Glyndebourne Opera House is having a pretty good season.

It began with the first Wagner opera ever staged at the Sussex theatre, Tristan and Isolde, then produced a stunning La Boheme and a near-perfect Marriage of Figaro.

Only the Peter Sellars-directed Idomeneo hasn't been a critical success, though audiences loved it.

Now it has come up with its first operetta, a sumptuous staging of Johann Strauss the Second's Die Fledermaus, The Bat, which on opening night received more than a couple of curtain calls.

The operetta was written by Strauss as a response to all the roars of approval being given to Offenbach's operettas in Paris.

Fledermaus came out in 1870 and was an immediate hit - soon becoming a traditional part of the music calendar. It became usual to put it on in the New Year where something extremely fizzy was necessary to match the champagne being quaffed in the cafs.

If nothing else, Fledermaus is most certainly a celebration of champagne.

It is essentially a superb piece of sugar candy, not at all suitable for diabetics, but Strauss did give it something of a dark side.

Conductor Vladimir Jurowski, Glyndebourne's music director, gives the sugary music a hint of lemon jouce to reproduce this small acidity and also gets a distinct Viennese lilt from the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Director Stephen Lawless and his costume and lighting people give us a great setting.

What we have is a beautiful art nouveau birdcage set on a revolve which matches the intrigues of the show's characters.

It's the women who take full singing honours. Pamela Armstrong makes her house debut singing Rosalinde Eisenstein, a woman who masks herself to attend a ball only to be wooed by her husband who thinks he is courting a Hungarian countess.

Eisenstein himself is pretending to be a Marquis and has skipped jail to attend the ball where he meets the prison governor pretending to be a Chavalier. Thomas Allen handles his role well.

The second half of Fledermaus, where all the disguises, pretences and misunderstandings are sorted out, does seem inordinately long.

Fledermaus has long, long chunks of dialogue, all spoken in German. There are subtitles above the stage and the translation is witty but to get the best out of music theatre you really need to watch throughout. This is a five-star show.

Call 01273 813813 for tickets (returns only).