This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
It must be a tough time to be one of those end-of-the-world soothsayers — who the hell needs Baba Vanga now the sky is black with circling pterodactyls, and with all the other standard portents of apocalypse doing a song-and-dance routine from Kalamazoo to Kamchatka?
Scenarios of ultimate doom abound wherever you look — including, it turns out, in the world of opera, rocked by shocking news that Glyndebourne, temple of all that is most beautiful and rarefied, has crumbled to the final taboo, and is for the first time performing the tawdriest old giallo of them all, Puccini’s Tosca.
This caving-in to monobrow populism has caused some puzzlement, but the explanation is perfectly simple: it can be traced back to the auto-erotic frenzy induced there a few years ago by the miraculous apparition of the blessed Angela Rayner. Since then the management have been holding feverish covens, seeking the spell that might recreate this wondrous event.
If Tosca fails to do the trick and there are no Angelic manifestations this year, they’ll probably try Mamma Mia! or The Lion King next year. Though by then the joint will almost certainly have been closed down in a whirlwind of competitive philistinism by whichever iconoclast wannabe emerges as our next people’s champion PM.
The joke is of course that it was Glyndebourne that was playing the arse all along with its sniffiness about Puccini in general and Tosca in particular: sure, Signor P’s 1900 shocker is a teeny bit pleased with its own nastiness, but it is also the inevitable destination of a strand of Italian opera which loved a good wallow in riotous “we’re-all-doomed!” fantasies (look at Verdi’s Trovatore) — plus a punchy fable of innocent bunnies being merrily crushed by capricious power.
There is an amusing story about Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich bitching out old Puccini, naturally way more successful and popular than either. He wrote dreadful operas, whined Benjy. No! says Dimka — brilliant operas, but dreadful music.
Well, so much for those prissy old gits, but after all it’s a rare composer — other than the sainted Gaetano Donizetti — who ever had a good word for another.
A couple of years ago I was writing here that in a curious shift, it was now these glitzy summer opera spots, rather than the maiden-auntish national companies, that were dishing up shows beyond the yawny old mainstream of top-30 hits.
Well, that was a brief madness, rather poorly timed too as the traditional audience of hedgie lizards and klepto-Russkies, who would block-book Glyndebourne and the rest of these £250-a-pop honky-tonks no matter what was on, took one look at Angela and co and flew the country en masse, leaving the summer-opera houses scraping together an audience from the remaining pasty, nervous, morlocky, mono-passported English, alarmed by anything more challenging than La Bohème.
So it’s not just that Tosca: this year these gimcrack fêtes-champêtres echo to wall-to-wall Rosenkavalier, L’elisir d’amore, Figaro and the rest of the usual old lags: marvellous things, which hardly deserve to be treated as wallpaper for dowdy suburbanites getting wasted on Tesco Value prosecco, but hardly exciting enough to tempt the epicure critic out of his lair.
With one exception — Gerald Barry’s 2011 outrage The Importance of Being Earnest, at Garsington in July: a thing that manages, in the most extreme way possible, to overmatch Oscar Wilde’s virtuoso double-entendre text, transforming it utterly whilst being an exact spiritual counterpart of the mad anarchy of the original; not so much a ravaged portrait as a psychotic twin brother escaped from his fetters in the attic, and going on a chainsaw rampage.
It opens, you remember, with Algernon tootling around on the piano whilst the butler makes tea. Except here it’s a bit different: a cacophonous crashing that dimly recalls Algy’s “Auld Lang Syne”, with the unusual musical directions BOMBS! FRENZY! UNDER FIRE! LIGHTNING!
After that, well, it’s good-bye self-control. Cecily and Gwendolen squabble through megaphones to the accompaniment of 48 smashed dinner-plates; next, they shoot each other and play out the rest as “undead”.
When Canon Chasuble bemoans the cancelled christenings, the entire cast wails and yelps like tormented sea lions. Lady Bracknell (a bass, obvs) launches into a Hitlerian rant on the subject of how chins are being worn this season.
Chastely accompanying these delicate manoeuvres, overstressed instruments career about at the extremes of their ranges; phalanxes of brass march around in parallel harmonies; the entire orchestra takes an excursion from the bottom of its range to the top and back again.
So, not exactly easy listening, and yet by a million miles the most exhilarating (and actually hilarious) contemporary opera in existence. Barry, a pleasantly deranged fellow from County Clare, wrote something which, whilst at some level a highly sophisticated Pythonian parody of the whole idea, brilliantly catches the Bunburying-induced neurosis (Algy’s, Jack’s, Oscar’s) beneath the ironic locutions and bons mots.
The ungovernable human appetite, Oscar’s true subject, perhaps, is manifested through uncontrollable eating: a hitherto unknown, existential angst in the choice between crumpet, muffin, teacake and bread-and-butter.
The best literary operas gut their sources savagely (Barry chucks out two-thirds of the text) and add, through music, things you never knew. And don’t panic, I doubt Angela — or indeed any of those gargoyles — will be there to lower the tone.
The Importance of Being Earnest is at Garsington Opera, 10 to 23 July.
