The good news: the overture is played with the curtain closed! The overture is the best-known piece of the entire opera, so it goes without saying that it is given plenty of space. Otherwise, Béatrice et Bénédict is not exactly what you would call a box office hit. No wonder: the opera is not particularly exciting, which is partly due to the endless stretches of spoken text.

The story (Berlioz himself wrote the libretto based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing) is insignificant, but the music is at times enchantingly beautiful.

The 2016 Glyndebourne production is very disappointing to me. Laurent Pelly is one of my favourite opera directors, but he has overreached himself here. He has taken the main characters’ “thinking outside the box ” too literally, and the end result is as dull and grey as the colours of the sets, the costumes and even the singers’ make-up.

Fortunately, the singers are all excellent. In her first aria, “Je vais le voir”, Sophie Karthäuser (Héro) still sounds a little heavy, but her duet with the excellent Katarina Bradic (Ursule), “Nuit paisible et sereine!”, sounds just as it should, like a real gem.

Stephanie D’Oustrac is a fantastic Béatrice, and the sexual attraction between her and Paul Appleby (Bénédict) is palpable from the start.

But it is the young baritone Philippe Sly who really steals the show as the gangly Claudio.