Fatal flaw | 24 March 2012

Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune, whose UK première was at the Royal Opera last week, has received the severest critical panning I can recall for any new opera. It is no masterpiece, but I wonder why it has been rounded on when so many new — not to mention old — pieces with no more going for them, so far as I can tell, get greeted warmly or at least tepidly. Admittedly, it takes an ambitious subject — Fate — and treats it in a largely unpretentious way. But Verdi’s La Forza del Destino takes the same subject and treats it in an utterly preposterous way, and has some dreadful passages of music, yet has survived for a century and a half. Weir may have been unwise to write her own libretto, with its mixture of homeliness and the portentous, but there are plenty worse that opera-goers take in their stride.