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Be prepared to meet a bevy of fallen women when Welsh National Opera brings its spring season to Birmingham Hippodrome next week.

David Pountney, the company’s artistic director, is pursuing the idea of collective themes for each seasonal offering, and he has some interesting comments to make about the current racy topic of “women behaving badly” as exemplified in Verdi’s La Traviata, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, and Hans Werner Henze’s Boulevard Solitude.

“With the subjects of human trafficking, exploitation and a world of glamour and capitalism, these three operas cover subjects as modern and relevant today as when the operas were written,” he says.

“But the moral lessons of 19th century society were such that whilst you could watch a woman misbehaving and enjoy their misdemeanours, it was under the strict condition that they had to be seen to be punished in the end by meeting their fate.

“The obsession of 19th century music, literature and the visual arts with she who has strayed from the path – (the literal translation of La Traviata) – may have embodied a degree of hypocrisy, but it also inspired some of the most heartfelt musical expressions of human sympathy,” he explains.

“The hypocrisy lies in permitting the audience the titillation of watching a woman behaving badly for three acts on the condition that she points up the moral by dying miserably in the fourth. The males in the audience in 19th century Paris were not above visiting such women themselves, but they still demanded that their wives and daughters were presented with an elevating moral lesson.”

The week begins with Verdi’s much-loved La Traviata, which is followed by Manon Lescaut, Puccini’s first successful opera, and one which charts the sorry tale of a young woman persuaded not to join the convent she is about to enter but instead lives off rich admirers. For some reason she is deported from Paris, and ends up dying at the feet of her first love - in Louisiana.

Finally in this series comes Boulevard Solitude by Hans Werner Henze, the German composer’s first full-length opera, written at the age of 25, and receiving from WNO its first performances in this country outside London.