Giuseppe Verdi's rapidly complicated, frequently histrionic, infrequently performed opera Ernani plays like a telenovela on fast-forward with the volume turned up.

Opera Boston's production, which opened Friday night at the Majestic Theatre, is exactly what you think opera looks like: there's candelabra, and wigs, or hair carefully styled to look like wigs, and more red velvet than David Lynch could shake a stick at. The labyrinthine plot—a story of imperial intrigue overshadowed by a love story that exceeds the usual geometrical limits of the triangle—is borne along swiftly on the ornately-embroidered shoulders of a cast that could carry it off.

Baritone Jason Stearns sang a booming Don Carlo (crowned Carlos V in the third act, and rocking some Prince Humperdinck hair) with one of the loudest voices that this Bostonist has ever heard emitted from an unamplified human mouth. As Elvira, the object of his entitled affections and Ernani's significant other, Quincy's own Barbara Quintiliani raged and swooned in enormous dresses, producing superhuman sounds with superhuman ease and heartrendingly human emotion. Duets and trios with her outlaw boyfriend, played by tenor Eduardo Villa (a valiant Ernani just shipped up to Boston from the Met), were stirring even when we glanced at the maudlin supertitles: Our nuptial bed of love is the altar of death, etc., etc.

She's the first character to pull a knife—in the second scene!—but she never gets to use it. The libretto by Francesco Maria Piave excised most of the deaths that litter the Victor Hugo play on which the opera is based, so the threatened-stabbing-to-actual-stabbing ratio is totally out of control. Instead, the characters vacillate between thoughts of vengeance and suicide without actually committing to either. At some point in his career, Verdi had at least heard of subtlety, but Ernani, one of his earliest operas, seems to have been written before subtlety was invented and imported to Italy.

Opera Boston's Ernani will be performed once more, this evening at 7:30. Student rush tickets, available after 3 p.m., are $10; regular tickets range from $29 to $114.

Photography by Michael Lutch. Top: Ernani (Eduardo Villa) and his merry men. Right: Finally, somebody dies instead of just singing about it. (Barbara Quintiliani merely swoons.)

Fancy McCulture-Pants contributed a great deal to this review.