It is not a necessary condition of writing about opera that it attempt to match the melodramatic heights of the operatic experience in its language. But tacky and stupid people would disagree, and unfortunately many of them have jobs that not only involve writing about opera, but in fact involve writing about opera on behalf of opera houses. 

Macdara can well recall overhearing some kind of Outreach effort at the Royal Opera House that involved a speaker explaining that Tosca has to choose between two men. In fact Tosca loves one man, and is persuaded by her partner’s torturer that she should surrender herself to him—your correspondent is being old-fashioned here in his terminology—in order to save the life of the man she loves, to which she ably responds by murdering the torturer. This is a choice not between two men, but between consenting to sex she does not want in order to save her lover’s life, or not consenting, and seeing him die. But she chooses violence instead.

With regards to Jenůfa, Royal Opera House audiences are invited to “Explore the lives of two courageous women struggling for fulfilment in a small rural community”. This is a modish but wilfully unrepresentative summary of the work. Jenůfa shows courage in having premarital sex with her cousin, arguably, since her stepmother clearly wouldn’t approve. Her stepmother shows courage in murdering Jenůfa’s baby, perhaps: a harder argument to make. She does confess, when Števuška is found in the millpond as the ice melts; this takes courage, admittedly, and by confessing she saved her stepdaughter’s life, as the villagers, like villagers on stage anywhere, were ready to stone poor Jenůfa. Is this fulfilment?…Maybe? Hopefully Jenůfa finds fulfilment with her other cousin, the one who cut her face out of jealousy, but whom she has come to love.

The problem of describing opera also affects those who labour in the media landscape of Late Capitalism, wherein adjectives not only bump up the word count but are lavished upon things in such a way that the reviewer, bestower of largesse, is bumped up to being a grander, more knowledgeable entity, one who Feels Things more deeply than the dullards who attend the opera but do not have a platform in which to use adjectives.

In the very worst publication flicking its way around the pond of the London Media, the Guardian, we read of Ariadne auf Naxos that Karita Mattila’s

engulfing sound still hits you in the solar plexus. Her singing is wonderfully controlled yet abandoned in expression, trawling Strauss’s emotional extremes with an utterly compelling immediacy.

Macdara was there in the house, and very much enjoyed the performance, though he can admit that his solar plexus was unmolested. Your correspondent has a few questions about this horrible passage: controlled yet abandoned—no doubt this is an intentional contradiction, though this writer finds it lazy and irritating—and then there is the fact that Mattila’s singing also has to trawl, which sounds like a lot of work, especially as she has to do it not with ordinary immediacy, not even with compelling immediacy but with utterly compelling immediacy. 

Jane Archibald is described as having “lethally accurate” coloratura, though neither she nor anyone on stage or in the audience did actually die of it, as far as the present writer can recall. We read that the director has “controversially perhaps” made Zerbinetta vulnerable: the reviewer was sitting in the audience, imagining that somewhere there might be a controversy about this directorial decision. Not only is this controversy entirely in his head, but he does not even fully commit to it: he only gestures towards a hinterland of non-existent argument. He wants us to believe that his article is a dispatch from a more dramatic, more fraught world, a place that functions at a higher pitch, where people furiously debate details of a revival of Ariadne auf Naxos, but he will not even properly commit to this conceit. In the rest of the short article, there is still room for “theatrical animal”, “a real monstre sacré”, “journey from grief to sensual renewal”, “impulsive but effortful”. As so often, one has the sense that media cretins are chattering away to themselves, mumbling out loud in a semi-public place, a park bench say, oh but look at the Guardian masthead above them!

The Opéra in Paris opts, in place of everyday sentimentality or verbosity, for something so excessive that it strains at the limits of Sense. Here is their attempt to sell Verdi: “Il Trovatore is a nocturnal tragedy of unmatched fulgurance where fate plays with men’s vengerous desires”. Yes please!