The life of Antonio Sacchini (1730-86) makes sad reading. The composer of nearly 50 operas, eight of them settings of libretti by Metastasio, he had successes in Naples, Venice and Rome before moving to London. Here he composed for the King’s Theatre, the principal venue for opera and the scene of many of Handel’s triumphs, both secular and sacred. Forced to leave England on account of his life of dissipation he moved to Paris, where he fell foul of various intrigues. He was a favourite of Marie Antoinette, but the Queen let him down by reneging on a promise to stage what was to be his last completed opera at Fontainebleau. Sacchini died soon afterwards; the following year it was performed at the Opéra, where it became an instant hit.

That opera was Oedipe à Colone, and it was at a performance 38 years later that Berlioz, as he recounts in his memoirs, ‘began to weep…like a man engulfed with distress’. Based on the second of Sophocles’ Theban plays, the plot concerns Polynices, who has taken refuge at the court of Theseus, and his guilt at the part he played in sending his father Oedipus into exile. After a slow start, chorus and dancers celebrating the forthcoming marriage of Polynices to Eryphile, Theseus’s daughter, the drama comes to life. There is a mad scene for Oedipus, where he sees the Furies and confuses his daughter Antigone with the dead Jocasta, and two splendid trios: at the end of Act 2, where Theseus helps Antigone save Oedipus from the wrath of the people, and in the penultimate scene, marking Oedipus’s forgiveness of Polynices. This precipitate departure from Sophocles, who had Polynices and his younger brother Eteocles cursed by their father, inspired the ‘penetrating sweetness of the simple melody’ that so affected the young Berlioz.

The music, as you might expect, is much in the manner of Gluck’s French operas, especially Iphigénie en Tauride: not so much in the mad scene, despite the similarity between the torments of Oedipus and Orestes, as in the grateful writing for Polynices, whose second air in Act 1 resembles a speeded-up version of Pylades’ ‘Unis dès la plus tendre enfance’. Sacchini shows a sound dramatic touch in, for example, the way he moves flexibly by means of an interrupted cadence from air to recitative.

The performance, unfortunately, is rough and ready. Sviatoslav Smirnov lacks tenderness in the reconciliation scene, while Fabrice Mantegna’s loud and uningratiating tone makes the part of Polynices something of a trial to listen to. Both are outclassed by Manon Feubel. This will certainly do for the moment, but a recording by Marc Minkowski or John Eliot Gardiner…now that would be something.