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Much Ado About Nothing, but Rather Less to Laugh About Wexford
National Opera House
10/21/2026 - & October 23*, 25, 28, 30, 2026
Charles Villiers Stanford: Much Ado About Nothing
Charlotte Baker (Beatrice), Ross Cumming (Benedick), Victoria Harley (Hero), Joshua Baxter (Claudio), Alexander Semple (Don Pedro), Meilir Jones (Don John), Maximilian Catalano (Leonato), Wonsick Oh (Dogberry, The Friar), Euan McDonald (Borachio), Rhys Meilyr (Seacole)
Christopher Knopp (music director)
Aoife Spillane-Hinks (stage director), Lisa Krügel (sets and costumes)
R. Cumming, C. Baker (© Padraig Grant)
Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852‑1924) was an Irish‑born composer, influential teacher and leading figure in Britain’s late Victorian musical renaissance. Though best known for church music and Shamus O’Brien (1896), he composed nine operas in an effort to establish a native tradition capable of rivaling continental models. Much Ado About Nothing, premiered at Covent Garden in 1901, set much of Shakespeare’s language to music in an ambitious English operatic adaptation.
Wexford presented the opera in a pocket version of roughly ninety minutes rather than its full length. That distinction shaped the performance profoundly. The abridgement compressed Stanford’s two romantic plots—the witty courtship of Beatrice and Benedick and the darker Hero-Claudio intrigue—without always preserving the transitions and contrasts that give the larger work its dramatic balance.
The comparison with Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict is revealing. Berlioz concentrated on Beatrice and Benedick, sacrificing breadth for comic focus, while Stanford and Julian Sturgis retained both couples and much of Shakespeare’s complexity. In Wexford’s shortened version, however, the broader design became a liability: the performance moved too quickly between contrasting emotional worlds to establish either the play’s comic momentum or the serious stakes of Hero’s humiliation.
Berlioz’s solution was to sacrifice breadth for concentration. His opera does not attempt to reproduce the whole Shakespearean mechanism; instead, it develops the relationship whose verbal combat is most naturally suited to musical comedy. Stanford and Sturgis pursued the more ambitious alternative, preserving the two couples and much of Shakespeare’s language. In the complete opera, that breadth is part of the work’s identity. In Wexford’s pocket version, however, the same breadth became a structural liability, because the compression retained the outline of Stanford’s larger design without always preserving the connective tissue that makes its shifts of tone intelligible. The resulting performance had to contend with a problem familiar to Shakespearean operatic adaptations: fidelity to the words does not necessarily preserve the dramatic life that animated them on the stage, and abridgement can make that problem more acute.
Indeed, the presence of Shakespeare’s text can become a liability when the music neither sharpens the dialogue nor supplies a compelling alternative form of theatrical momentum. The play’s wit resides not only in what its characters say, but in the speed of their exchanges, their interruptions, their shifts of tone and the audience’s pleasure in recognising what the characters themselves have yet to understand. Much of this is difficult to sustain when the dialogue is set to music, and more difficult still when a full‑length opera is reduced to a short festival presentation. Stanford’s staccato writing for Beatrice and Benedick, reportedly conceived with Berlioz’s example in mind, acknowledges the problem and offers some of the score’s most promising material. Yet in Wexford the verbal sparkle did not consistently translate into theatrical electricity, partly because the pocket format allowed too little time for the exchanges to accumulate comic pressure.
The production, directed by Aoife Spillane-Hinks, did little to resolve these difficulties, whether they arose from Stanford’s original conception or from Wexford’s compressed version of it. Its contemporary updating, situated in the milieu of a modern garden party, seemed more cosmetic than illuminating. The staging’s most conspicuous contemporary gesture involved John displaying the incriminating tryst on his mobile phone. One might reasonably ask what this transposition contributes beyond the substitution of a digital image for the older mechanisms of overhearing and misinterpretation. Shakespeare’s plot is already concerned with the manipulation of appearances and the treacherous authority of apparently convincing evidence. Modern technology could have sharpened those themes, but here it felt like an incidental gimmick rather than the foundation of a coherent reinterpretation of either the original play or Stanford’s opera.
More problematic was the treatment of Hero’s supposed sexual transgression. The original comedy reflects a social world in which female chastity, family honour and a woman’s marriageability were intimately connected. Such assumptions are not wholly extinct, of course, but a contemporary setting requires a convincing account of why the accusation should carry precisely the catastrophic weight it does in Shakespeare. Without that justification, Claudio’s denunciation risks appearing not only cruel but dramatically disproportionate, while Hero’s subsequent acceptance of reconciliation becomes harder to credit. In Wexford’s shortened version, the difficulty was compounded by the limited time available to establish the social and emotional stakes before the plot moved towards restoration. The production did not adequately bridge the distance between the conventions of Shakespeare’s comedy, Stanford’s operatic treatment of them and the social world of the present day.
Nor did the performance establish a sufficiently persuasive comic rhythm. Shakespeare’s play requires an exact balance between the two plots: the frothy pleasure of Beatrice and Benedick’s verbal sparring must coexist with the uglier consequences of Don John’s malice. Stanford’s full opera attempts to accommodate both strands, whereas Wexford’s pocket version had to compress their development into a much smaller span. In the performance, the transitions between these registers lacked definition, and Hero’s public humiliation failed to acquire the dramatic force necessary to make the eventual restoration satisfying. The abridgement clearly contributed to the problem, but compression alone cannot explain the absence of momentum. A short opera must be especially economical in establishing character, articulating conflict and preparing its resolutions; Wexford’s version often seemed to inherit the demands of Stanford’s larger structure without finding an equally concise dramatic language.
The musical performance was similarly uneven, though here too the distinction between the opera itself and this presentation is essential. Christopher Knopp presided over a performance with piano accompaniment, an arrangement that inevitably reduced the score’s orchestral dimension. Stanford was a capable orchestrator, and contemporary praise for the 1901 premiere specifically remarked upon the richness and individuality of his orchestration. Hearing Much Ado About Nothing without that colouristic resource, and in a shortened version, inevitably changes the experience. The melodies rarely seemed to surge beyond the accompaniment; their harmonic and lyrical possibilities were constrained by the piano’s percussive, self‑contained sonority. This was not simply a question of instrumental luxury. In Stanford’s opera, whose dramatic transitions depend on tonal shading and whose characters’ emotional states must be distinguished without the full expressive assistance of Shakespeare’s spoken theatre, orchestral colour could be essential to the unfolding action. The Wexford performance therefore offered only a partial account of the score’s expressive means.
There were nevertheless moments of genuine sweetness, particularly in the ensembles and in the duet for Claudio and Hero at the conclusion. These passages suggested the more lyrical and humane opera that might emerge in a fuller performance with Stanford’s orchestration restored. They also indicated that the weaknesses heard at Wexford should not be attributed entirely to the composition itself. Stanford was not incapable of writing attractive vocal music, and the score’s appeal should not be dismissed because this particular pocket presentation failed to realise its full potential.
Among the singers, Korean baritone Wonsick Oh made the strongest impression as Dogberry and the Friar, bringing a welcome vocal solidity to roles that require both character and comic definition. Ross Cumming’s Benedick, by contrast, was tense and somewhat disjointed, while his partnership with Charlotte Baker’s Beatrice did not consistently generate the playful antagonism on which their relationship depends. Baker’s task was particularly difficult: Beatrice must appear both intellectually formidable and emotionally vulnerable, and the compressed staging did not always give her the space to establish either quality convincingly. Victoria Harley and Joshua Baxter, as Hero and Claudio, likewise failed to create a sufficiently persuasive vocal and dramatic chemistry to anchor the more serious strand of Stanford’s opera. Their reconciliation consequently lacked the emotional inevitability that the score’s sweeter concluding music seemed to promise.
Stanford’s Much Ado About Nothing remains a worthwhile curiosity in the history of English opera, and perhaps a more rewarding work than this performance suggested. Its ambition is admirable: to fashion a through‑composed Shakespearean opera that preserves the original’s verbal identity while accommodating comedy, intrigue and lyrical tenderness. Its very fidelity, however, exposes the difficulty of translating Shakespeare into music without either sacrificing the play’s complexity or allowing the text to overwhelm the musical drama. Berlioz recognised the advantage of choosing one couple and pursuing their story with undivided attention. Stanford’s more comprehensive approach might have yielded a richer achievement, but it demands a particularly assured dramatic realisation, as well as the orchestral resources needed to animate its subtleties.
At Wexford, the pocket-opera format, contemporary staging and piano reduction combined to present only a partial and uneven image of Stanford’s larger conception. Neither the staging nor the musical presentation supplied the decisive spark needed to make the compressed version cohere. What remained was a handful of agreeable melodies, some attractive ensembles and the tantalising impression of an opera whose ambitions exceeded the success of this particular encounter. The title promises much ado; this Wexford performance, regrettably, made rather less of it.
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