Vaughan Williams’s fourth opera, written in 1929, is a curate’s egg – a great deal of charming, English music coupled with a plot of unparalleled confusion, and crucially unsure of how lightly or seriously it is meant to be taken. The composer was always afraid it was “too high-falutin’” and tried to wrest it entirely from its hapless librettist. So what’s the plot? Once upon a time the Empress Persicaria was forbidden by her parents to marry Dipsacus, a magician by trade.
