Devoted opera listeners delight in having lots of high-quality live performances to attend. So it should be no surprise to find that two of Washington’s most devoted fans of opera — Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and yours truly — after hearing the premiere of Washington National Opera’s production of L’Elisir d’Amore on Saturday night, were reunited in the audience for Washington Concert Opera‘s performance Sunday night at Lisner Auditorium. Artistic director and conductor Antony Walker led the final performance of the group’s two-opera season, a stunning concert rendition of Gioacchino Rossini’s lesser-known opera seria Tancredi, from 1813. Rossini composed this opera for his first production at one of the most famous opera houses in Italy, the Gran Teatro La Fenice in Venice, incredibly one of four operas that he composed and saw produced in that one year alone. No one can accuse Rossini of lingering too long over a composition, and for that reason a few of his operas are titans in the beloved operatic repertoire and the rest are forgotten.

Tancredi deserves to be forgotten because of its absurd libretto, adapted rather freely by Gaetano Rossi from Voltaire’s play Tancrède (1760). Voltaire’s intention was to show that if people are credulous and believe patently false things, they are capable of committing terrible acts in the name of morality. The tragedy in the story is that nearly all the people who love the play’s heroine, Aménaïde — even her father and Tancrède, the man who claims to love her — believe that she has been false on the basis of an intercepted letter and condemn her to death. The opera undoes Voltaire’s tragic conclusion, with Tancrède dying on the field of battle, in favor of a rather forced happy ending. At the moment in the libretto where this happens, and the male characters all realize that they have been mistaken, the audience’s laughter in the auditorium signaled the absurdity of the reversal.