There has been a lot of tut-tutting about the Royal Opera being ‘bought’ by Lorin Maazel for him to put on his first opera, 1984. I don’t really see why, considering the number of foolish or fairly disgraceful things that it gets up to there anyway. Admittedly, it would be nice for someone visiting London for 25 days to have the chance of seeing another opera there, but that’s just the way it organises its schedule now. And so far as the work itself goes, though it is open to criticism on almost every relevant count, at least it makes for a much less boring evening than Sophie’s Choice did, and in fact than most new operas that I have seen in recent years — not that the Royal Opera specialises in mounting them on its main stage.
What is perhaps more bewildering is that Maazel could have persuaded himself that what he wrote was worth staging.
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