Addicted to myth

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. Birtwistle’s work has something in common with Michael Tippett’s, in that both are attracted or addicted to myth, and therefore unafraid of creating works of immense pretensions, which sometimes come off and sometimes don’t. Tippett was his own librettist, a largely bad idea since there was no check on his intellectual ambitions, while Birtwistle has various librettists, whose work can lead to indigestible concoctions, as The Mask of Orpheus showed, or to great works of the order of Gawain and now this.