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Long before the tears of a clown were celebrated in the pop song smash of that name from Smokey Robinson, they were a familiar feature of opera in such works as Verdi’s Rigoletto and Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci. Jacques Offenbach’s Fantasio is another of them, though few will have realised, since the piece utterly vanished from the radar after its premiere at Paris’s Opéra-Comique in 1872. The classy revival at Garsington – a merry romp in the festival’s larkiest spirit – was actually (and astonishingly) the opera’s first airing in Britain, coinciding with the 200th anniversary of its composer’s birth.