No critic sets out to be a reactionary, even though it’s much easier that way. There’s no real satisfaction in rejecting novelty on sight; no joy in measuring a living performance against your record collection and coming down, every time, in favour of the dead Nazi. I get that. Still, it’s a plain fact that in three decades of regular opera-going, I have never – not once – seen a live production of Carmen that locates the action in 19th-century Seville. Or one that centres the visual elements – mantillas, sunshine, picture-postcard Spanishness – that directors tell us (and how they tell us!) have become such clichés.

Presumably they must exist and increasingly I regret not catching one of Ellen Kent’s touring Carmens, the ones that promised majestic Andalucian stallions and smouldering glances. Meanwhile, a new set of clichés has settled on Bizet’s masterpiece, all pretty much downstream (consciously or not) of Calixto Bieito’s much-revived 1999 staging, which reset the action in a dusty, surreal 1970s Spain. Bieito, of course, had an intensely personal agenda. He grew up under Franco, and there’s a rawness and intelligence about his Carmen that still has the power to provoke.

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