No, it's not

1 Insofar as we thought at all, we guessed that it would not be La Fille du Regiment, nor would it be Don Pasquale. Still, we could expect a few tunes. After all, the opera had been composed by Donizetti. Now we know. Now that we've seen the opera, now that we've thought about it, now that your correspondent has spent read some of the reviews (on the web), I'm (we're) ready to say what was going on. A dark opera.

2 Yes, indeed. Ravenswood castle was an inhospitable place. There were no comforts there for a young woman. We sensed that straightaway as we took in the setting, the empty rooms, the windows (and the sense of constantly being seen), the men's (especially her brother's) concern for power and fortune. Money, and power, were the drivers. The exercise of a brother's power over his sister was to drive her into a marriage entirely of convenience. It had already driven her, it was clear, to comply with the brother's incestuous directions. As we watched the games, the first scene, in which Lucia lay, in white, upon a bed whilst her brother sat, in grey broadcloth, at a business desk, made sense. The castle was a place in which humanity and care, with the exception of the young woman's companion, had no place. It was no place for a fragile young woman, perhaps no place for any young woman.

3 If there was a breath of fresh air, if there was a person of natural good-will, then it must be the dispossessed owner of the castle, the man from the heather, as it were, Edgardo. He, in leather coat and kilt, be-sworded, was able to love the young woman, to express that love, and to be rewarded with hers. Alas, a man, even a man from the heather, with natural good-will, has to do what a man has to do. He must go about public business and leave the young woman (to the mis-handling of the others).

4 Those others continue the imprisonment. In concert, they sunder the link between the lovers. The young woman, in ritual white, is brought to the culminating submission of a marriage with the man, who seems aimably indifferent to the woman, before the audience, grey and indifferent too. She signs the marriage contract. Her sentence is life.

5 There was no surprise when the leather-coated, kilted, still sworded lover enters through a window. Bravura, bravado, sword against pistol. The man from the heather, and men such as he, must fail before the new men, the members of the dominant commercial class (who have done well out of the change of monarchs and who will remain in power for years, and years).

6 There has been a sense of the Gothic throughout the opera. The lighting, the Wolf's Tower, the sense of awful things in remote castles, madness in those castles. Now we come to the Grand Guignol. The young woman returns from the marriage bed in a bloodied white gown. Her husband is dead in the bed, killed by the young woman. She is mad. The man who loves her kills himself.

7 Such was our night at the opera. Ah, had we known what to expect, we should have been more receptive. Still, we know now, and we will be ready for a later production. In the meantime, we have also been reminded of the benefits of a review immediately after a performance. We have been reminded not just to ask 'Now, what was all that about?' but to treat the question seriously and to undertake the process of developing an answer.