A half-baked classic, lovingly reheated

Ferdinando Paer’s Agnese has left no great “hit” to posterity; certainly no individual number that you might find on a Callas or Caballé rarities disc, or in a Juan Diego Florez bel canto recital. But there are very good reasons for paying attention to Paer’s now largely forgotten opera. Premiered in Parma in 1809, Agnese was a huge immediate success and quickly appeared in London, Vienna, Paris and Milan before largely disappearing from the stage a few decades later.

As an early nineteenth-century semiseria, it occupies a significant role in any history of the period around 1800 (or more prosaically, between Mozart and Rossini). And in terms of plot, this is an opera that offers a genuinely tantalising prospect.