Vick's picnicking ensemble encounter "ancients" straight out of some Shaker folk-fest. There is a spiral staircase connecting hell and heaven (now that's original); there's a mystical orb representing the womb and the world from which - in the opera's only dramatic highlight - emerges just the head of the mystical soothsayer Sosostris. I could accept (grudgingly) all the symbolistic claptrap if The Midsummer Marriage weren't so dramatically static And for so long This is not an opera, this is an oratorio. The director Graham Vick (for whom I have a lot of time) was/is plainly defeated by it. His 1996 staging (now revised and developed, apparently) is feeble. If you go down to the woods today you're in for a big disappointment. What chance the new and younger audience this opera purportedly celebrates? Who is it really for? And where were Tippett's editors when we needed them? Someone should have stopped him from writing his own librettos.

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I know he hoped TS Eliot might be persuaded to take this one on, but that could have been even worse. What opera needs more than anything are words which release the music, not inhibit it And - dare I even say it - it needs drama. It's about love, it's about sex, it's about renewal, it's about the generation gap, the old and the new It's about rebirth. Yet even literary minds (and I canvassed one or two) emerged with furrowed brows after each act. There's even a line saying: "Now is this nonsense at its noon." Too right.

What is it about? Well, that part is simple; it's about the mating game. And if that sounds like the title of a sitcom, I think it once was. Why? Because, as opera, The Midsummer Marriage has insurmountable problems It might even be unstageable. It's hard - no, impossible - to reconcile Tippett's verdant, effusive and often ravishing score to the proto-new age tosh of his libretto It really is a stinker: dense, obtuse, unsingable nonsense. So we really have to ask ourselves why, in the centenary year of Tippett's birth, his most celebrated opera should be far from full on its opening night and - more significantly - even less full at the start of its final act Far from embracing it, people are walking away from it. Fifty years is a long time in the life of some operas In the case of The Midsummer Marriage, it's an eternity. Since its premiere at the Royal Opera half a century ago, the perception of what an opera is or should be has shifted In the past decade, it's been a seismic shift.