Handel’s Semele at Glyndebourne: going out in a blaze of glory
Last Saturday Glyndebourne became a potential crime scene. The countryside haven witnessed opera’s Women’s World Cup moment. It happened thus. The ref had just shown a red card to Semele who blew up convincingly in Act III of George Frederic Handel’s Semele. She was off the pitch and en route to the dressing room.
The sight of her lover, Jove, in all his godlike, burny-lightning pomp had proved a tad too scorching. Juno’s unfaithful husband had been easier to canoodle with earlier when in human form, even badly kitted out in a ghastly XXXL double-breasted lime-yellow suit and Elton John glasses.
And here’s the crime. Step up Athamas, American countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, Semele’s former suitor, who played offside in extra time to, out of nowhere, hard tackle Ino, Semele’s sister.
He unsurprisingly seemed less enamoured of his Semele reduced to a pile of hot, smoking cinders, than in her Act I self-admiring pulchritude. So, a player to his roots, Athamas swapped jerseys at half-time. Now for a teammate huddle with Ino. He stepped forward and planted a hefty, unsolicited smacker square on her unyielding lips.
Luis Rubiales, suspended Spanish soccer federation chief, the main protagonist in the recent Spanish forced snog debacle, and current go-to world authority in the unsolicited smackeroo department, could not have pulled it off more convincingly.
Knowing Nussbaum Cohen, I sent him a cheeky post-opera email saying he should perhaps expect to be fingered as the next Spanish Football Association boss. “Ha!!! Brilliant. I’ve been fielding calls from the Association, but we haven’t been able to work out a deal”, came the instant reply. Stick to the day job, Aryeh!
Which goes to show that the rising countertenor not only has a passionate voice, first let loose as a synagogue cantor, then shaped while an Adler scholar in San Francisco, but an attractive self-denigrating sense of humour which stands him in good stead when adding humour to his roles. As when he was recently a remarkable comic turn as Rosencrantz in Brett Dean’s Hamlet. He gained much audience sympathy as the put-upon Athamas.
First off with Semele. Don’t take the opera too seriously. This is a great entry point for anyone who thinks Handel nothing but a boring old Baroque fart. He isn’t. Semele is a great evening’s entertainment with well-concealed stings in its tail. For those who need to be reminded of the full synopsis, adjourn here.
Disguised as an oratorio, Handel smuggled Semele onstage on the first Friday in Lent, 10 February, 1744. It was a cloak and libretto operation. The public and censors expected a religious work along the lines of Handel’s other wildly popular religious oratorios. The composer had bolder plans.
Having ditched Italian opera because it was failing commercially, Handel saw an opportunity to create a new market. With William Congreve, the famous Whig playwright, penning a libretto based on a classical work by Ovid telling of Greek legend, the censors were gulled into a sense of false security.
What the audience got instead of Lenten hair shirts was a bawdy opera, sung in comprehensible English no less, featuring a randy god, Jove, and a self-obsessed adulterous influencer-earthling, Semele, who fancied the best way to become immortal – “Just look at my followers, dahling! I deserve it.” – was to seduce Jove and eventually have him make her immortal. She could then leave dowdy Frogmore behind and high tail it to trendy Montecito. Well, something along those lines.
Myself I shall adore, Semele’s grandstanding 18th paeon of praise to herself, is nothing less than an effusion of perfectly recognisable 21st century self-delusion and narcissism. The human psyche has not changed much. Semele invented the selfie two hundred and fifty years before the smartphone was even thought of. Opera for today.
Meantime, Juno, Jove’s cuckolded wife, is plotting Semele’s downfall by appearing to her in the guise of her sister, Ino. The cunning plan is to egg her on to persuade Jove to grant any wish to prove his love, then make that wish be his appearing before her in full godlike pomp. Juno/Ino knows that Semele’s human frame will not survive the exposure to radiant god-like glory. No pair of Raybans has been made dark enough. Curtains, Semele.
To add to the mayhem, Athamas, who expects to marry Semele, eventually reappears, and falls in love with her sister, Ino, after observing Semele’s immolation. Hence the kissy-kissy. A foreshortened period of mourning.
Which takes us to a core requirement of any self-respecting production of Semele. She really must explode. No minor, fizzing disappearance will cut it. The whole point is that having dominated the action until this moment, when she disappears, she is gone for good, forgotten and everyone else just gets on with their lives. Her X, formerly known as Twitter, account deleted.
I’ve seen one production where she drops through a trapdoor. Useless. Another when she ascends into the flies. Totally off message. Here Welsh director Adele Thomas treated us to a right scorching disappearance. Joan of Arc, meet Wicker Man.
At the critical moment of Jove’s transformation Semele slipped on a rather alarming suit of clunky armour back of stage. Which then burst from top to bottom into roaring flames, leaving only a scorched metal frame. I can only assume soprano, Joélle Harvey, singing Semele escaped through the back of the suit beforehand, because she had survived through a dozen performances. I was seeing the last.
One production test passed with flying colours. Another, I’m not so sure of. The opera ends with the announcement that Semele had been pregnant and her baby, the god, Bacchus, Jove’s son, was to be given to the world to woo the Wapping ale house crew. Stouts all round.
But Thomas had decided to portray Semele as pregnant from the start. The narrative problem this creates is to make Athamas’ continued pursuit of her in Act I incredible. She was visibly pregnant and Athamas, if he had read the birds and bees book his mummy gave him when he was a wee boy, must have known it wasn’t by him. He had already been cuckolded by Jove. I don’t think making her pregnant from the start added anything to the plot, except confusion.
Talking of flying colours, Jove really should have gone to Specsavers. Stuart Jackson, tenor, was schooled as a Jerwood Young Scholar at Glyndebourne and is enjoying a burgeoning career. If I had been Jackson, I think I would have told costume designer Hannah Clark to rethink the bright yellow suit. He is not a small man and when he and Semele descended from the flies in a suspended bower-basket of flowers, the pair of them just looked ridiculous. Jackson outdid the flowers.
And why was Juno dressed up in a towering costume left over from an old production of Turandot? Not only was it anachronistic, it was also dangerously top heavy and she performed a Biden stumble when taking her curtain call.
Adele Thomas’ roots are in Wales, well reflected in the blasted Act I landscape from which Semele was trying to escape. This felt like land in the lee of the Port Talbot Steel Works around which Thomas grew up. To her credit, although she has since reached beyond the grey horizons of her youth, she owns their persistent influence.
The contrast with the fertile, flower-strewn landscape of Jove’s world was stark, and, in her production, Thomas was not afraid to raise the awkward question, was Semele to be entirely blamed for trying to escape her bleak surroundings? Perhaps Thomas knew how she felt.
Choreographer, Emma Woods, delivered a mesmerising backdrop of action throughout, and the work never risked being static. Her dancers and the chorus drove the action on with flourishes and echoing foot stamps in time to the music.
Handel’s music in Semele is simply beautiful and includes the famous aria, Where ere you walk, sung to Semele by Jove. I wonder how many readers were first introduced to Handel in their youth by listening to that aria as a stand-alone. I still have a recording dating back to the 1950s sung by the wonderful Scottish lyric tenor, Kenneth McKellar, famous for singing hoochter-tcheuchter songs in his homeland, but better known at La Scala, Milan for his Handel roles alongside Renata Tebaldi.
The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under the baton of Václav Luks lived up to its reputation as possibly the finest exponent of Handel’s works on the circuit today. Luks founded Collegium 1704 in Prague. Together they delivered a performance of the highest quality. They captured the mood of frequent insanity and eccentricity which the work demands.
As a ground-breaking Handel project moving 18th century opera on from an Italian form that by 1840 was becoming stale Semele deserves its place in the repertoire. That it happens to be a crazy, entertaining romp with moral resonance today is a bonus. This was my sign-off to Glyndebourne for this season. Great to go out in a blaze of glory.
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