Eno

Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus (but if it’s given in English, why not The Bat? Does that somehow sound too unglamorous?) is not only the greatest operetta ever composed, as everyone agrees, but also, in my view, a great work, to be ranked with the finest comedies in any genre. That is, beneath its featherbrained hedonism there is a core of seriousness, conveyed as usual by Strauss in glittering music that never lets you forget that all good things come to an end, usually sooner than you expect. But that is only part of its claim to an exalted status that the term ‘operetta’ seems to deny. As in many great

Behind the Candelabra is Stephen Soderbergh’s film about Liberace, starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, and already you will have heard two things which, naturally, you will need me to confirm so you can move on with your life. These two things are: 1. It is fabulous. 2. The film was ultimately funded by the television channel HBO, as Hollywood declared it ‘too gay’. I will now deal with both: 1. Yes. It is fabulous. No other word for it, unless that word is ‘glorious’. 2. True and, if I had the time, I would go to Hollywood and knock their heads together. Saying this film is ‘too gay’ is

At the close of the first night of Wozzeck at the Coliseum there was a longer dead silence than I can remember after any operatic performance I have been to, and when applause began it sounded reluctant. Everyone was stunned by the intensity and involvingness of the preceding 100 minutes, the work having been performed straight through, no interval. Virtually every element in the production contributed to this shattering effect, and any shortcomings would be easily corrigible and with one exception trifling. Perhaps the first thing to say is that the conducting of Edward Gardner and the playing of the ENO orchestra were at least as fine as any that

Someone should write an opera about a once-great opera company, now in artistically suicidal decline. A few decades ago it had great productions and performances of the masterpieces of the repertoire, but it has been scared by successive governments warning about élitism, the need for attracting new, young, opera-hating audiences, and so on. So it has hired a succession of ‘directors’ (adopting the language of cinema), who have never seen an opera, to stage established works and mount new ones, making them look as much as possible like the eternally running musicals it eyes enviously. It makes sure to invite for first nights a large number of media people, who