Beatrice and Benedict, Welsh National Opera

Such a pity about Beatrice and Benedict! As a musical visualiser, a creator of musical tableaux, a radio composer avant la lettre, Berlioz had few equals. The Damnation of Faust is surely the greatest radio opera ever written. But for some reason he had no grasp of the stage. Benvenuto Cellini is a lifeless succession of spectacular tableaux. The Trojans must have more superb music per square yard of ineffective drama than any work of comparable length.

As for Berlioz’s singing-telegram version of Much Ado About Nothing, it would have merited that title all too well if Berlioz had risked it. As it is, the one he chose tells us precisely what the work is not about, which I suppose is a triumph of sorts. The real heroine is, aptly enough, Hero. She has the biggest solo and the major part in the two big female ensembles. Yet her lover, Claudio (almost her sole topic of conversation) sings nothing except a small part in one trio, and is otherwise passive or absent.

Berlioz called the work a caprice written with the point of a needle, but it needs playing of equivalent refinement

The nominal hero and heroine discover and discuss their love in spoken dialogue, and have nothing approaching a love duet. Beatrice hardly sings in Act 1, Benedict hardly in Act 2. And so on. Almost every dramatic (as opposed to musical) decision is a mistake. Somehow WNO’s revival of their now quite antiquated Elijah Moshinsky production gets round this with a lovely, exquisitely lit Renaissance-arcade set by Michael Yeargan (lighting by Howard Harrison), some witty stage business, especially for the musician Somarone (brilliantly farced up by Donald Maxwell), and well-posed tableaux vivants, which accept the beauty of Berlioz’s inspiration while acknowledging his dramaturgic frailty.

WNO do make some mistakes of their own, it’s true. I can see why they play Beatrice in Geoffrey Dunn’s skilful English, not least for the jokes; but the invitation to regret the absence of Shakespeare’s sparkling barrage of repartee in the presence of odd fragments of it is altogether too glaring. Much better, surely, go French and hang the comprehension (Maxwell, at least, would be funny in any language).