Opera review: Britten’s Gloriana may be a failure but it still manages to shock

The most surprising thing about Benjamin Britten’s coronation opera Gloriana, for me, is that it merely fell rather flat at its first performance. The composer, we read, had insisted on its virtually official status as part of the coronation proceedings, and it seems to have been his major bid to be accepted as an establishment figure, and not merely as the most significant of the younger generation of composers.

But to have chosen, at the suggestion of the Earl of Harewood, the nearest relation to the royal family with any serious pretensions to being artistically cultivated, Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex, with its characteristically world-weary deflating view of human affairs and affaires, was surely a piece of ill-judged mischief at least. Britten and Pears spent an evening at the Harewoods’ house in Orme Square playing through parts of the opera to the Queen and Prince Philip, but one can’t imagine that a great deal of it would have sunk in, or that if it had that the royals would have given voice to any particular reservations.

I found, in this new production at the Royal Opera, a clever and characteristic effort from Richard Jones, that the scene in which the Earl of Essex breaks in on Elizabeth when she is déshabillée and almost bald is still shocking, not so much as a breach of protocol but for more general human reasons. It is also one of the most effective scenes in a work that doesn’t have many, and it breaks down the extra barrier that Jones has erected by having the whole opera done as a provincial show put on for the benefit of the new monarch.

Before Britten and his librettist William Plomer have got under way, members of the royal family, including the Queen, all looking like figures who have walked out of a Horlicks advertisement, stroll along surveying the preparations; a prompter, a children’s choir conductor, and so on appear and the opera begins, in a large tent, and with the actors helping the stage hands to wheel the Tudor scenery on and off.