Whatever you do, don’t leave at the interval. For 2½ hours this operatic version of Edmond Rostand’s celebrated play about the nasally challenged Frenchman has all the vitality of a body gripped by rigor mortis and it seems impossible that the last 30 minutes could give it the kiss of life.

There is one good reason for the opera having been resuscitated now, which is as a fresh challenge for Placido Domingo. This co-production was first seen at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and has now been transported – lock, stock and putty nose – to Covent Garden, where it gives Domingo his 25th (and last?) new operatic role at the house.

It takes for ever to get going. The composer, Franco Alfano, is best known as the man who finished Puccini’s Turandot. It has always seemed a marvel that he never let his own personality intrude. But now we know it was no fluke: his music for Cyrano de Bergerac goes through almost an entire opera without producing a single idea that might recognisably be called Alfano’s own. Everything is clouded in an impressionist haze until the last act, where Alfano suddenly produces a long death scene for his hero that rivals Massenet or Debussy in its visionary spareness.

Domingo was marvellous in that, capturing the autumnal resignation of poor, unloved Cyrano to perfection. But then he had given his all throughout. A tenor half his age might balk at having to engage in a sword- fight through his opening aria, but Domingo husbands his top notes and swashbuckles with the best of them, holding his own against the searingly strong soprano of Sondra Radvanovsky’s Roxane and trumping his rival, Raymond Very’s cleanly sung Christian, in the personality stakes.

Mark Elder conducts with flair and refinement. Francesca Zambello’s production goes for old-fashioned spectacle with expensive-looking sets and a lot more than three musketeers on the payroll. Altogether, Alfano’s opera has been given luxury packaging, but I still would not pay through the nose for it. ★★★☆☆
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