A neat but somewhat specious claim to historical importance prefaces this revival. Mayr’s Ginevra was, as its editor Marco Beghelli has pointed out, ‘the first opera composed in the 19th century which was destined to pass into history’. Commissioned for the first night of Trieste’s Teatro Nuovo in 1800, it was eventually given on the postponed opening in April 1801. Its immediate success led to performances in Vienna and Milan, then throughout Europe, before the great silence which befell almost all the operas of its period, up to the rebirth of interest in recent years. More specifically, it has benefited from the circumstances of its birth, in that they made it the natural choice for a revival to celebrate the theatre’s bicentenary in 2001. A year earlier or later, and a different house for its première, need have made no great difference to the opera itself, but time and place have worked in its favour and now here it is for the first time on records.

Opera Rara (who but?) have undertaken the recording, and that has ensured, once again, a high standard of production and presentation. Jeremy Commons provides an excellent introductory essay, with details about the reconstituted score. No autograph copy is known to exist and as many as 20 versions have been used to put together a text as fully authentic as possible. Even so, passages in the earliest printed libretto are without musical setting – these are included in the book here within inverted commas. They occur mostly in the later scenes and one can well see that they might help to cushion developments which, being abrupt and improbable, have to be accepted as established dramatic conventions. The success of the opera with a modern audience is likely to depend upon the quality of the music, and with this, too, we may experience a slight difficulty.

Mayr is never shoddy. Everything has the touch of a thorough professional, a man of taste who has worked conscientiously on the whole project, distributing the interest of his writing evenly between voices and instruments. He has a feeling for dramatic pace and movement towards a well-defined climax. The trouble is that his best ideas are not melodic. Memorable points do arise, but what memory seizes on to recall is most often some feature of orchestral commentary or scoring and rarely a phrase of the vocal line. This seems to go with a further limitation – that the moments requiring the deepest, most intense emotional expression (think, by contrast, of Mozart’s Figaro, written 15 years earlier, or Beethoven’s Fidelio, given in its first form only four years later) go by with little more than nominal acknowledgment.

Happily, much of the most appealing music is either sung by or associated with the heroine, whose part is taken by the most attractive singer in the cast of this enterprising revival. One of the reasons given for the opera’s disappearance from the repertoire is the extraordinary demands made on the soprano’s uppermost register. Elizabeth Vidal has all the notes and with them a gently rounded voice and an assured technique. Her solos towards the end of Act 1 and in her scene with the King at the start of the third CD are particularly fine.

The hero, Ariodante, originally a castrato role, is sung here by the accomplished mezzo Daniela Barcellona. The villain, Polinesso, is an aptly reedy tenor, the King a sturdy baritone; the others have considerable opportunities but not quite the freshness or fullness of tone to make the most of them. The male chorus contributes admirably and the orchestral playing under Tiziano Severini’s spirited direction is a major factor in the general artistic success.

The recording comes live from the stage and suffers minimally from the usual inconveniences of faulty balance and extraneous noises. The audience gives what, by Italian standards, sounds like merely respectful support though Patrick Schmid, the recording’s producer, assures us ‘the theatre in Trieste was alive’ and ‘Mayr would have loved it’.