That Force of Destiny isn’t a great evening is the fault of Verdi not ENO

The Force of Destiny, ENO’s latest offering to its ‘stakeholders’, as its audiences are now called thanks to Cressida Pollock, the new CEO, is perhaps Verdi’s most interesting failure. It’s an opera with too much fine, even magnificent, music to be neglected, but it doesn’t add up to a satisfactory experience. Even epics, which Force is routinely categorised as, have their limits of accommodation. Henry James described War and Peace as ‘a loose, baggy monster’, but what would he have called Force if he had had the least interest in opera or music? There are times when we are longing for the central story of vengeance and fate to get a move on. The inserted episodes of low life are mainly of inferior quality; I’m thinking especially of Preziosilla, a gypsy but at ENO ‘a soldier’s widow’. Fra Melitone, the grouchy monk who loathes doing charity work, is musically interesting but dramatically null.