English Touring Opera has form when it comes to baroque opera. Handelfest in 2009 marked the composer’s 250^th anniversary with a sequence of excellent stagings, while 2010’s The Duenna was a riotous and irreverent musical delight, and there was an Alcina back in 2005 that still sticks in the memory for all the right reasons.

Whatever it was about the kings and queens of England that so intrigued Donizetti, it certainly wasn’t their politics. The third, and last, in WNO’s autumn cycle shows Elizabeth once again in a state of unrequited love with one of her rebellious (and much younger) nobility, but wholly unconcerned with affairs of state; and the one thing that distinguishes her from the average abandoned woman of Romantic opera is that she has the power to decapitate her uncooperative swains. Freud would have nodded sagely; but it’s unlikely that Donizetti was thinking of emasculation.

A baby's brain is polished off by a throbbing welter of maggots. A field of sheep are on fire. A screaming child whose hands have been tied to a kite is flying out over the North Sea. How do you make an opera out of any of this? The answer of course is you don’t. You leave this kind of thing to cinema or the novel. Opera is - contrary to popular belief - extremely bad at spectacle, especially if the aim is to terrify. Horror has never had much of a look-in as a genre in the art form.

Rich, racy, randy and irreverent: such were the R words gathered up by a Canadian critic to capture the essence of Christopher Alden’s production of Johann Strauss’s cork-popping operetta when it premiered in Toronto last year. Other R words, alas, came to my mind, like rubbish, reprehensible, risible, even rigor mortis.

For Londoners unable to travel up to Aldeburgh – or, now, to Leeds for the revival of Phyllida Lloyd’s Opera North production – this was the only chance in Britten centenary year to be blitzed by his seminal masterpiece. After the phenomenal success of the Proms’ Wagner semi-stagings, even the craft and sure-footedness of Daniel Slater’s direction here was never going to be a substitute for Grimes in the opera house (or on the beach), serving only to show that this is a supreme music drama least happily separated from the theatre.

All starts with a barely perceptible bass rumble, before Britten’s lower strings begin their queasy glissandi, shifting key signature every few seconds. It’s a wonderful operatic opening, here teased out with deft mystery by conductor Stuart Stratford.

The first words we hear don’t belong to Fidelio at all. The first music does, but not at all where you expect to find it. If you’ve read your programme (and who does before the show begins?) you’ll find a poem entitled “Labyrinth” by Jorge Luis Borges from a collection In Praise of Darkness. So there’s the thinking behind the amazing image we see before us (designer Rebecca Ringst) - a neon-edged framework of shifting metallic chambers, a vertical maze with no apparent way in or way out.

“Strike again,” cries Elektra as her brother stabs their mother to death. It’s third strike lucky for this Covent Garden production of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s singular mythic horror. In previous manifestations of designer-director Charles Edwards’ rather over-freighted but ever improving staging, conductors Semyon Bychkov and Mark Elder, as well as top-less soprano Lisa Gasteen and the more nuanced but sometimes underpowered Susan Bullock, missed the heart of the matter.

We all know the drill: Wedekind’s Lulu is a page men have written on through the centuries, the canvas on which they have painted their desires, the feminine void they have filled. The patriarchy have appropriated her, and the perverts, and now it’s contemporary composer Olga Neuwirth’s turn.

Revivals, especially at Covent Garden, too often wrong-foot high expectations.