What’s Opera, Doc?

PRAGUE (AFP) - After a 278-year hiatus, a long-lost opera by the Italian Baroque master Antonio Vivaldi will be performed in Prague Saturday in a tour de force for a young Czech conductor with a detective’s nose.

“Argippo”, a two-hour drama about a young princess smitten with a dishonest suitor, was scouted out nearly a year-and-a-half ago by 37-year-old Ondrej Macek, who founded and directs a Baroque music ensemble.

“I was really very happy when I found the scores that everyone thought lost,” he said modestly.

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Rufus Wainwright is working on a full-scale opera, after coming off an extensive tour performing songs from Judy Garland’s repertoire.

“I’ve wanted to write an opera since I was about 14 years old. But I couldn’t find a story that I could wrap my head around,” Wainwright said.

“The construct of the diva, from Maria Callas to Norma Desmond and the movie Diva from the 80s,” Wainwright said of the possible influences on his opera.

Comedy works best, one theory goes, when the people in it don’t know they are being funny. Another school favors a more Marxian (Groucho, not Karl) approach, in which the reasonable turns into the improbable, and the improbable into the outrageous. The Metropolitan Opera’s visually drab but industriously comic new production of Donizetti’s “Fille du Régiment” represents theory No. 1 with touches of theory No. 2.

Natalie Dessay as the heroine in Donizetti’s “Fille du Régiment” in Laurent Pelly’s production at the Met, updated to World War I. She sometimes uses robotic actions for dramatic effect.

Laurent Pelly’s production updates Napoleonic warfare in the Tyrol to the time of World War I. Pains were taken to excise every bit of fluff and gold braid, anything that might remind us of the toy-soldier productions traditional to this ever-endearing piece. Maybe the idea is to clear away anything that obstructs the view of the Met’s marvelous principals.

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