Much Ado About Nothing (opera) Much Ado About Nothing (opera) Much Ado About Nothing is an opera in four acts by Charles Villiers Stanford (his Op. 76a), to a libretto by Julian Sturgis based on Shakespeare's play "Much Ado About Nothing". It was the composer's seventh completed opera. It premiered at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden on 30 May 1901, conducted by Luigi Mancinelli, when it was "well, but not rapturously received by the public", and given one further performance four days later. "The Manchester Guardian" commented, "Not even in the "Falstaff" of Arrigo Boito and Giuseppe Verdi have the characteristic charm, the ripe
Much Ado About Nothing and proneness to sexual lightness". In the patriarchal society of the play, the men's loyalties were governed by conventional codes of honour and camaraderie and a sense of superiority to women. Assumptions that women are by nature prone to inconstancy are shown in the repeated jokes on cuckoldry and partly explain Claudio's readiness to believe the slur against Hero. This stereotype is turned on its head in Balthazar's song "Sigh No More," which presents men as the deceitful and inconstant sex that women must suffer. A theme in Shakespeare is cuckoldry or the infidelity of a wife. Several of the