Brief encounters

When Mozart was commissioned to write an opera for the coronation of Emperor Leopold II, he produced La clemenza di Tito: a hymn to the benevolence of a Roman despot. When Matt Rogers and Sally O’Reilly were commissioned by the Inner Temple, they came up with an opera in which the protagonist is a law student who tries to obstruct the emergency services. The Fire of London is spreading, you say. And the only way to save life and property is by creating firebreaks? Sorry, I think you’ll find that, under Section 15 (4) of the Irresponsible Pettifogging Jobsworth Act 1661, you can’t do that. Truly, an operatic hero for our time. As the lights of the surrounding legal chambers shone into the Temple Church, I swear I heard the smartly dressed crowd in the pews around me purring quietly with approval.

And fair enough. He who pays the piper, and all that. It’s actually pretty heartening that in 2016 a community of lawyers should commission an opera to commemorate the great fire. The result, And London Burned, fulfilled its brief with striking musical originality and considerable visual flair, even if — for all the efforts of a fresh-voiced professional cast — that short, futile legal squabble was almost the sole moment of human drama. The Law Student (Alessandro Fisher) wasn’t even given a name, although Dryden and the Duke of York (Andrew Rupp in both roles) made fleeting appearances, and the soprano Raphaela Papadakis stalked the scene as an allegorical personification of London, initially in the light-studded robes of the modern city and later stripped of her finery as the fire progressed.

That was the giveaway: this wasn’t really an opera, but a pageant, a masque. As such, the artificiality of O’Reilly’s libretto was perfectly appropriate, weaving in bits of 17th-century texts to give an agreeably Pepys-ish flavour.