The new production of Puccini’s Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera, directed by Luc Bondy, has been a sensation, though perhaps not in a good way. It’s drawn some of the most negative reviews there in many seasons, and elicited choruses of boos on opening night.

But over the last quarter century surely we’ve become used to controversy in new productions of beloved operas. Peter Sellars placed Mozart’s three operas with Lorenzo da Ponte librettos in modern settings: Cosi fan tutte unfolded in a diner on Cape Cod, the Marriage of Figaro was set in a luxury apartment in Trump Tower in Manhattan and Don Giovanni took place in the South Bronx (with the banquet scene taking place in a McDonald’s, with Big Macs).

Stefan Herheim’s 2003 production of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail did away with the original libretto entirely – Herheim wrote new dialogue and the production was a treatise on relations between the sexes (even including a quasi-rape scene between Blondchen and Pedrillo).

There’s more:

A 2003 production of Idomeneo directed by Hans Neuenfels has the hero laughing at the severed heads of the Prophet Mohammed, Jesus Christ and the Buddha.

An English National Opera production of Verdi's A Masked Ball had a homosexual rape and members of the chorus sitting on a row of lavatories.

A Louis Erlo production of Tales of Hoffman was set in an insane asylum.

Christoph Schlingensief staged a Parsifal that drew heavily on African myths and images.

Katharina Wagner’s Bayreuth production of Die Meistersinger featured a barefooted, chain-smoking Hans Sachs, and naked dancers in oversized masks of German icons such as Goethe, Schiller, Bach and even Wagner himself.

Many opera-goers lament what they consider the desecration of great art by such stagings, as if updating were itself wrong. But even if an opera of Mozart’s were to be presented in what its producers consider an authentic way, it would still be modern, due to the way singers approach the music, the way they hold themselves, the gestures they use, how the music is played by modern musicians, the lighting, even the costumes (it’s highly unlikely any female singer today would be willing to be as corseted as 18th-century female singers actually were). Anyway, it is impossible ever to be wholly authentic in a presentation of music. If it were somehow to be done, with period instruments, faster tempos, low lighting, more makeup, different singing styles and such, the results would seem wholly unrecognizable to modern ears and eyes.

Now, some directors feel that they can better present classic works of another century to a modern audience by contemporizing or universalizing the situations somehow via recognizable social settings, costumes or even graphic sex. Some operas, such as The Magic Flute, are already set in an unspecified time, and are highly symbolic anyway, and so lend themselves to a variety of directorial interpretations. Indeed, some feel The Magic Flute may benefit from this, as some of its dialogue would strike modern sensibilities as biased.

Other operas, such as those of Handel’s, which only became more widely known in the second half of the twentieth century, have no burden of long performance history with which audiences might be saddled, so directors are free to have their way with the operas’ elaborate plots and lack of stage action. Thus we’ve had Handel set in outer space – as if that would his work more recognizable to a modern sensibility.

Nevertheless, by their very presence in the modern opera house, we acknowledge that these classic operas continue to speak to us. Something universal in their music, in the way the characters express themselves in situations of telling psychological distress or melodramatic crisis, has lasted through the years.

But regardless of whether one likes a particular new staging or not, even a controversial opera production can be somehow worthwhile, since it means we’re still talking about the composer, his music, his librettist, what the opera says to us. Even if we consider what a director has done to an opera to be wrong, at least we should acknowledge that something in the opera spoke to him or her strongly enough for him to act upon it.