Ariadne auf Naxos at Glyndebourne – how can an opera go so wrong?

Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos should be the perfect Glyndebourne opera, not too long, not too demanding, a unique and cunning mixture of seriousness and comedy, plenty to think about if you’re inclined to do that, nothing to oppress you, almost no longueurs — though I might take that back later; and a giddy ending. So it is quite a coup to come up with an account that offers almost no pleasure, whether from the pit, from the voices, from the stage; which seems empty and pretentious in a way quite different from what Strauss can all too often manage; where the humour is leaden and the seriousness has been mislaid, so that it makes — remembering always the journeys to and from the place, which mean that for almost anyone a visit to Glyndebourne is a full-day affair — for an infuriated sense of expensively wasted time.

The first mistake was to get Katharina Thoma, a relatively inexperienced German, to direct. In an interview in the programme book, she says, ‘Sometimes when I leave the theatre and see the news, and there are catastrophes, I think, what have I been worrying about? There are more important matters in the world.’ So, she continues, she has set the opera in 1940, in a country house doubling as a hospital. If you’re as confused as that, you should get a different kind of work altogether. Ariadne, the Prologue and the Drama, are not set in or about 1940, and to move them to that date is to take away their subject and try to make them shed light on something else — the artist’s relationship to contemporary social and political reality — which they aren’t in the least able to do.