As serious as La Cenerentola is slight, Fidelio differs from the other opening work in the 2009 Garsington season in other respects. An obvious one is in the care lavished on its composition. Beethoven spent the best part of two years (1804/1805) on the original version, produced another the following year, and a third – the work with which he was finally satisfied – for performance in 1814. Rossini finished La Cenerentola in three weeks in January 1817. Then there are the overtures. Beethoven famously wrote four for his only opera; Rossini couldn’t be bothered to write one at all and lifted La gazzetta’s. (This opera buffa, which he wrote the previous year, was given its long-delayed British premiere at Garsington in 2001).

Yet for all their differences, a common theme can be discerned in these near-contemporary works. It is the celebration of decency, of the hope for a better tomorrow, of goodness for its own sake – all illustrated through the example of a woman faithful to her self and to her ideals.

In La Cenerentola the woman is ‘rags to riches’ Cinders. In Beethoven’s uplifting musical drama she is Leonora. ‘Fidelio’ is the name she adopts when, disguised as a man, she successfully seeks work in a prison in which she suspects – correctly as it turns out – her husband Florestan is being unlawfully detained. Success in this part, as in so many of opera’s ‘breeches roles’, depends on how effectively the singer is able to present the masculine figure others take her to be. In Garsington’s production, from the veteran director John Cox, Rebecca von Lipinski scores highly in this area. One quite sees how this strutting figure might have caught the eye of jailer’s daughter Marzelline (Claire Ormshaw), and why jailer Rocco himself (Frode Olsen) might regard their happy union with approval.

Vocally, too, the performance is one to captivate and delight, nowhere more so than in the final joyful duet of reunion, ‘O namenlose Freude!’ with the husband (Peter Wedd) whose freedom she has won through her bravery.

Sharing in the joy of liberty, of course, are the jail’s other prisoners released on the orders of the King’s Minister (Pauls Putnins) from the clutches of tyrant prison governor Don Pizarro, the latest in a line of hissable villains (Iago, Scarpia, Mephistopheles) portrayed by baritone Sergei Leiferkus. I doubt if there was a dry eye in the house as those ragged, shambling figures – 20 of them, a lavish chorus for Garsington – came blinking into the daylight.

Under conductor Douglas Boyt, this is another triumph for Garsington. Performances continue until July 3.