All the world was the stage for Marc Dalbavie’s 2021 Le Soulier de Satin (The Satin Slipper), an epic of the Catholic faith in the Age of Discovery that brought the Paris Opéra back from the pandemic with its world premiere. Now The Melancholy of Resistance, his “filmic” latest opera, promises another magnum opus on the broadest scale. Readers of László Krasznahorkai’s apocalyptic farce will remember a traveling circus whose only attraction is a stuffed whale. The pivotal character is the purehearted Valouchka, a latter-day Parsifal perhaps, whose part Dalbavie has conceived for the countertenor divo Philippe Jaroussky. Believe it or not, the Hungarian State Opera, in Budapest, unveiled a rival adaption of The Melancholy of Resistance last December. It was the 13th opera and the first in Hungarian by Peter Eötvös, whose Angels In America and Three Sisters have enjoyed international acclaim. —Matthew Gurewitsch