Michael Tanner: Why I prefer Donizetti to Strauss

Three operas this week, each of them named after its (anti-)heroine: one of the heroines (the most sympathetic) murders her husband, one of them spends her time successfully plotting the deaths of her mother and stepfather, one insists on the murder of a prophet who refuses her advances, and has an orgasm as she kisses the tongue of his severed head. Very much standard operatic fare. Two of them belong in the grand tradition of German high romanticism, one to the Italian tradition of bel canto melodrama of the first half of the 19th century.

Unfashionably, I much prefer Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor to Richard Strauss’s Salome and Elektra, indeed to any of his operatic works with the exceptions, perhaps, of Intermezzo and Capriccio. Whereas Strauss’s bloodcurdlers were given to packed houses in the Royal Albert Hall, with all the publicity attendant on the Proms and on Strauss having been born 150 years ago, Lucia is being staged in a marquee at Winslow Hall in Buckinghamshire. This production has suffered from a disastrous lack of publicity, but I would earnestly advise anyone interested to make the journey, the last two performances being on 13 and 14 September. It is a triumph, almost without qualification. The staging is unobtrusive but perfectly effective, all the dramatic moments in a work full of them emerging with an impact I haven’t experienced before.

The three principal singers are outstanding, and indeed in the case of Lucia already well known: Elena Xanthoudakis has made a well-received disc of bel canto arias, but what one might fail to gather from that is that she is a passionate actress, almost alarmingly identifying with the role. Giving an original account of the mad scene, she begins with hysterical mirth, which intrudes from time to time as she muses on her fate, always using her large and supple voice to intense expressive effect.