Classical Music

'We couldn’t get rid of the production – there’d be an outcry,’ fondly beamed a member of the Royal Opera staff a couple of years ago about the nth revival of ‘Tosca’ with Zeffirelli’s 1964 sets. I tried not to look stunned. The production conceived for Maria Callas at the squally end of her career had long since passed from fastidious Franco’s controls into anonymous hands, with only the plush designs suggesting the high camp swish that once thrilled Covent Garden’s corporately cosseted. Feature continues

The direction itself veered from creakingly melodramatic to embarrassingly unfunny (in the comic sacristan’s scenes). Even given the bovine contentment guaranteed by the familiar at this address, a new production has been overdue for at least two decades. On Tuesday the ROH unveils a new version of Puccini’s ‘shabby little shocker’ (in fact a taut triangle of politics, jealousy and lust, underpinned by Puccini’s endemic sadism towards his female characters). Directed by Jonathan Kent, a relatively late recruit to opera from such theatrical summits as the Almeida, it stars Gheorghiu, Alvarez and Terfel – so the first-cast run will be sold out whether it’s set in Napoleonic Rome or Blairite Dorneywood, with lecherous political bigwig Scarpia polished off by Tosca in Act Two with a croquet mallet instead of a knife.

All of which makes you wonder if production matters. Apart from the blood sport of booing the production team on first nights (post-performance fistfights in the Coliseum foyer marked ENO’s heyday), aren’t opera’s devotees addicted enough to rush to their favourites even if, like Bernard Haitink who reportedly avoided watching the production as he conducted Richard Jones’s ‘Ring’, they wince at the onstage goings-on? Conversely, are the hoary old favourites wheeled out season after season really so beloved?

ENO certainly thinks so. And there are signs that Jonathan Miller’s stagings of ‘Rigoletto’, in its NY mafioso setting, and ‘The Mikado’ (rapturously received this season) are still delivering the goods since 1982 and 1986 respectively; one a theatrically canny transformation, the other a self-parodying romp – oh, and both have good tunes. There are signs, too, that production can carry a weak work. Next week ENO revives ‘Nixon in China’ by John Adams, the composer whose vacuity comes layered with portentousness. Peter Sellars’ staging and some superb singing actors not only redeemed the nightmarish monotony of this mind-numbing musical nullity, but turned it into a smash hit in 2000, likely to be repeated in this revival.

The cliché has it that we live, operatically speaking, in the age of the director – the dominant diva, conductor and leading tenor having had their day. The era’s past when Adelina Patti sent her maid to rehearsals to inform cast and stage management where Madame would stand, but the whims of the mighty still carry clout. The Royal Opera’s old production of ‘Elektra’, with its walls climactically seeping blood, provided 100 minutes of unremitting tension until a distinguished conductor insisted on a new version before he’d perform. A hasty and mediocre production was thrown together, the maestro decided not to conduct after all, and Covent Garden has lost one of its jewels for nothing.

It’s not just star conductors that lure managements into jettisoning their brightest and best. Graham Vick’s ‘Madam Butterfly’ for ENO, with its almost cinematic fluidity, added unbearable intensity to what can be a boring tear-jerker but the production’s been scrapped in favour of Anthony Minghella, never mind that he’s never directed opera before. The result’s a feast for the eye, a garish Japanese trade-fair cliché carnival, with minimal feeling for the opera, where you come out humming the gimmicks. But ‘Butterfly’ will survive, along with ‘Tosca’, ‘Rigoletto’ and the rest. Considering what a rarefied art form opera is, it’s amazingly resilient. As WH Auden said, prefacing his translation of ‘The Magic Flute’: ‘A work that lives two hundred years is tough; And opera, God knows, must stand enough.’