In the second in a six-part series, Tim Ashley seeks out the best opera productions available to watch complete on YouTube. This week: five comedies in which nothing is quite as straightforward as it might seem

Humour in opera is often ambivalent, bittersweet and troubling. Composers probe the psyches of their characters to reveal hidden conflicts beneath the laughter, and to examine the clashes of moral values that lurk beneath the surface veneer of artifice or farce, with results that can be profound and profoundly unsettling as well as funny. Here are five opera comedies in which nothing is quite as it seems.

Mozart: Così fan tutte

Richard Strauss thought Così fan tutte the greatest opera ever composed. An ambivalent, marvellously open-ended work depicting an erotic game spiralling slowly out of control, it derives its impact partly from the psychological complexity of the score, and partly from the fact that Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, never explicitly tell us how the narrative resolves, hinting at levels of emotional damage perhaps beyond repair or resolution. Nicholas Hytner’s Glyndebourne production carefully mines the resulting ambiguities, and shows real genius in suggesting that disguise enables Ferrando and Guglielmo – Topu Lehtipuu and Luca Pisaroni, both outstanding – to experience an unexpected sexual freedom, at once liberating and dangerous. Anke Vondung is a passionate Dorabella, Miah Persson the vulnerable Fiordiligi, Iván Fischer conducts. For a very different approach – modern, acerbic, controversial – try Claus Guth’s La Scala production conducted by Daniel Barenboim: you can watch Act 1 here and Act 2 here.

Rossini: Il Barbiere di Siviglia

The late, great Claudio Abbado was a superb Rossini conductor, and you can hear him at his best in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s 1972 TV production of the composer’s most popular opera, filmed by Unitel in Munich, though using forces from La Scala, Milan. The cast, one of the best ever assembled for the piece, is dominated by Hermann Prey’s sexy, funny Figaro, while bel canto greats Teresa Berganza and Luigi Alva play the lovers Rosina and Almaviva. Ponnelle’s approach is fairly traditional, but note his clever use of camera angles to reflect the stylisation in the score. He doesn’t shirk the opera’s moments of darkness, or its anticlericalism, either: Enzo Dara’s outstanding Bartolo can be as lethal as he is preposterous, while Paolo Montarsolo is the creepiest Basilio imaginable.

Smetana: The Bartered Bride

The work that effectively put Czech music on the map, The Bartered Bride, remains the finest of all operatic folk-comedies, although there’s a sting in its tail in its depiction of a world of arranged marriages and the literal buying and selling of lives. The upload above, a Czech TV production from 1981, is a bit lightweight – with its almost self-consciously pretty designs and big show numbers, it’s rather like a pre-Glasnost equivalent of an American musical, and you might find it camp in places. But musically, it knocks spots off the competition. Peter Dvorský and the great Gabriela Beňačková are breathtaking as Jeník and Mařenka. And no one plays this music better than the Czech Philharmonic under Zdeněk Košler. Listen to the overture alone to be convinced.

Verdi: Falstaff

Falstaff, Verdi’s last opera, is essentially the work of an old man looking back on life and finding it, with all its setbacks, a colossal joke. But it also marks his farewell to one of the most remarkable of all careers writing for the stage, and its humour is offset with passages of great sadness and poignancy. Tito Gobbi was among the finest of all interpreters of the title role. Here he is at the Paris Opéra in 1970 in a performance recorded by French TV. A great singer-actor, Gobbi captures Falstaff’s self-deluded but warm-hearted vitality with wonderfully subtle glee. He directed the production himself, though it’s by no means a one-man show. Veteran mezzo Fedora Barbieri is a tremendous Mistress Quickly; the underrated Andréa Guiot is the delightfully witty Alice; and Matteo Manuguerra almost steals the show as the most self-important, up-himself Ford imaginable. The upload is from a VHS original: be prepared for the occasional flicker.

Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier

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Filmed at the Nationaltheater in Munich in 1979, this is one of the great performances of Der Rosenkavalier, Richard Strauss’s “comedy for music,” in which he uses Wagnerian methodology in order to recreate the ambivalent world of his great idol, Mozart. It’s exceptionally conducted by Carlos Kleiber with great emotional clarity and insight, and a total lack of the sentimentality that can easily creep into some interpretations. Brigitte Fassbaender, rarely bettered, is the naive, attractive Octavian opposite Lucia Popp’s rapturous Sophie. Gwyneth Jones, who could be controversially variable, is at her best here as the Marschallin – a marvellously understated performance, beautifully acted. Otto Schenk’s period production piles on the Rococo detail, and is tender and barbed as well as funny. If, like me, you like Fassbaender as Octavian, try her extraordinary recording of Schubert’s Winterreise: you can listen to it here.

For another remarkable Rosenkavalier listen here to Karl Böhm’s 1958 recording (audio only), with the wonderful Irmgard Seefried as Octavian.