If one wanted to make an argument for the continued relevance of Meyerbeer’s grands opéras in the twenty-first century, Les Huguenots would be a good place to start. The story, which concerns the love of a protestant gentleman for the daughter of a catholic count and culminates in the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, is a tragedy of religious intolerance that is arguably even more topical now than when it was written. As a work of drama, David Alden’s new staging – which opened at the Deutsche Oper as the second instalment in their new Meyerbeer cycle – was something of a missed opportunity, a mix of intriguing and uninvolving scenes that were never quite able to delineate the tense antagonism at the heart of the story. The singing, however, was of such a consistently high quality that it was often able to offset the production’s moments…
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