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Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, a now almost unknown composer, sat in as Toscanini performed one of his pieces, gushing, “I come here to hear every single nuance, every bit of phrasing that I intended, expressed by this marvellous man.”

For Lehar and Wolf-Ferrari in the early twentieth century, read II Divo and Andre Rieu in the twenty-first.

As late as 1936 La Scala in Milan could still premiere such enthusiastically received comedies as Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s delightfully tuneful and quaint II Campiello, based on a play written for the Venetian Carnival of 1756, and which would not have been stylistically out of place had it opened a whole century earlier - rather than in the same year as the BBC began television transmissions.

Similarly, the song cycle “Quattro Rispetti” highlighted Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s talent for creating melancholy miniatures without a wasted note, sung sensitively by the soprano Cecilia Violetta López, with Brian Zeger on piano.

I Gioielli della Madonna Holland Park Opera, Until 2 AugustBox office: 0300 999 1000 Ticket information Written in the middle of a career otherwise devoted to lightweight comedies, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari's 1911 Jewels of the Madonna marked a sudden and violent detour towards verismo's farthest extremes.