Hurrah for Sebastian Schwarz. The new general director of Glyndebourne, the epitome of country-house opera, has given his first interview. And, hallelujah, he has attacked those opera directors who seem to think that we pay money to see what wheezes they can come up with rather than watch what the composer actually gave us.
Mr Schwarz says of his tenure: “What I won’t have is anything that is offensively trashy for the sake of shock.”
If only others shared his approach. Last month I had the misfortune to be at the opening night of the Royal Opera House’s Lucia di Lammermoor. It’s not a difficult story: boy and girl from opposing families are doomed in love. Yet director Katie Mitchell felt it necessary to invent a scene in which Lucia kills her husband on their wedding night. That would be bad enough, but it was so ineptly done that the audience around me was convulsed with laughter. Oh, and that was after the production revealed that Lucia is actually up the duff. When that secret was shared with us, the hysterics nearly drowned out the music.
But Ms Mitchell is far from alone. One of the first operas I saw, in 1984, was a Welsh National Opera production of Don Giovanni by the East German director Ruth Berghaus. It was set on the moon. Who knew?
Don Giovanni seems to be especially prone to this. Rufus Norris’s production for English National Opera a few years ago began with an electric current passing loudly through intertwined lumps of metal. Why would anyone want to hear Mozart’s overture, after all, when you can listen to electricity instead?
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So thank heavens for Mr Schwarz, who has had enough of these idiocies. But putting the composer and the audience above a director’s grotesque egotism doesn’t mean sterility. As he rightly says: “Entertainment can also include an educative element, can’t it?” Opera houses should be “somewhere in living engagement with the past that also looks to the future”.
Opera will die if directors don’t rethink what’s being performed. But that rethinking should come from within the opera.
Good productions make you think. Bad productions make you wish someone had taken the director aside and said brusquely: “Oi, matey. Since when did anyone pay to watch you perform?”
Stephen Pollard is editor of The Jewish Chronicle