Comic operas frequently end with the promise of a wedding; tragedies often explore what happens when the honeymoon is over. Operatic marriages aren’t always happy, and this week’s choice of uploads deals with rifts, breakdowns and domestic nightmares. All five operas, significantly perhaps, were first performed within a relatively short period – 1887 to 1925 – when the nature of marriage as an institution was under scrutiny right across the arts: think of the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and Shaw, and the fiction of Henry James (remember The Golden Bowl), Proust and DH Lawrence.

Verdi: Otello

Otello is extraordinarily well served on YouTube. There are a considerable number of versions out there, many of them exceptionally fine: choosing one isn’t easy. The upload above is the famous RAI telecast from La Scala in 1976, when Carlos Kleiber conducted Plácido Domingo in a production by Franco Zeffirelli. This is probably the best, I think, of Domingo’s several extant performances, both video and audio, in the title role: there’s an impulsive sensuality here and a heady glamour that make him unforgettable. Kleiber’s interpretation, remarkable for its fire and detail, was considered by many to be the finest since Toscanini. Mirella Freni is the ravishing Desdemona, Piero Cappuccilli the fine, if occasionally melodramatic Iago.

For another classic, albeit very different lineup, try Alberto Erede’s 1959 Tokyo performance. Erede was no Kleiber, but the recording does allow us to hear and see the exceptional pairing of Mario del Monaco’s Otello with the great Tito Gobbi’s Iago: you can watch it here. And, for a radical theatrical rethink, try Willy Decker’s 2006 Barcelona production, with José Cura compelling in the title role and an outstanding Iago from Lado Ataneli.

Puccini: Madama Butterfly

Some persist in seeing Madama Butterfly as a Romantic work, when in fact it deals, often unsparingly, with a man who buys a teenage bride in catastrophic ignorance of the emotional consequences, all of it set against a background of US expansion and exploitation. Frédéric Mitterand’s film of the opera, released in 1995, subtly reminds us of the underlying issues in its examination of the clash of early 20th century attitudes between a half-westernised Japan and a US that saw the world very much as its exotic playground. We’re conscious, at times of the almost symbiotic relationship between the two countries. Notice how Jing Ma Fan’s Goro, who presides over the initial transaction, returns at the end to oversee Pinkerton’s adoption of his son by Butterfly: there’s a system in place on both sides, we realise, to deal with the offspring, wanted or otherwise, of such colonialist philandering. Mitterand gets fine, nicely understated performances from his two leads, American tenor Richard Troxell as Pinkerton and Chinese soprano Ying Huang as Butterfly. She really does look quite shockingly young at the start, and the growing attraction between them, of which neither is aware of the implications, is quite beautifully done. The subsequent spiral into tragedy is handled with admirable restraint, and is all the more powerful for its total lack of sentimentality.

Janáček: Katya Kabanova

Katya Kabanova’s tragedy is that she attempts to escape from a loveless arranged marriage through an affair with an attractive but weak man who ultimately is unable to save her. Janáček’s methodology, with its vocal lines based on speech patterns and its repetition of fragmentary rhythmic figurations, is usually seen as antithetical to Puccini’s lyricism. Yet Janáček also saw his opera as a response to Madame Butterfly, and when you listen to the entrance music for both heroines – Katya at 11:03, Butterfly at 15:17 on the previous upload – the similarities are unmistakable. The opera’s repressive atmosphere is well-maintained in François Rochais’s 1988 Geneva production: note the particularly chilling end, in which Katya’s suicide is effectively overseen by the community that has dared to judge her. Ellen Shade is the agonised Katya, slowly losing her reason under pressure from her appalling mother-in-law, Kabanicha, played by the great Czech mezzo Eva Randová. Christian Thielemann, a noted Janáček interpreter early in his career, is the conductor.

Bartók: Bluebeard’s Castle

This is the great Michael Powell’s film of Bartók’s two-hander, made for German television in 1963, and something of a rarity. The project was the brainchild of the American bass-baritone Norman Foster, who produced the film in addition to singing Bluebeard. Powell, whose career was at that point at a low ebb, was drafted in comparatively late in the day, it would seem, by the designer, and one of his regular collaborators, Hein Heckroth.

As one might expect from the co-director, with Emeric Pressburger, of Black Narcissus (which Heckroth also designed) and the director of Peeping Tom, this drags us kicking and screaming into the dark side of the human psyche and doesn’t let go. It shows its age in places: there are echoes of contemporary horror films, while Heckroth’s designs swerve close in places to Wieland Wagner’s work of the same period. But where most stage productions leave the contents of the castle to the audience’s imagination, Powell takes us unsparingly into every nook and cranny, all the while reminding us that the building is ultimately the outward manifestation of Bluebeard’s tormented soul. The Uruguayan soprano Ana Raquel Satre is the very manipulative Judith: Powell’s sympathies lie with Bluebeard; Bartók himself is more even-handed. The Zagreb Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Milan Horvarth. The opera is sung in German. For a good performance in the original Hungarian, click here.

Berg: Wozzeck

Another film made for German TV, from 1970 this time, directed by Joachim Hess, and using forces from the Hamburg Staatsoper under the Italian composer-conductor Bruno Maderna. Berg’s study of a soldier driven to murder his common-law wife has been treated as an internalised psychodrama by many directors of late. It’s the realism and the political anger of this version that I like so much – the sense of a man being ground down by his fellow human beings, all of them unwitting members of a system that crushes and destroys. Hess’s use of muddy, wintry landscapes adds immeasurably to the sombre atmosphere of it all. Toni Blankenheim, one of the finest singer-actors of his time, is the befuddled, tragic Wozzeck, while Sena Jurinac, a major Mozart-Strauss soprano strikingly cast against type, is the sympathetic Marie, less overtly sluttish than most. Watch out for the young Hans Sotin, creepy and unnervingly genteel as the Doctor. Maderna’s conducting is admirably lean and sinewy.