2025 was, as far as opera’s concerned, largely a year of disappointments – even from Warlikowski (Der Rosenkavalier). Not the first year of the kind, of course, after more than 40 years at the game.

I can’t help feeling that what should have been the best thing in my operatic year was Romeo Castellucci’s production of Götterdämmerung, but that magnificent project was curtailed (for personal, technical or budget reasons, or all of them at once) and replaced by something more cautious, by the late Pierre Audi.

Otherwise, what seemed to mark the year was a series of large-scale, complicated, and presumably expensive, productions that didn’t quite hit the spot — often handsomely-conceived and ingeniously implemented: great aesthetic ‘objects,’ but where famous directors, focusing on concept and design, either didn’t actually direct, or had trouble staging their concepts clearly: Sellars’s Castor et Pollux, Bieito’s Ring, Kosky’s Les Brigands, Shirin Neshat’s Aïda…

Tcherniakov’s Carmen was interesting and beautifully directed, but I don’t share his fascination with group therapy and role-play. La Damnation de Faust at the Champs-Elysées was a flop, and, so it’s supposed, Bernheim fled.

After Reimann’s Lear, nearly ten years ago, I wrote, “When there’s so much to get right, unsurprisingly a lot can and, as we all know, does go wrong. You even, sometimes, leave at the interval. But occasionally, along comes the kind of evening that reminds you why you keep going back. It makes up for the rest and reconciles you to your expensive hobby.” I tried, looking back over 2025, to see what matched that criterion. I very nearly chose Dusapin’s Il viaggio, Dante, in a Claus Guth production in Garnier, and set aside Dame Felicity Lott’s recital at the Athénée, partly because it wasn’t an opera, and partly because my reasons for finding it so moving were in part extra-musical. So in the end, the winner is…

… Robinson Crusoé at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, directed by Laurent Pelly and conducted by Marc Minkowski, with Hervé’s Le petit Faust at the Athénée a close runner-up. In any case, going to the Athénée isn’t an expensive hobby at all: the best seats cost 50 euros, so Crusoé it is.

Nigel Wilkinson

Nigel has attended regularly, in Paris and elsewhere, for over 40 years. His focus is more on live, staged opera, warts and all, than recordings. His reports, which started as an aide-mémoire but were soon shared with friends and eventually became a blog, aim to encapsulate the unique experience, warts and all, of an ordinary, paying opera-goer. His other interests include travel, food and friendships, and he collects art by (mostly) young artists from around the world. UK-born and a graduate of Trinity College Cambridge, he has lived and worked in Iran and Turkey, but settled in Paris and, Brexit oblige, is now French.

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