It is good to find the fruity quality of Claudio Desderi’s voice still firm and flavoursome. In 2006 he was 63, his age shown up here by the youthful appearance of the three other principals. Nephew Ernesto looks like a young David Copperfield, slender of voice as of person. Malatesta must be just starting out in the medical profession, for he seems scarcely older, and his light baritone would need no more than a puff of wind to lift it up to tenor. Laura Giordano, the Norina, looks a pretty little thing, and if operatic sopranos were rated according to waist measurement (low scoring high) she would be up there in the top ten. Instead, there still being a preference for steady, well focused tone, she barely qualifies for entry.

As characters, these three do what is expected of them. Over Pasquale himself there is always these days a question mark. In origin, of course, he is a commedia dell’arte clown. Presumably Lablache, the original, with his enormous embonpoint still presented a buffoon, and in the last century Baccaloni continued in that tradition. Desderi has rather too much dignity for that. We don’t laugh with him (he is not a comedian) or at him; the moment we are most likely to carry away in memory is the silence during which his face regains mobility after the astonishment of his first marital slap and, while his fingers grope for his fallen spectacles, he looks into a shrew-pecked future. This is affecting, but the comedy needs its Pasquale at least to sparkle along with the others and probably, like Falstaff, to sparkle brightest.

The stage production is competent and does not indulge in any clever-silliness. Muti’s musical direction is elegant, even flexible. But it is a grim-faced maestro who takes up his baton to conduct Donizetti’s comic masterpiece. And in the end I didn’t arise from my privileged but solitary seat (comedy craves company) refreshed and looking forward to seeing it all over again.