Terry Gilliam turns to eye-watering excess for his staging of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini

Operas about artists are not rare. However — perhaps for obvious reasons — those artists tend to be musicians, singers, or at least performers, able to persuade and cajole both us in the audience and the other characters on stage through their eloquence. Berlioz, in his first opera, presents the renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, in an episode loosely adapted from his autobiography. But the final casting and unveiling of his new statue of Perseus, against all the odds, provides a climax that music (let alone stagecraft) seems fundamentally ill equipped to portray.

The road to that climax is also paved with numerous distractions for both us and Cellini, the most significant being an amorous subplot invented by Berlioz and his librettists as a concession to the piece’s opéra comique origins. It was later adjusted for the more ‘serious’ Paris Opéra, where it flopped magnificently. It has remained a rarity ever since: ENO’s is London’s first professional staging for four decades. And ultimately it also remains an opera about art and artists in which no one has very much to say about art or artists. The composer clearly identified with Cellini as an exemplar of the fast-living, fast-loving creative genius for whom arrogance and irresponsibility are but necessary, forgivable corollaries; but his score, shot through with irrepressible brilliance and invention, does a great deal more to persuade us of Berlioz’s own genius than of Cellini’s.

This impression is compounded by ENO’s new production by Terry Gilliam. His 2011 production of the Damnation of Faust at the Coliseum mapped that work on to German history from 19th-century imperialism to two world wars. His Benvenuto Cellini is conventional in terms of presenting the action, but it does so in a manner that suggests that sheer eye-watering excess is a worthwhile aesthetic end in itself.