The cult Norwegian director Stefan Herheim has made a selling point of “losing the plot” of the operas he tackles. Although he is a relative newcomer to the UK — his first production here was Les Vêpres siciliennes at the Royal Opera in 2013, and last summer he made his Glyndebourne debut with Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande — I have now seen 13 of his shows, all of them notable for the tiniest details of the text.
His 2010 Bayreuth Parsifal, a conspectus of Wagner’s life at Bayreuth, intertwined with German history up to the rise of Hitler in the 1930s, remains his finest achievement, but its successors have followed the same modus operandi: multilayered interpretations that prioritise the subtexts and historic/psychological background to the