"What I find beautiful in how this opera is structured," he said, "is that we drill down from the larger historical events into the human condition".
Eighteenth-century opera is structured, as Ms. Saffer put it, "like pearls on a string": a chain of da capo arias, each adhering to a pattern echoed in modern-day pop songs, with a verse, a bridge and a reprise (ABA form).
Granta 80: The Group 256pp, Granta, £8.99 Marilyn Monroe said true unhappiness was to be lonely within one; Oscar Wilde said it was a tragedy to be without one; and soap operas are structured entirely around them: groups - social, familial, political - form the structure of human experience.
The piece is structured in the style of a Ballad-opera, with songs and choruses, and also has music underlying dialogue, like a melodrama.
The structure of the opera is inevitable, given its genesis.
And the opera is vast indeed.
Here the opera is an annual fixture.
"The opera is top heavy," he said.
The opera is notable for Rossini's mixing of opera seria style with opera buffa.
