Culture

Should a secret pleasure ever be shared? Spoiler alert: Susanna’s secret, unknown to her husband Gil, is that she smokes. And when, in his opera Il segreto di Susanna, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari finally gets her alone with her longed-for cigarette, he makes it feel like nothing in heaven or earth could top the sensuous bliss of

Think back to when you were 12, and the sensation of re-opening your favourite book. (This is The Spectator; I’m assuming you were all bookish 12-year-olds.) The Silver Chair, perhaps, or The Phoenix and the Carpet — some fantastic alternative world, anyway, filled with characters who felt like old friends. The lumbering iron giants, powered

Think of the children in opera. Not knowing sopranos and mezzos, pigtailed and pinafored or tightly trousered-up to look child-like, but actual children. There are Mozart’s Three Boys, Menotti’s Amahl, possibly Debussy’s Yniold and Handel’s Oberto and, if you stretch a point, Marie’s little son in Wozzeck. But that’s about it. Until, that is, you

We’ve cried wolf with Handel. Ever since the modern trend began for staging the composer’s oratorios we’ve hailed each one in turn as the composer’s ‘most dramatic’. We’ve said it of Theodora, Saul, perhaps loudest (and most persuasively) of Jephtha. The trouble is that now, nearly 40 years since we last saw Belshazzar on an

The tears of a clown have often fallen on fertile operatic ground. Think of Rigoletto and I Pagliacci; or The Yeomen of the Guard, where mock-Tudor merriment turns to ash in the mouth of the jester Jack Point. But what if the composer himself is the buffoon? Jacques Offenbach was the court jester of France’s

So it’s the start of the summer opera season at Wormsley and we’re sitting there in evening dress in the middle of the Getty estate, looking at a beautifully detailed replica of a rundown English village hall. It’s superbly done: the canvas chairs and austerity-drab paintwork in Paul Curran’s new production of The Bartered Bride

It was bucketing it down in Venice, yet the beach was heaving. Families, lovebirds, warring kids, a yappy mutt, all strewn across a sandy expanse, basking on beach towels. Balls were bounced, crosswords filled, timelines scrolled. Out of this idleness, songs would bubble up, light billowy airs — speaking now to suncream mundanities, now to

Is it possible to write a feminist opera about Jack the Ripper? Composer Iain Bell thinks it is, and his Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel tries very, very hard to prove it. But while the result is respectful, topical and agonisingly, paralysingly sincere, it’s also a sheep in wolf’s clothing. You can’t have

To stage Verdi’s Il Trovatore, they say, is easy: you just need the four greatest singers in the world. The Royal Opera has applied this principle to La forza del destino. Jonas Kaufmann sings Alvaro, Anna Netrebko is his beloved Leonora, and Ludovic Tézier her brother Carlo, with the mighty Ferruccio Furlanetto completing the set

You can see Graham Vick’s work at La Scala or the New York Met. But if you want to be directed by him, you need to go to Birmingham. The Tower Ballroom is a sticky-floored former nightspot out by Edgbaston Reservoir, artfully trashed by Block9, the people behind Banksy’s Dismaland. You crunch across the tarmac,

Operas are like buses. Both are filled with pensioners and take ages to get anywhere, but more importantly they always seem to arrive en masse. You wait ages for a Magic Flute, then five come along at once. Opera North started us off in January, Welsh National Opera and English National Opera are currently following

Janacek’s upsetting opera Katya Kabanova, which hasn’t been seen in the UK for some time, turned up in two different productions over the weekend, with a third to follow in Scotland. The Opera North production by Tim Albery dates from 2007, when it was conducted by Richard Farnes with the clarity and passion which characterises

Spoiler alert: it’s all a dream. At least, I think that’s what we’re meant to take away from the business with which director James Brining accompanies the overture to Mozart’s The Magic Flute. A little girl in ochre pyjamas is trying to sleep while in an adjacent room braying, guffawing adults sit down to a

It’s December, and while musical theatre is busy celebrating ‘warm woollen mittens’, opera, as usual, is far more interested in the tiny frozen hands inside them. Because nothing says Christmas quite like consumption, and I’m not talking turkey and mince pies. London’s opera companies are serving up a heaped sleighful of heartbreak this year. English

The People are angry. In fact, they’re bloody furious. As the lights flash up on David Pountney’s production of Prokofiev’s War & Peace, the entire cast confronts the audience: grim, braced, defiant. And before you’ve had time to wonder if this sort of thing is just the long-term legacy of Les Misérables, or whether opera

How do you solve a problem like Lucia? Murder, madness, abuse, possibly even incest, all set to a soundtrack of rollicking, rum-ti-tum tunes. Add to that a Scottish setting (nothing sabotages dramatic seriousness quite like a kilt, just ask Mel Gibson) and you have Gilbert & Sullivan in an Italian accent, Ruddigore with a cigarette

Wolverhampton; Workington; Blackburn; Sheffield; Lancaster; Hackney. Every year English Touring Opera does what our national opera company doesn’t: packs up its props and takes to the road, bringing opera to the bits of the UK other companies don’t even think about reaching. And not just Traviatas and Toscas either, but properly interesting, often unusual, repertoire.

Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess springs to life fully formed, and pulls you in before a word has been sung. A whirlwind flourish; the hectic bustle of violins and xylophone, and then a quick fade into an image of a woman cradling a child and ‘Summertime’, the very first number we hear sung. The aria’s fame

‘On Brünnhilde’s rock I drew the breath that called your name; so swift was my journey here.’ It’s Act Two of Götterdämmerung. Siegfried, entoiled in evil beyond his comprehension, has unwittingly committed the betrayal that will tip the whole vast drama into its final collapse, and at this point Covent Garden’s Ring cycle really does

Yes, Oscar Wilde never wrote it. No, Strauss didn’t intend it. In fact, the composer famously demanded the Dance of the Seven Veils be ‘thoroughly decent, as if it were being done on a prayer mat’. But that doesn’t stop this striptease and musical money shot being the look-but-don’t-touchstone of any Salome. A blonde, blank-faced

At the end of Act Two of Tosca there are some 30 bars of orchestral music — accompaniment to a very specific set of stage directions. During this time Tosca takes two candles and places them on either side of the dead Scarpia’s head. She then removes a crucifix from the wall and lays it

‘Outside this house the world has changed. Life is swifter than before; there is no time for idle gestures.’ Anatol, in Samuel Barber’s opera Vanessa, doesn’t pretend to be a romantic hero. The son of Vanessa’s old flame, he’s arrived by night at the remote mansion where she’s waited for 20 years with her elderly

‘They’ve dined well, they’ve drunk their fill, their brains are dull and slow. They’ll sit snoozing in the dark until they hear some applause, and then, out of courtesy, they’ll wake up’. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s words, not mine. I’ve never bought the notion that Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier somehow predicts the first world war.

When Kasper Holten’s production of Don Giovanni was first staged at the Royal Opera in 2014, I disliked it intensely, even more than I have disliked most of his other productions, or for that matter most productions of Don Giovanni. I missed the first revival, but when I saw it this time round my reactions

The femme fatale was invented in France. A giddy, greedy child in her first incarnation, as the antiheroine of Abbé Prévost’s L’Histoire du Chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731), she had no voice of her own. Reshaped as a sphinx by Alfred de Musset, made over as a gypsy by Prosper Mérimée, plumped

Patrick Mason’s new production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette reminded me of something, but it took a while to work out what. We saw shiny black walls with chrome Bauhaus details, and a swirl of mist through which beautiful people moved in black formal wear. Then Olena Tokar made her entrance as Juliette, and as