Royal Opera’s Idomeneo: get seats but make sure they’re facing away from the stage

Mozart’s first great opera, Idomeneo, is not often performed, and perhaps it’s better that way. It should be seen as a festival work, celebrating qualities that we rarely reflect on, but are of the utmost importance. In his fine essay on the opera, David Cairns writes that it encompasses ‘love, joy, physical and spiritual contentment, stoicism, heroic resolution; the ecstasy of self-sacrifice, the horrors of schizophrenia, the agonising dilemma of a ruler trapped in the consequences of his actions; mass hysteria, panic in the face of an unknown scourge, turning to awe before the yet more terrible reality; the strange peace that can follow intense grief. Idomeneo, finally, moves us because it holds out the possibility of human nobility in a context of unblinking psychological truth.’

For the contemporary opera director such words must seem very quaint: certainly for Martin Kusej, who directs the new Royal Opera production, and who presents Idomeneo as a work about regime change. Idomeneo is the king who has made the terrible vow to kill the first living thing he sees, doomed to kill his own son, whom he loves. Kusej presents him as a vicious tyrant who is only too eager to get rid of his more democratically minded heir, and who also fancies his son’s beloved, Ilia. And so on. The plot is systematically twisted and undermined, with the help of mendacious surtitles and projected stage directions, so that it becomes increasingly incoherent.

One thing that that shows is that Kusej hasn’t listened to Idomeneo’s music. The idiom of this, Mozart’s (to my mind) only wholly successful opera seria, is elevated, sometimes even earnest, and the idea that some of the characters are singing sweetly to conceal their poisonous intentions can gain no purchase.