Performer: Jeffrey Tate

Promising young South-African director Alessandro Talevi opened the new season at the Teatro La Fenice with a new mis-en-scene of Mozart's Idomeneo.

Nina Stemmes' glorious Brünnhilde crowns a towering performance of Götterdämmerung at the Vienna State Opera. 

A new production of Ariadne auf Naxos is a major draw in itself, but a queue for standing room whose end is on the other side of the opera house is news even in Vienna, especially when the performance is not the première, but the fourth in a run of five and also the one that Franz Welser-Möst left to Jeffrey Tate, who has conducted the piece to positive reviews before.

As The Flying Dutchman nears its close, the crew of Daland's ship are celebrating their safe homecoming and yelling at the Dutchman's unseen crew to join them. To their horror, they realise that they have indeed woken the dead: the Dutchman's crew are ghosts who have wandered the oceans for centuries: the storms cannot burst their sails for they are protected by Satan.