French connection | 28 July 2016

It takes a particularly wilful wit to alight on Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict as the perfect operatic nod to a Shakespeare anniversary. To walk past Verdi’s Otello, Falstaff and Macbeth, to pass over Purcell’s Fairy Queen, Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi and instead opt for this curiously and idiomatically French piece of musical flummery, in which Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing finds itself stripped of any sour notes and whipped up into a sugary dramatic froth, is bold indeed. If it weren’t for the revival of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, opening at Glyndebourne later this season, it might even look a bit like taking le piss.

Lighter than a Frenchman’s promise, Béatrice et Bénédict is the composer’s final operatic hurrah, the ‘caprice written with the point of a needle’ that signalled his release from the labours of Les Troyens and took him from the gilded world of grand opera to the sunnier landscape of opéra comique.