★★★★☆
Beethoven’s advice to Rossini was, roughly, “stick to comic operas, laddie”. Semiramide rather proves his point. This melodramma tragico, Rossini’s last Italian opera, has hours of wonderful music. Yet there’s something so contrived about its tragico element, which fleshes out known facts about the Babylonian queen Semiramide (ie, nothing at all) by mashing together bits of Hamlet (spooky intervention from dead king), Macbeth (murderess unhinged by guilt) and Oedipus Rex (mother inadvertently lusting after son).
You feel that Rossini was more titillated than deeply moved by the story’s possibilities, and especially by being able to toy with the delicious taboo of depicting incest on stage (only toy with it, mind; it took Wagner to go the full Monty). Either way, I don’t think