In the past several years, the Deutsche Oper Berlin and director Christof Loy have been mining the neglected margins of the early-twentieth-century operatic repertoire … and more often than not they’ve managed to strike gold.

The Meistersinger's staging of Jossi Wieler, Anna Viebrock and Sergio Morabito had numerous great ideas and a few terrible ones;it conjured a convincing world and populated it with well-realised characters, then allowed entire scenes to fall flat.

Jens-Daniel Herzog, whose new production opened recently at Dresden’s Semperoper, did not seem especially interested in arguments.His willingness to unearth interesting themes only to leave them unexplored resulted in a staging with a lot of wonderful set-up and a frustrating lack of follow-through.

In each of the past four seasons the Deutsche Oper has managed to bring at least one new work to the stage.Of those works, which have included new operas from Aribert Reimann and Georg Friedrich Haas, Heart Chamber is perhaps the most conspicuously challenging, both in its logistical demands and in its composer’s restless determination to avoid the easy paths of musical and dramatic expression

The new production of Die Lustigen Weiber, which opened the Staatsoper’s 2019–20 season, provided an elegant overview of the work’s numerous charms without quite overcoming its limitations.David Bösch’s well-conceived, well-executed staging revelled in the libretto’s potential for physical and situational comedy while Daniel Barenboim’s musical direction had an effervescence that, at various points, suggested Rossini without the invigorating showmanship, or Weber without the fascinating undercurrents of darkness