Gruesome fun

Having been away, I only got to Alexander Raskatov’s opera A Dog’s Heart at its fifth performance by ENO, by which time everyone knew that it was brilliantly mounted, but not of much musical substance.

Having been away, I only got to Alexander Raskatov’s opera A Dog’s Heart at its fifth performance by ENO, by which time everyone knew that it was brilliantly mounted, but not of much musical substance. Actually, you could say the same for most of the new operas that ENO has mounted over the past decade, and from composers much better known than Raskatov. I’d be happy to volunteer a list.

For me a good deal of the unsatisfactoriness of A Dog’s Heart lies with Bulgakov’s novel, which is a scattershot satire on Soviet life, in particular on the social and genetic engineering which the early rulers of Soviet Russia hoped would lead to a happier society — hence the attempt in the novel and opera to graft a man’s testicles and pituitary gland on to a dog. When satire is most desperately needed — all the time, one might say — it needs to burn as much as it tickles, but Bulgakov, as anyone who has read his cult novel The Master and Margarita will know, had so exuberant an imagination that he couldn’t resist moving from satire to surrealist fantasy, and thereby losing focus.

If you don’t mind the opera having no real cynosure, this production by Simon McBurney will provide a lot of fun, some of it quite gruesome, and one scene which is hysterically funny. None of the enjoyment is either dependent on or much related to the musical side, which is not dull, in the way that minimalist operas are, but is vacuous, derivative and does nothing to justify the large forces involved.