Terry Gilliam turns to eye-watering excess for his staging of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini

Operas about artists are not rare. However — perhaps for obvious reasons — those artists tend to be musicians, singers, or at least performers, able to persuade and cajole both us in the audience and the other characters on stage through their eloquence. Berlioz, in his first opera, presents the renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, in an episode loosely adapted from his autobiography. But the final casting and unveiling of his new statue of Perseus, against all the odds, provides a climax that music (let alone stagecraft) seems fundamentally ill equipped to portray.

The road to that climax is also paved with numerous distractions for both us and Cellini, the most significant being an amorous subplot invented by Berlioz and his librettists as a concession to the piece’s opéra comique origins. It was later adjusted for the more ‘serious’ Paris Opéra, where it flopped magnificently. It has remained a rarity ever since: ENO’s is London’s first professional staging for four decades.