What, actually, is this “destiny”? The title of Verdi’s 1862 opera suggests a power bent on our ruin. About halfway through you realise there is no one to blame but ourselves: everyone is complicit in his own doom. True, there is that nasty accident with the gun, plus many unlucky coincidences, but the fault, clearly, is not in our stars. Not content with the globetrotting sprawl of the Duke of Rivas’ Spanish Gothic-death-cult 1835 play, Verdi added a battle scene from Schiller to contextualise the protagonists’ lunacy amid a ragbag population, cannon fodder swept around by tides of need and history – people with actually no control over their fates. Some of them survive – unlike our heroes. A rather literal starting pistol goes off by accident at