Peter Conrad discovers Glyndebourne without grass in the New Mexico desert

The Santa Fe Opera advertises its summer season by promising "heavenly music, celestial voices" or - in a variant of the slogan - "marvellous music, spectacular sunsets". The untamed landscape of New Mexico and its simmering, combustible weather constitute part of the show.

Opera began here in a makeshift open-air compound in 1957. Since 1998, the theatre has had a wooden sail-shaped roof, suspended from cranes, which scoops up rainwater to irrigate the eroding cliffs on which the building perches, but its sides remain open and there is no back wall to the stage. Nature therefore designs the scenery, with the volcanic ridges of Los Alamos (where J Robert Oppenheimer and his team invented the atomic bomb) and the busy, shifting desert as a backdrop; the proscenium frames those shamelessly vivid sunsets, along with dust storms, lightning bolts, angular downpours, and the double rainbows that arch in brief appeasement across the engulfing sky. On the night I saw Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri, an ignited, golden dusk - fringed by jokey cut-out palm trees on stage - faded, as if on cue, to pearly grey just as the overture began. But the weather is not always so well-tempered: on the previous evening, during La Traviata, a monsoon swept over. Thunderclaps mocked Verdi's tinny drum rolls, and drenching gales tore at the artificial fernery in Violetta's garden. The courtesan came close to drowning before she could die of consumption.

The problem, as in any colonised land, is one of acclimatisation. As Willa Cather suggests in her New Mexico novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, God deposited "all the materials for world-making" on this convulsed plain but then wandered off, discouraged, before completing his creation. Spanish missionaries attempted to implant a Christianity that had no connection with the pantheism of the Indians, who worshipped the maternal earth and the paternal sky and thought of those evening storms as acts of parental coition; the Mexicans adapted Catholicism to suit themselves, sticking white crosses on adobe huts like the one at Ranchos de Taos, and festooning the Virgin Mary with aureoles of spicy crimson chillis. In some ways, the social reality of New Mexico is more operatic than any of the operas performed at Santa Fe. In La Traviata, the sodden Violetta, a reformed good-time girl, loudly proclaimed her own state of penitence. Earlier that day, I had been to see a rustic chapel at Chimayo, where every Easter, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, who walk 80 miles from Albuquerque, come to abase themselves and rub "holy dirt" into their wounds. Penance, for Violetta, is a state of mind; for the peons trudging along beside the highway, it's an arduous physical trial.

Santa Fe means "holy faith", and opera promotes a gospel of its own - a religion of sublimated passion and sacrificial nobility - in this ancient landscape. Modern Americans are eager to be converted, and wealthy retirees flock to Santa Fe in their finery, picnicking in the car park as if this were a Glyndebourne without grass, but the cult has not quite made itself at home here. The audience, intently reading the projected titles, sabotaged this year's production of Eugene Onegin by mocking the vocational misery of Tchaikovsky's morbid characters. Guffaws greeted the translation of a melody sung by Tatyana's mother, who declares that connubial routine is an acceptable substitute for romantic fulfilment. The idea sounds blasphemous to Americans, constitutionally rallied to the high-speed pursuit of happiness.

I feared the worst when I read a precis of La clemenza di Tito in one of the company's brochures. Mozart's study of political morality seemed to have been adapted to current conditions: "a country's new ruler", the blurb said, "is put to the supreme test when the Capitol is attacked". So was the clement emperor Titus to be George W Bush, piously forswearing revenge? After last September, every cultural event in the United States is expected to serve the purposes of commemoration or recuperation, and the Santa Fe programme book opened on a quotation from Leonard Bernstein, recommending music as "our reply to violence". As it happened, Tito's response to betrayal, in this thoughtful production, was desperate disillusionment, not the facile forgiveness prescribed by Mozart: shedding his court uniform, he ended the opera barefoot, wandering in a field of flowers like a hippy who has opted out of society.

Despite Bernstein's remonstrance, there is little enough that music can do to repair damaged American morale, and the best production of the Santa Fe season was the most heedlessly forgetful and licentiously hedonistic. L'Italiana in Algeri began with a crackling electrical storm that turned out to be a false alarm conjured up by the lighting technicians; Rossini's heroine buzzed the auditorium in a biplane, before crash-landing in an Algeria whose exotic settings were pages from a pop-up picture book. As the bossy Isabella, Stephanie Blythe got her way with the aid of a supple voice and a roly-poly body that advanced on opponents like a ten-tonne truck. William Burden hurled out volleys of high Cs as her enslaved lover Lindoro, while Mark S Doss, playing the fatuous Mustafa, hilariously conducted anthems in praise of himself. Mustafa's captives escape while he stupidly gorges on the spaghetti they have prepared for him; before leaving, in helium balloons that drift off across the desert sky, they tell him in a jaunty ensemble that "Whoever has half a brain only wants to be comfortable". The audience, reading the English titles, this time chuckled in agreement. The constitutional admonition has been subtly altered in contemporary America: if you can no longer pursue happiness, you can at least concentrate - with the aid of opera, or any other available narcotic - on feeling good.

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