The infinite variety of sexual experience, behaviour and attitudes has been a central preoccupation of opera composers since the genre’s beginnings. Music, with its patterns of excitement, tension, rhythm and climax is innately predisposed to erotic depiction and expression. Operatic psychology understood both the mechanics of desire and repression long before Freud and the psychoanalytic movement, and the moral and social responses to this most insistent of forces within our lives.

Monteverdi: l’Incoronazione di Poppea

Conducted by René Jacobs, Michael Hampe’s production of Monteverdi’s last extant opera was filmed at the 1993 Schwetzingen festival. Hampe is particularly good at examining the intersection between sex, politics and metaphysics. Nero’s Rome has overtones both of Renaissance Italy and a modern dictatorship, and the maps of the world, and later of the sky, on which – and in front of which – the drama is enacted, are a constant reminder that the opera plays itself out on a scale at once imperial and cosmic. Tremendous performances from Richard Croft as Nero and Patricia Schuman as Poppea capture both the physicality and the delirium of a passion that gradually becomes impervious to reason, and makes casualties of Kathleen Kuhlman’s proud Ottavia and Jeffrey Gall’s hapless, handsome Ottone. The final, unforgettable, image says it all.

Mozart: Don Giovanni

Each age, they say, reinvents Don Giovanni in its image, an idea taken literally in Robert Carsen’s 2011 La Scala production, which opens with Peter Mattei’s Don prowling in front of an enormous mirror that reflects the auditorium back on itself, and goes on to use theatrical imagery and alienation effects to present a coolly erotic portrait of a moneyed society at once self-divided and hypocritical. Carsen is very good on the personal dramas of conflicted emotion the Don leaves in his wake, while Mattei admirably conveys the fixity of purpose of a man prepared to lose his soul rather than betray his sense of his own integrity. It’s finely conducted, in a big-boned way, by Daniel Barenboim. For a more traditional staging – and a remarkable musical experience – try Wilhelm Furtwängler’s 1954 Salzburg performance.

And, for something completely different, seek out Kasper Holten’s film Juan based on the opera. It will alarm purists – Holten takes liberties with the score, but it’s a formidable piece of cinema, and Christopher Maltman bares body and soul in an extraordinary central performance. The trailer is here: you need to get the DVD to see it complete.

Bizet: Carmen

Carmen is, in some respects, Don Giovanni’s female counterpart. Both operas are about the emotional havoc wrought by a self-determining figure aware of their own amorality; and both central characters are prepared to pay what is perceived, in each opera’s world, as the ultimate price for their sexual integrity. Where Giovanni risks his soul, Carmen defiantly braves death at the hands of the obsessive psychopath she has rejected and to whom she now refuses ever to submit. A powerful operatic statement, Bizet’s opera has become so familiar that we all too easily tend to forget that its first audiences in 1875 found it baffling and brutal, even obscene. Choosing a single upload isn’t easy. I’ve opted for David McVicar’s 2002 Glyndebourne staging, partly because McVicar treats the opera as a piece of French naturalism (which is is), rather than a kind of Spanish travelogue; and partly because Anne Sofie von Otter is admirable in her characterisation of Carmen as a self-assured, independent woman. If you prefer the grand manner approach, then watch Franco Zeffirelli’s 1978 Vienna staging, conducted like one possessed by Carlos Kleiber, though Elena Obraztsova’s matronly Carmen won’t be to everyone’s taste. For something altogether more avant-garde try Emma Dante’s 2009 La Scala production, conducted by Daniel Barenboim: the downside is a tobacco factory that appears to be full of nuns: its great advantage is Jonas Kaufmann as a compelling, iconic, leather-clad José.

Strauss: Salome

Based on Oscar Wilde, and arguably the most extreme of operas, Salome deals with a sexual awakening so traumatic it assumes necrophiliac implications, an experience its heroine repeatedly defines as love in a world so corrupt that no one else dare speak its name. A performance stands or falls on the title role, so it’s worth putting up with flickers, murky visuals, and a Japanese commentary and surtitles to hear and see rare footage of the great Leonie Rysanek in action in Tokyo in 1980. Strauss imagined Salome as 15: Rysanek was in her 50s when this was filmed. But it’s all there, astonishingly acted, and sung with an engulfing sound that tears you in two. For other outstanding interpreters of the role watch extracts of Ljuba Welitsch, Karita Mattila and, most recently, Alex Penda (who, be warned, leaves little to the imagination). Here you can also watch the extraordinary 1923 Hollywood film of Wilde’s play, with Alla Nazimova as Salome, designed by her lover Natacha Rambova, who was also Rudolf Valentino’s wife.

Berg: Lulu

Act I

This 2010 Salzburg festival production of Berg’s Lulu was the work of Vera Nemirowa, the Bulgarian-born, German-based director, and one of the few women ever to have staged the piece. It’s an extraordinary interpretation, both thoughtful and in-your-face-explicit. Patricia Petibon’s Lulu is at once the waif-like femme fatale who is all things to all straight men, and the angry, traumatised victim of the exploitative world in which she moves but is rarely able to control. A succession of powerhouse male singers – Pavol Breslik, Michael Volle, Franz Grundheber and Thomas Johannes Mayer – are the sensual yet disquieting predators and prey in her life.

Act II

Like Robert Carsen in his production of Don Giovanni, Nemirowa implicates the audience in the opera’s world, on this occasion by locating the Act III gambling house scene in the auditorium rather than on stage: look out for composer Wolfgang Rihm being accosted by cast members at one point! The Vienna Philharmonic is beautifully conducted by Marc Albrecht. It all makes for brave, provocative music theatre, but be warned that Nemirowa’s unflinching take on the final scene is very disturbing indeed.