This week Music Theatre Wales gives the UK premiere of Julie, the latest opera by Philippe Boesmans. It's a welcome premiere by the consistently adventurous company, not specifically because of the quality of the piece itself, with its libretto by Luc Bondy based on Strindberg's Miss Julie, but because the Belgian Boesmans, who celebrated his 71st birthday last week, is a major figure in contemporary European opera, yet none of his stage works has been seen in Britain before. Across much of the continent, both Boesmans' Reigen, based on Schnitzler's play La Ronde, and his Wintermärchen, a version of Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale, are regularly performed, yet there has never even been a whisper of any British opera company staging either of them.
Sadly, though, Boesmans hasn't been singled out for special neglect. When it comes to keeping their audiences abreast of what opera composers are doing elsewhere in Europe, British companies, especially the large-scale heavily subsidised ones, have a woeful record over the last 20 years. The list of composers whose stage work remains almost unknown here reads like a roll call of the most significant figures in music today. Only one of Luciano Berio's operas, which are among the most important of the second half of the 20th century, has been fully staged here, while an early chamber opera by Wolfgang Rihm is all we have been allowed to see of his considerable dramatic output; and nothing by Sciarrino, Corghi, Eotvos, to name just three prominent figures, has been presented here at all.
But British composers are getting ignored in their own backyard too. Most companies here do their bit (just) by commissioning new works, but seem far more reluctant to take on pieces first seen elsewhere, whatever their virtues. The brownie points evidently get awarded for premieres, not simply for staging possibly far more worthwhile works that other foreign companies had the foresight to commission. So there are now outstanding music-theatre works by George Benjamin, James Dillon and Jonathan Harvey that have all been premiered abroad yet currently lack any firm plans for British stagings. And while everyone works themselves up into an orgy of self-congratulation about how wonderful Thomas Ades's The Tempest is, it's worth remembering there are other homegrown stage works that deserve to be seen here at least as much as his does.
