‘Forget Downton Abbey!’ exhorts David Pountney in the programme for Figaro Forever, Welsh National Opera’s season of Beaumarchais operas, The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro and Elena Langer’s Figaro Gets a Divorce. ‘A televisual age in which the vast narrative panorama of a “series” strung out across many episodes seems to capture people’s imaginations is perhaps exactly the right moment to follow the fortunes of the Count and Rosina, their servant Figaro and his fiancée, Susanna,’ he continues.
What WNO’s artistic director means is the opposite of what he says. The reader is in fact being asked to remember Downton and make an improbable connection between the unpredictable business of going out to three live operas, including one world première, and the passive pursuit of watching television at home on the sofa with a cup of cocoa, a plate of biscuits and a smartphone for live-tweeting the worst lines.
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