There will be blood | 14 April 2016

Lucia di Lammermoor is one of the two or three Donizetti operas that have never fallen out of the repertoire, and the more of his operas it’s possible to see, or at least to hear on CD, the less explicable that becomes. The late and rightly venerated Rodney Milnes called Lucia ‘a blazing masterpiece’, but that does seem to be overdoing it, and in fact several of his other works are more worthy of that accolade. Throughout much of its history Lucia was prized primarily for its glorious sextet, and for the maddest of all mad scenes, added to by generations of sopranos until it became the ultimate coloratura showpiece. Sung by Callas it can still powerfully move one, since every last note serves an expressive purpose; sung by almost any other soprano it became, at full length, an intolerable narcissistic display. Exit Sutherland, and the Royal Opera decided that the whole work should be treated with deadly seriousness. The result was, in 2003, the laughably inept production under Christof Loy, though that was less amusing than his Lulu and his Tristan.

So the question remains: how serious a work is Lucia? Katie Mitchell, who directs the new production at Covent Garden, sees it as a chance to push her ‘100 per cent feminist’ agenda, and on the Royal Opera website you can see her enlarging on her views about the dynamics of a society that prizes masculine values of vindictive justice and honour above all others, but which is confronted by a determined woman with a mind of her own. This is a conceivable reading of the work, in fact a largely similar one to Loy’s, but it is executed with no more success. In the first place, it drowns in detail, nearly all of it unconnected to getting the main points across.