Access all arias: Woody Allen accepts an honorary degree in Barcelona. Photograph: Manu Fernandez/AP
Isn't it a barmy idea for Woody Allen to take a year out from movie making to direct an opera? Anything that stops him making increasingly embarrassing films, the unkindest of you might well reply. "I have no idea what I am doing," said Allen disarmingly, when asked why he is going to direct Puccini's one-act opera Gianni Schicchi for Los Angeles Opera next year, "but incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm." That attitude may well explain what he did to London in his recent film Match Point. If not justify it.
But Allen has nothing if not enthusiasm for opera. In Match Point a succession of arias from pre-world war one vintage opera records hissed on the soundtrack to mark the passion for opera that everyone in the British capital apparently shared. "The effect," wrote the Observer's film critic Philip French, "is as if Radio 3 was broadcasting a marathon season celebrating Enrico Caruso and everyone in London was listening with their windows open." But even in that film, the suggestion was that Allen had got opera - and in particular opera fans - horribly wrong: "[P]eople with pretensions to love high opera do not tend to adore the work of Andrew Lloyd Webber, or at least not without a great deal of pre-emptive English irony," wrote the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw.
Are filmmakers ever the right people to direct operas? Placido Domingo, the tenor who is currently general director of Los Angeles Opera, clearly thinks so. He has lured not just Allen , but also filmmaker William Friedkin, to direct operas in LA. The Exorcist director will stage the two other one-act Puccini operas Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica that along with Gianni Schicchi make up the composer's Il Trittico triptych.
The English National Opera, striving desperately to revive its critical reputation, clearly believes so too as it has placed a great deal of hope in established film directors to revive its image. Last year, Anthony Minghella, who made The English Patient, The Talented Mr Ripley and the recent Breaking and Entering, was hired to direct Madama Butterfly; this September, Sally Potter , the director of Orlando, will direct Carmen. Perhaps opera companies are right to hope that some cinematic glamour will rub off on ailing institutions.
Critics were ludicrously divided over Minghella's efforts. "Minghella's concept eviscerates the heart and soul of the work, chucking out its emotional reality and stuffing it instead with catwalk chic," moaned the Daily Telegraph. "This is a performance for connoisseurs of Vogue, not lovers of opera." However, the Independent's reviewer said "this Butterfly is at once the simplest and most sumptuous thing we've ever seen in this theatre."
As for Potter, at least she has a track record that makes it possible she will be an inspired choice. Her 1979 short Thriller was a reworking of Puccini's La Boheme, while her 1997 the Tango Lesson had the director learning to tango with the master-dancer Pablo Veron, who will work as choreographer on her operatic debut.
But opera-loving film directors love to express themselves in opera. Werner Herzog, too, whose 1982 film Fitzcarraldo had Klaus Kinski as a businessman obsessed with the idea of building an opera house in an obscure Peruvian city, has directed operas several times. Unsurprisingly, most of his productions have been Wagner. Atom Egoyan directed Richard Strauss's Salome.
But there are film directors who haven't just dabbled in opera, but have straddled both art forms to great effect. Think of Patrice Chéreau who, in 1976 and with Pierre Boulez, directed one of the most hailed productions of Wagner's Ring cycle at Bayreuth and has since gone on to direct films, including La Reine Margot, Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, award winners Intimacy and His Brother, as well as plays and operas, the latest being a production of Tristan and Isolde at the Scala. Think too of Count Luchino Visconti di Modrone, director of such films as Ossessione, The Leopard and Death in Venice, and an opera director who was instrumental in transforming an Italian soprano called Maria Callas into the greatest diva in operatic history. Indeed, one might well argue that the best of Chereau and Visconti's films have been operatic in sensibility. Franco Zeffirelli, too, has (some suggest) successfully combined a career in film, opera and theatre.
It's just a shame Domingo got Allen to direct the wrong opera. If only he had been allowed to direct something by Wagner rather than Puccini, we could have all had something that he hasn't given us for a few years, namely a good laugh. But it was never to be. "I can't listen to that much Wagner," Allen said once. "I start getting the urge to conquer Poland." A 71-year-old Woody Allen trying to conquer Poland? Now that would make a terrific spin-off comedy.
What can we expect from Woody Allen's opera debut? The story of Gianni Schicchi is set in Florence in 1299, though Allen fans may hope he shifts the action to the Upper West Side in, say, 1978. Possibly with a young Diane Keaton in the role of the hotsy-totsy Lauretta. It is based on a Florentine commentary on a passage in Dante's Divine Comedy and is a comic satire on greed, featuring phoney wills, angry relatives, comic misunderstandings, true romance and sentimental arias. It sounds, to fit map the story on to Woody's oeuvre, more like a Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, rather than Annie Hall. Boh!
(Movie quiz. In which two British films did Gianni Schicchi's most famous aria O mio babbino caro get aired? You'll never get this. Answer: A Room with a View and Mr Bean's Holiday.)
One of the most unsung of film directors who has also made forays into opera is Ken Russell. Perhaps Woody Allen should seek to emulate Russell's career trajectory from highly regarded films, to widely derided films and then an appearance in Celebrity Big Brother. Woody Allen in the Big Brother house? With all due respect to Placido Domingo in luring the ageing New York nebbish to helm Puccini, that would be a real coup.
