Almost exactly a century after the Weimar Republic’s constitution took effect, English Touring Opera presents a show whose birth coincided with the Republic's untimely death. His third collaboration with the prolific, maverick playwright Georg Kaiser, Kurt Weill’s The Silver Lake (Der Silbersee) opened in three German cities (Leipzig, Magdeburg and Erfurt) just 19 days after Hitler had come to power in 1933.

No great innovations in this Seraglio – as ETO are styling Mozart’s early Singspiel (its full title in translation is The Abduction from the Seraglio – but a traditional staging that makes the most of all the work’s characters and quirks.

A crash, a scurry, a long, lilting serenade – the overture to Rossini’s Elizabeth I sounds oddly familiar. Not to worry. English Touring Opera has anticipated our confusion. “You may recognise this overture” flash the surtitles, to a ripple of laughter, before explaining that yes: this is essentially the same piece, originally composed in 1813 for Aureliano in Palmira that ended up attached to – of all things – The Barber of Seville.

Selfish, cunning, cynical, the older generation has screwed up the world with aggression abroad and dishonesty at home. Can their children make it good again? This family drama of transgression and reparation threads through Idomeneo, the opera that Mozart – who had his own troublesome issues with both biological fathers and father-figure patrons – premiered in Munich in 1781.

The Fates did not want theartsdesk to review English Touring Opera’s new production of The Marriage of Figaro.

Baroque opera is always a challenge to stage, and Rameau’s Dardanus is no exception. In its original form, the story, of love in times of war, was infused with allegorical characters and mythological scenes. It flopped, and so Rameau and a new librettist thoroughly revised the work to focus more on the human drama. But even with the changes, the plot is still slow and nebulous, and ends about half an hour before the opera does.

How well do you know your bad Victorian poetry? “When through the purple corridors the screaming scarlet Ibis flew/In terror, and a horrid dew dripped from the moaning Mandragores.” Go on, guess the author. Or how about this? “What time the poet hath hymned/The writhing maid, lithe-limbed,/Quivering on amaranthine asphodel". Got it yet? The first is Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, from 1881. The second, WS Gilbert’s libretto for Patience – written in the same year, and skewering Wilde with gleeful relish and lethal precision.

The curtain is up for the overture to English Touring Opera’s new production of Don Giovanni, but no-one is on stage. Instead, we gaze at Anna Fleischle’s set: a creation in two layers. On the top, elegant Klimt panels glint with gold. Below, and joined to the opulence above by a rickety looking metal fire escape, is a Piranesi-like underworld of drab brick, archways and mysteriously curving passages – perfect for lurking or throwing sinister shadows.

Gluck's two operas about the daughter of Agamemnon saved from sacrifice only to serve as priestess-butcher herself have found their level on the contemporary operatic stage. Not that the handful of UK productions or their casts in recent years have quite matched the pared-away beauty of his peculiar classicism: neither Iphigénie en Aulide at Glyndebourne nor the Royal Opera's Iphigénie en Tauride have stuck in the memory, and I doubt if ETO's brave shot at the second opera will either.

Shorn of several scenes, characters, and a large portion of the orchestra, the question was always whether English Touring Opera’s Pelléas et Mélisande was going to thrive in its new intimacy and intensity or shatter with the pressure. The answer sits somewhere between the two, in a production where some orchestral deficiencies are supplemented by a strong cast and bleeding cuts are – at least partially – staunched by an elegant, understated production.