Royal Opera: Don Pasquale

'I'm uncomfortable,' admits David Syrus, Head of Music of the Royal Opera, at the pre-performance talk. 'Don Pasquale is an old person being mocked for our entertainment, and that is something we probably wouldn't find acceptable today.' Syrus does, however, concede that Donizetti's opera is 'unbelievably accessible'. 'You will be charmed by the music,' he assures us; but he wonders all the same if our sympathies will truly lie with the young people.

The role of Don Pasquale this season is played by Paolo Gavanelli who, in true buffo baddy style, never really gets a melody line, 'so that he doesn't ingratiate himself with the audience'. Malatesta, played by Jacques Imbrailo, is the sort of 'smooth, slick person you wouldn't buy a used car from', but who nevertheless succeeds in his ruse of selling the idea of marriage to Pasquale. The two young lovers, Ernesto and Norina, are played by Barry Banks and Íride Martínez. Ernesto is described by Syrus as being, true to his name, 'a rather boring, earnest young tenor', while Syrus finds there is 'something synthetic' in the character of Norina, who is full of 'artifice and deception'.

The infamous slap, when it happens, is a lot less scandalous than when the opera first premièred in 1843. Then, the Parisian critics decried it as 'too much'. According to La France Musicale, 'the threats in Act I are fine, but carrying them out is not funny', whereas Le National regarded it as 'simply violence. She calls her husband a buffoon, and this is just about okay. But slapping a 70-year-old man! Really, Madame!'

Although the action takes place in a doll's house (the production was designed by Isabella Bywater), Syrus is at pains to point out the element of verismo that surrounds the central characters. The lady in the kitchen chopping salami at the end as she was in the beginning for Syrus recalls Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts, in which all extraordinary action is inevitably set against the backdrop of the mundane.