Knights at the opera

I’ve been trying to pinpoint the exact moment when it became impossible to take Mascagni’s Isabeau seriously. It wasn’t when the scenery jammed, leaving half the cast briefly trapped inside a revolving tower. These things happen, after all: you simply suppress thoughts of Spinal Tap and re-suspend disbelief. I don’t think it was the entry of a character called Ubaldo of Edinburgh either, though people were definitely starting to snigger. It wasn’t even the bit when Mascagni, called upon to depict a trotting horse orchestrally, deployed what sounded like a pair of coconut shells. A score that had started as a weak but listenable slice of art-nouveau medievalism descended — clip clop, clip clop! — into pure Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

None of that exactly helped, however, and Isabeau needs all the help it can get. It looks promising on paper: the composer of Cavalleria rusticana goes Pre-Raphaelite, and serves up a foamy draught of high-flown piety spiked with a double shot of titillation. Princess Isabeau is too chaste to choose a suitor, so her father the king forces her to ride, Godiva-like, naked through the city. Meanwhile the mysterious forester Folco has quietly impressed Isabeau by summoning a hawk from the heavens to perch on her hand — which, as seduction strategies go, certainly tops a two-for-one deal at Pizza Express.

The music’s a bit heavy on fanfares, but between bouts of sub-Puccini splurge, Mascagni does find some poetry: the sequence in which the hawk descends, to sweeping harps and swirling woodwinds, is fantastic. Act One ends on a note of high anticipation and the prospect of the leading lady getting her kit off. And then Mascagni and his librettist Illica (the man behind Tosca and Madama Butterfly, clearly having an off-day) simply shrug, abort a love duet before it’s started and cut the whole thing dead with a choral mêlée and an ending that’s as sadistic as it is perfunctory.