High and low

‘Besides feeble writing, there is a mixture of tragic-comedy and buffoonery in it, which Apostolo Zeno and Metastasio had banished from serious opera’. You can always rely on Charles Burney (the celebrated musicologist, who spent most of the 18th century being professionally underwhelmed) to find fault. But writing here about Handel’s Xerxes he has a point. The opera’s blend of lighter and more serious elements, though typical of Venetian opera, was by no means the norm for the Londoners who were its audience. They didn’t like it then, and nearly 300 years later it’s something we still seem to struggle with, as English Touring Opera’s latest season makes unexpectedly clear.

The all-Baroque programme for ETO’s autumn tour brings its revival of Xerxes together with new productions of Monteverdi’s Ulysses’ Homecoming and Cavalli’s La Calisto — works that offer three very different answers to the same basic dramatic equation: what happens when you add grubby lust to noble love, low comedy to high tragedy?