Torment of languor

It’s easy to see the way opera Inszenierung is going. We are in for a spate of US-located productions, just as we emerge from 19th-century industrial locations and nondescript car parks. Hollywood, Las Vegas, the prairies, Texas oilfields and the omnipresence of TV, something we are hardly likely to forget, are where Poppea, Giulio Cesare, Die Zauberflöte, Norma, all of Verdi and Wagner, Peter Grimes will find themselves next. Within a week two such disparate pieces as Candide and The Rake’s Progress have received broadly similar treatment, the locations dictating, to a large extent, the kind of characters and the range of their motivations. Absurd in Candide, this was wholly undermining of Rake, if it hadn’t already been a failure on musical grounds. It’s an opera with one of the most celebrated and overrated libretti, which naturally, being mainly written by Auden, contains many a memorable phrase, but is arch, badly constructed dramatically, and gives us a set of characters in whom there is no reason to feel any interest until very late in the day.