It’s a truth universally acknowledged—by theater professionals, anyhow—that compared to comedy, tragedy is a piece of cake. How brave, then, for Juilliard Opera to test its artists-in-training in a double bill of frothy one-acters. The eponymous silken ladder of Gioacchino Rossini’s bedroom farce La Scala di Seta (1812, running time 90 minutes, like Elektra) is the means by which a secretly married couple take their conjugal pleasure under the noses of meddlers who have other pairings in mind. The boy-and-girl-next-door wallflowers of Nino Rota’s radio opera I Due Timidi (1950, running time an hour, like Bluebeard’s Castle) are too shy even to say hello. At the rate they’re going, with folks fainting dead away and getting hit on the head by falling shutters, maybe they never will. Movie fans know Rota’s soundtracks for practically all of the Fellini films you can remember, Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, Visconti’s The Leopard, and Coppola’s Godfather trilogy (Rota copped an Oscar for Part Two). Five years before I Due Timidi, Rota completed a scintillating full-length adaptation of the Age of Offenbach spoken-word operetta The Italian Straw Hat, which didn’t reach the stage until five years after I Due Timidi, in Palermo. That’s another Rota challenge Juilliard might like to take up. —Matthew Gurewitsch