Booing by German audiences is an occupational hazard for opera régisseurs at their opening-night curtain calls. It is rarer, however, for the protests to continue at later performances in the run. I attended the second night of Richard Jones’s new production of Wagner’s Lohengrin at Munich’s Bavarian State Opera and the booers were still in full cry. Some of the hostility was undoubtedly directed at Kent Nagano, the BSO’s music director, whose conducting often seemed tentative, with an instrumental blend that failed to capture the mystical intensity of Wagner’s “grail” music.

Jones’s Lohengrin is character­istic of his penchant for cutting Wagner down to size, bringing an every­day, even banal, dimension to the work of Germany’s great operatic monstre sacré. The curtain rises on a bare stage, at the centre of which, Elsa von Brabant, wearing dungarees, with her back to the audience, is designing a house on an architect’s easel. For the rest of the opera, Lohengrin and a group of workers help to build the house, which is completed in time for the Act III wedding scene.

Jones superimposes the autobio­graphical hinterland of Lohengrin onto Wagner’s “romantic opera”, which was written at a time of personal distress. Wagner was unhappily married to Minna Planer and a homeless exile from Germany after his revolutionary activities in the Dresden uprising of 1849. Whether one needs to see such footnotes on stage is certainly debatable, but Jones follows through his concept unerringly. Elsa, like Minna, turns out not to be a self-sacrificing woman unquestioningly subservient to her lord and master, and so Lohengrin torches her house, their bed, along with a cot for future progeny. The concept takes on a life of its own, generating its own — rather than Wagner’s — scenario.

German audiences are well acquainted with directors’ alternative plots, so I can only assume that it was the regimented, fascist or GDR-communist treatment of the chorus that provoked their wrath. Lohengrin’s German Reich tub-thumping, and the craving for a leader to help Germany out of a national crisis, provides rich pickings for those who wish to see premonitions of Hitler’s Nazism in Wagner’s works.

The British director is an enigma, no doubt unwilling to reveal all the secrets of his productions, but even if this Lohengrin was sometimes baffling, sometimes irritating, it was never dull or uninteresting. He gets outstanding histrionic performances from a cast of youngish, German-speaking principals with substantial voices. Jonas Kaufmann brings a burnished-golden, Italianate ring to Lohengrin’s Grail Narration and, at the end of a long evening, he sang Mein lieber Schwan with breathtaking inwardness. Anja Harteros’s radiant Elsa, a sultry brunette rather than the usual vapid blonde, marked another important debut in this rising soprano’s burgeoning career, while Wolfgang Koch’s vehement Telramund, Michaela Schuster’s dramatic mezzo Ortrud and Christof Fischesser’s noble King Henry are all welcome additions to the roster of international Wagnerians.

The little miracle that is Buxton Festival — the UK’s most unpretentious and best-value-for-money summer opera event — continues to astonish. This year, six operas are on the playbill at Frank Matcham’s exquisite 900-seat Opera House: Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, Messager’s Véronique and a concert performance of Mendelssohn’s Camacho’s Wedding are the festival’s own presentations, and there are visiting productions of Mozart’s Mitridate (Classical Opera Company), Handel’s Orlando (Dublin’s Opera Theatre Company) and Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse (Psappha). All of this, plus daily concerts, literary interviews and opera talks, is offered on a budget of just £1.1m, only 10% of which comes from the public funders. I don’t know how they manage it, charging a top price for staged opera of only £49.

Lucrezia Borgia gets a smart, gripping update to the 1930s by Stephen Medcalf and his designer, Francis O’Connor, who costumes the eponymous poisoner and the ladies of her court in fabulous deco frocks and the men in sleek, sexy gangster evening wear. Mary Plaz­as apologised for an unseasonal cold, but she is such a resourceful singer that one hardly noticed until she tired in her final scena.

Even more enjoyable was Giles Havergal’s immaculately stylish, witty and touching staging of Messager’s neglected little chef-d’oeuvre, unaccountably not seen in a fully professional UK staging since the first decade of the 20th century. Messager’s score is froth, but del­ectably airy froth, full of instantly hummable tunes and catchy ensembles, deftly orchestrated and brilliantly paced. The story is a time-honoured operetta yarn of an aristocrat (Hélène) disguising herself as a shop girl (“Véronique”) to test the love of the man (Florestan) she is destined to marry.

The operetta passes in a flash, thanks to Wyn Davies’s sprightly conducting; Havergal’s lightness of touch looks wonderful in Leslie Travers’s simple but evocative black-and-white sets; and the singing is pretty good, too. Mark Stone as a raffish Florestan, a French forbear of Lehar’s Count Danilo, and Helen Williams as a sparkling Agathe — a happily married lady with an eye for mustachioed men — have the operetta style to a tee. There is excellent work from Yvonne Howard as Hélène’s flirtatious aunt, Andrew Mackenzie-Wicks as a deadpan Inspector Loustot and Donald Maxwell as a bumbling Coquenard, the florist who employs “Véronique”. Only Victoria Joyce’s soubrettish leading lady is a slight disappointment, but she doesn’t spoil an enchanting night in Buxton.

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