Respighi’s Sleeping Beauty began life in 1922 as a small-scale piece, commissioned by the puppeteer Vittorio Podresca for performance at the Teatro dei Piccoli, a children’s theatre in Rome, and only reached its definitive form in 1934, when Respighi reworked the score as a full-scale opera for its stage premiere in Turin the same year. We know too little, regrettably, about its first incarnation, of which only Respighi’s piano score survives. The revision, however, is one of his finest operas, at once ravishingly beautiful and capable, I suspect, of casting its considerable spell on adults and children alike.

Its success lies in Respighi’s ability to weave together an eclectic multiplicity of styles and genres into a wonderfully consistent whole. As one might expect, Impressionism and post-Romanticism rub shoulders with formal numbers derived from early music. Piano cascades and shimmering strings evoke a fairyland not far removed from the Janiculum sequence from Pines of Rome, while the court rituals have much of the elegance and grace of The Birds or La boutique fantasque. A grotesque gavotte introduces us to four useless Doctors, who vainly try to revive the Princess with science, and the second act closes with a Stravinskian ballet of Spiders, who spin cobwebs round the sleepers in the castle.

The libretto, by Gian Bistolfi, is for the most part witty but can, however, turn heavy-handed. Bistolfi’s decision to let his heroine sleep not for a century but for three hundred years allows Respighi both to waken her at the time of composition and to add cakewalks and foxtrots into the mix in the final scenes. The Blue Fairy’s prediction, however, that the Princess will be roused from slumber by ‘the raptures of April’ also pulls in a portentous Symbolist gloss that equates her awakening with the arrival of spring: the Prince himself is called Aprile, and his first kiss is the prelude to a big, almost Straussian love duet that sits a bit uneasily with the rest of the score.

It’s also very much an ensemble piece, with no one role allowed to dominate, though Respighi’s vocal writing is nothing if not exacting, which ultimately makes for an opera that ultimately lacks a star vehicle but which at the same time is difficult to cast successfully. The challenges are more than met, however, in this beautiful DVD of Leo Muscato’s 2017 Cagliari production, exquisitely conducted by Donato Renzetti. Angela Nisi makes a fine, silvery-toned Princess, tellingly naive in her opening scenes but wakening to more adult emotions when faced with Antonio Gandía’s ardent, handsome-voiced Prince. Shoushik Barsoumian does ravishing things with the Blue Fairy’s coloratura, for which Stravinsky’s Nightingale to some extent served as the model. The rest of the cast are consistently good and take multiple roles, all of them exuberantly characterised.

The staging, meanwhile, is a thing of great charm. Muscato kicks off the proceedings in the 18th century, which allows Nisi to awaken in the present day. The opening is really lovely, as birds and a chorus of frogs, sheltering under umbrellas, ruefully observe the Ambassador’s awkward attempts to summon the Fairies to the Princess’s christening. Knitting has, for some reason, replaced spinning in the scene where the Princess pricks her finger; but later on there’s genuine enchantment as a corps de ballet of mice bear the sleeping Princess to her moon-shaped bed before the Spiders weave their cobwebs over the sleeping court. The whole things provides some much-needed magic at a time when we really could do with it most. I loved every second of it.