Andrew Clements declares the new La Forza a consummate disaster. Muti, whose departure may have been about more than scenery, was the only reason the Royal Opera House wanted the production in the first place, and when he cut out, “the company was left with the part of the package it never wanted: a staging of monumental awfulness. The music director, Antonio Pappano, gamely took over in the pit, but the Royal Opera deserves little sympathy for the mess, since it had been happy to compromise artistic standards in the first place by importing the show just to pander to an overrated conductor.”