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“... The Irish actress Harriet Smithson is remembered as an extraordinary episode in the life of Hector Berlioz. Appearing in the 1827 English theatre season in Paris, she took the city by storm – lithographs of her as the mad Ophelia were in every prinitshop window. Ladies of fashion demanded coiffure ‘à la Miss Smithson’ – a black veil with wisps of straw tastefully interwoven amongst the hair ...”

“... As the Royal Opera House staged its grand reopening, two of its former bosses filed conflicting accounts of its recent history. Both John Tooley (1970-88) and Jeremy Isaacs (1988-97) describe the House’s considerable achievements over the past half-century; and Isaacs’s part in pushing through the magnificent rebuilding was heroic. What we still want to know is why things also went so cataclysmically wrong ...”

“... a microchip factory. In Ruth Berghaus’s Frankfurt Götterdämmerung, described in some detail by Patrick Carnegy, the murdered Siegfried ‘was not solemnly borne aloft but brutally kicked aside by Hagen’s men’. Not all of these images are stupid or anti-musical, but as a whole they are symptoms of a process that has invaded opera over the past ...”