Jonas Kaufmann’s illness, a muddled production – nothing can stop Bavarian State Opera’s La forza del destino

Rather than brave the boos and the first reprise of Frank Castorf’s half-hearted Ring at Bayreuth, I decided to pay a visit to Munich and catch the last two days of its annual opera festival. Less of a festival, as one usually understands the term, than a ramping-up of activity in the final month or so of its regular season, it mixes new stagings with starrily cast revivals. I caught one of each: a new production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, with Christian Gerhaher in the title role, and a revival of La forza del destino that was rendered a little less starry by the last-minute illness of Jonas Kaufmann — that’s destino for you, I suppose.

There was a touch of Bayreuth nevertheless with L’Orfeo, which was performed away from the Staatsoper’s main house, the Nationaltheater, in the Prinzregententheater, a 1,000-seat Jugendstil space modelled on Wagner’s Festspielhaus. David Bösch’s production located the action in a dreamy, trippy hippie commune in the 1970s.