Moon Over Mozart.(new production of Mozart's Idomeneo set in postwar Iraq)(Column)

In opera festivals, like so much else in contemporary Europe, Britain stands apart. Continental productions are staged in the palaces of Salzburg and Aix, but England's flagship festival, Glyndebourne, takes place in a pint-size opera house erected in 1930, when a dotty colonel added it to his country manor. The festival, which runs this year until Aug. 31, retains a quintessentially English combination of informality and exclusivity. At intermission, patrons in formal dress stroll manicured lawns. Some play croquet. Most spread extravagant picnics, traditionally topped off with strawberries and cream.

This year something has disturbed the bucolic buffet. Peter Sellars, the enfant terrible of stage directors, is back. As a Harvard undergraduate in the late 1970s, he shocked his fellow students by staging Shakespeare in a swimming pool. Ten years later he achieved renown by modernizing Mozart. "The Marriage of Figaro" became class warfare atop the Trump Tower. Don Giovanni was portrayed as a drug dealer in the South Bronx. And "Cosi Fan Tutte" became the bitter joke of a disabled Vietnam vet, played out in a Long Island diner. Each production was staged with a dark, radical edge, critical of modern America. But each also demonstrated unparalleled sensitivity to the nuance of Mozart's musical characters.

Now in his mid-40s, Sellars is as provocative--and sure-footed--as ever. At Glyndebourne this year he's revived his 1996 production of George Frideric Handel's "Theodora," about the fourth-century Christian martyr who was put to death for refusing to worship the Roman gods. Under Sellars's direction, the opera becomes not only gripping drama but also biting criticism of modern-day minority persecution: Roman soldiers in 21st-century jumpsuits brandish machine guns, a cynical president in a power suit signs the death warrant and the title character dies via lethal injection.