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.