In a house where world premieres are rare and successful ones even rarer, I suspect the Vienna State Opera feels it must produce at least one recently composed, audience-alienating work each season, so as to say "we tried", with respect to promoting contemporary music.

To this end, George Enescu's Oedipe was revived last winter in a brilliant production, magnificently sung (it returns in April 2005). This year, we have the first reprise of Alfred Schnittke's Gesualdo since its world premiere in 1995, three years before the composer's death.

Many of the audience exercised a proclivity denied to critics: simply to leave the theatre at the interval and go and do something productive or pleasant, such as change the cat litter box.

In 35 years of opera-going, I cannot recall an evening so totally void of musical and theatrical quality, produced on such a grand scale.

The story is an episode from the life of the eponymous 16th-century composer: to comply with family politics, Gesualdo marries a vibrant young widow; she takes a lover; Gesualdo slaughters the infidels in flagrante delicto; distracted from composing, he kills his baby son, doubting his own fatherhood.

For an evening that contains fornication, murder by genital mutilation, flagellation and infanticide, it's one big yawn. The fault lies in Schnittke's utter lack of skill in setting a vocal line. All the characters sound the same: they endlessly repeat notes in what amounts to nothing more than accompanied recitative, while a harpsichord scurries like a 1960s horror movie, someone plays the organ with his elbows and a huge orchestra blips and bleeps.

The State Opera's waste of its precious talents borders on the obscene.

Schnittke wrote a lot of interesting, groundbreaking music. But Gesualdo should be reserved for bored musicologists with time on their hands.

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