Rare delight | 31 March 2007

Camacho’s Wedding; Poro

An opera by Mendelssohn? It sounds unlikely, but not because you can’t imagine him writing one, as you can’t with Bruckner or Brahms. You’d expect someone with Mendelssohn’s particular gifts to be able to write fine operas, but you’d also expect to have heard about them. And now it turns out that he did write at least one most attractive piece, which has acquired a small reputation as being a mistake. It took University College Opera to put us right about that. They staged four performances of Camacho’s Wedding, a full-length Singspiel, that is to say sung numbers separated by spoken dialogue. Mendelssohn created it when he was 14 to 17, and writing the most astonishing music ever composed by someone of that age. Nothing in Camacho is up to the level of the Octet or the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it is recognisably from the same pen, and very much more worthy of revival than the late-Romantic German stodge or the Italian giddy tragedies from the early-19th century which we are constantly being urged to revalue.