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. The man who has conducted, according to the programme, more than 5,000 opera and concert performances in the last half century must surely be partially aware of the quality of his composition. As usual with conductor’s music, his is eclectic, derivative and utterly without individuality. There’s a fair amount of Broadway in it, above all in the nightmarishly embarrassing love duet — ‘What happens in our hearts/ Is a night with one star/ What happens in our hearts/ Is the light that we are.’ There are also doses of Richard Strauss, Berg and Korngold, among many others. There’s a lot of spoken dialogue, and it’s unclear why it gives way to singing when it does, or vice versa. Nothing remains of the music in one’s head after the show, except that much of it is very loud.
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