Say what you like about Monteverdi, but he knew how to get his audience on side. ‘I greet you, heroes, princes,’ declares the personification of Music in the opening scene of L’Orfeo, and if you’re a Glyndebourne regular you’ll feel at home right away. ‘Many singers have celebrated you – and fallen short of the truth, which is too exalted for mortal vision.’ Why, thank you; and how true, how very true. Now, when’s the picnic?

But seduction is what opera does. It’s what opera has done since the very beginning – and L’Orfeo, premièred in 1607 at the court of Mantua, is almost as close to the beginning as we can get. A shrewd director will lean into the impossible extravagance and ambition: the sense that we’re dealing here with an entirely novel piling of art upon art. As director of this spectacular new staging, the artist William Kentridge says that his aim is to provide ‘too much to see and experience’ and your reaction will depend upon how you feel about being overwhelmed. This is not a production for those delicate souls who imagine that baroque opera is somehow safer and purer than those awful overbearing romantics.

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