzi’ appeared in the text, the sole apparent reason being to enable another ‘hilarious’ rhyme, with ‘floozy’. Perhaps worst of all, and once again with no discernible justification, the plot was changed, so that instead of having encountered one of Leporello’s sweethearts, he had flirted with his manservant’s sister instead. These are but a few examples. Da Ponte deserved much better.

ENO, please may we have Bieito’s Don Giovanni back? It may be flawed, but it is uncompromising in its vision and provides the opportunity for serious musical drama.