The question remains why Mozart never finished Zaide. One immediate reason is he got a well-paid commission for Idomeneo, and Zaide was written on spec. Another reason, at least on last night’s evidence, was that it seems as likely he didn’t finish it because he realised he had a turkey on his hands. On a beautiful summer's evening when, if you wanted drama or entertainment you could be (to take a few examples) watching the World Cup or Wimbledon or the fabulously operatic Muse at Glastonbury, you would in any case have to have a pretty compelling night in the theatre to compete. This turgid gallimaufry wasn’t it.

The question remains why Mozart never finished Zaide. One immediate reason is he got a well-paid commission for Idomeneo, and Zaide was written on spec. Another reason, at least on last night’s evidence, was that it seems as likely he didn’t finish it because he realised he had a turkey on his hands. On a beautiful summer's evening when, if you wanted drama or entertainment you could be (to take a few examples) watching the World Cup or Wimbledon or the fabulously operatic Muse at Glastonbury, you would in any case have to have a pretty compelling night in the theatre to compete. This turgid gallimaufry wasn’t it.

Watching and hearing this revival of WNO’s now eight-year-old production of Verdi’s Rigoletto, it’s hard to remember he composed it only a year or two before La Traviata, that most psychologically believable of all his operas. In Rigoletto nothing makes sense: the hunchback’s pretty daughter, her apparently willing incarceration, Rigoletto’s hoodwinking (literally) into helping her abduction, her final self-sacrifice – all palpable nonsense. Yet the piece never seriously fails.

The beautiful gardens of Garsington Manor might seem an ideal setting for Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its ilex groves, its miniature forests of pyramid yew, and its paths overhung (o’er-canopied?) with climbing roses.  So it’s a mild shock to confront on the actual stage what looks like a huge attic store-room littered with beds, chucked in at all angles, a few lamps, various items of bric-à-brac, and, upstage centre, a large C. S. Lewis-style wardrobe through which, in due course, characters enter and exit.

Only those who think the burnt-out question of Wagner and the Nazis can still be brought to bear on his operas could be disappointed by Richard Jones's life-enhancing new production. Not a swastika in sight, not a hint of anti-semitic caricature for the fallguy who was never intended for it in the first place, only affirmation of the opera's central message that great art can bring order and understanding to society.

Anyone hoping to take refuge from last night’s football fever in the solemn halls of the Royal Opera House would have scored something of an own goal. Heading the bill for OperaShots – a trio of new operas staged in the intimate Linbury Theatre – was Jocelyn Pook’s Ingerland, an operatic meditation on the beautiful game. Framed by shorter works from Orlando Gough and Nitin Sawhney, the evening was a chance for three established composers to have a “shot” at opera for the first time. With Gough promising not so much an attempt as a “shot across the bow of opera”, we prepared ourselves for something pretty provocative.

Shakespeare's Macbeth is full of fleetingly funny moments. Halfway through the regicidal Second Act, we stumble upon a castle porter gibbering on about the bodily consequences of drink - "nose-painting, sleep and urine". Verdi's opera mostly shuns these vignettes for the bigger, more concentratedly darker picture. The music works itself up into an ornamented mania and for the most part broods on low orchestral colourings. There is nothing funny about a single second of it.

We love Gareth Malone, don’t we? We are big fans of the Pied Piper of primetime. And so we should be. The youth of today seem impressively eager to down tools, put away childish things like knives and drugs and safe-cracking equipment, and follow this slightly weedy and totally uncool choirmaster out onto the concert platform. Our glorious new coalition should be using him to tackle crime.