Justin Timberlake says sorry, but he’s not the only one who should apologise

And when Covent Garden produced its latest all-expense-spared extravaganza — a prim little salon concert in the funeral-parlour-meets-whorehouse Crush Bar with Uncle Tony Pappano tickling polite ivories while laundered young singers with nice hair piped "Come into the garden, Maud" — clearly the time had come to seek out a bracing draught of hardcore Euro-opera.

and indeed, it turns out they’ve been a teeny bit more industrious over in

outremer — as they can afford to with their ability to ignore such fripperies as box-office receipts.

Thus the empty Grand Theatre in Geneva lately witnessed a notable demolition of Mozart’s Clemenza di Tito by the affable Swiss director Milo Rau (I’ve reviewed this online — and the show is on Mezzo TV). This poised, luminous miracle was dashed off by Mozart in 1791 to mark the coronation of some unworthy Habsburg or other, using a brown-nosing text that had already been wheeled out dozens of times for every princeling in the previous half-century.

Rau’s case (you guessed!) is that the first-century Emperor Titus, hitherto generally thought the most righteous dude, was actually a massive twat, busy repressing the shit out of everyone behind the scenes while giving it the large one with mercy and forgiveness for the cameras.

Standard teen provocation, indeed, but what is notable is that Rau is finally permitted to do what all directors long to: to demote the previously sacrosanct music, ditching the tedious bits, stopping the show to bung in a scene of a guy having his heart ripped out by two African ladies, or, best of all, sidelining the music during some particularly tiresome aria by turning off the translations and projecting a story about refugees, while the despondent singer warbles away forgotten and ignored in the corner.

Mozart might have agreed with Rau about Titus, of course (while muttering “Jeez, are you literally 16?”). But I’m sure he’d join in our cheers for this momentous liberation from the tyranny of the composer and his blasted notes. About bloody time too!