Opera must bring down the curtain on gimmickry and gore 

Behind the phenomenon is a profound and widespread loss of confidence. Opera house managers are desperately worried that opera has been haemorrhaging audience and relevance, leaving it socially exclusive and culturally marginalised. The hip-hopping Twittering young don’t understand or respond to it, while decreasing numbers of the elderly only want to hear nice tunes sung by people in polite period costume. Meanwhile, as the level of public subsidy shrinks fast, the entire labour-intensive enterprise of mounting opera becomes ever more financially unviable.

All sorts of tactics have been pursued in the vain effort to reverse this trend and “refresh the brand”. New operas on “cutting-edge” contemporary themes are commissioned (I currently await, with trepidation, something set in the lavatories of a gay night club). Squads are sent out into schools with a mission to persuade impressionable children that opera is fun, fun, fun and nothing to be scared of; television talent shows feature amateurs belting their way through “Nessun dorma”; ticket prices have been slashed and free drinks proffered, as opera is marketed as either super-glamorous or accessible to all.

Commissioning productions such as Mitchell’s Lucia di Lammermoor is another common wheeze – the idea being that presenting a provocatively different interpretation, preferably involving a frisson of post-watershed transgression, will break the mould, excite public interest and have people hammering at the box office for tickets.

It doesn’t work; none of it works. The harder you try to sell opera as groovy, the greater the suspicion and resistance, the stronger the shrieking fat lady stereotypes, the louder the catcalls of elitism and anachronism.

So I think that the opera business needs to simmer down and relax. Managements need to stop reaching for trivial gimmicks and think more about keeping their regular audience happy and less about following the mirage of a young proletarian tattooed audience elsewhere. We need to stop telling children that they ought to like opera and let them find their own way there, in their own time.

And most of all, we need directors like Katie Mitchell to use their imaginations and find a deeper truth in the music that goes beyond the sort of factitious sensationalism that marks her dismally pretentious and faintly silly vision of Lucia di Lammermoor.