Joélle Harvey and Stuart Jackson. Photo credit: Richard Hubert Smith.
If you were thinking The Playgirl of the Western World as the scene goes up on a boggy (later scrubland) Thebes in Handel’s 1744 Semele at Glyndebourne, director Adele Thomas might agree.
With a cast mostly costumed in pale green attire circa 1910, crowded round bogland strikingly like John Synge’s Arran Islands, it’s dour, acidic, in designer Annemarie Woods’ unrelenting flatlands, illumined only by marsh-light in Peter Mumford’s lighting – with few exceptions – including a rainbow, depicting Iris, goddess of rainbows.
More, it’s a patriarchal community Thomas feels this Semele’s desperate to escape from. Costumer designer Hannah Clark ensures it’s also inescapably early 20th century. The gods are another thing.
Alone garbed in white, already pregnant, doubtless dismissed as a playgirl, Thomas gives humanity as well as agency to Semele (Joélle Harvey), and latterly her younger “playmate of my tender years” sister Ino (Stephanie Wake-Edwards).
Thomas apparently takes inspiration from industrial South Wales – some might think of Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott. There, a pregnant woman’s desperate to escape too. Splott in Cardiff is exactly the abandoned wasteland depicted here: grey-green pools of acid waste, or Irish bog –with Clark insisting on period, it fits better.
It’s also late Restoration comedy, and maybe (with Otway) the best restoration tragedy too, written by Congreve in 1706 for the greatly-gifted John Eccles after Congreve retired at 30, returning only for libretti. It was never produced, but Handel knew Eccles, and judging by the 2003 recording of Eccles’ work, he took more than the libretto.
This is understandably called – with Hercules – Handel’s greatest opera. First, Handel clears out most of the brass and woodwind. Strings do huge, heavenly lifting; there’s just three core instruments. Conductor Václav Luks’ harpsichord (flamboyant conducting of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment too), an active theorbo (that oud-like uber-stretched mandolin), and chamber organ. That’s unnervingly close to Eccles’ more modest 1706-style forces.
It sounds like nothing else in Handel. Even with the wonderful Glyndebourne chorus this is intimate, intricate writing. Every colour registers and if you’re above it, there’s no opera house that can deliver rapt sonics like this one.
Samuel Mariño. Photo credit: Richard Hubert Smith.
Unlike Eccles (where the intact libretto can be read), Handel excised vividly explicit sexual references (literally incendiary orgasms); snuck in other Congreve, and that most famous aria ‘Where’er You walk” is Pope’s. Never have “crowd” and “flourish” been used with greater poetic effect. And though he cuts words, Handel replaces eroticism in music, particularly “pantings” and “faintings” stroked lovingly with violins and double-bass.
Handel’s penultimate opera Semele, with Hercules the next year, enjoys an anomalous position: opera in English with religious, oratorio choruses, and like oratorios, not staged. With secular texts neither were called oratorios but as Charles Jennens (librettist of Messiah and other Handel oratorios) put it of Semele: “a bawdy opera”. And those choruses. Welcoming an illegitimate brat already drunk? That’s to anticipate.
After the riveting, nine-minute sigh of an overture, Semele, pregnant by Stuart Jackson’s Jove, is yanked towards the arranged marriage her father Cadmus (Clive Bayley, an inky bass of real power) is pressing her into with Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen’s Athamas. He’s keen, though it’s Wake-Edwards Ino, not Semele, who’s keen on him.
When Wake-Edwards unleashes her mezzo, it’s heart-rending, confiding, then wrenched into desolation. Wake-Edwards is also perhaps the clearest vocally in an evening not devoid of it. There’s little indistinction anywhere.
Cohen’s Athamas will need to match Wake-Edwards’ empathy for his condition, and he does: his creamy high tenor is rapt, sympathetic in everything but his wrong-heartedness, where Athamas suddenly realises too late quite why Ino’s so comforting. It’s a marvellous duet, the most emotionally compelling of Act One.
Thomas picks up Ino’s character uniquely, ensuring she’s not to be picked up so easily later on where she’s fallen from; which involves her attachment to Semele, whom she doesn’t blame. Thomas proves at least some of Semele’s ambition derives from needing to escape a literally toxic land and people. Driven too by a naturally exuberant sexuality, and an ambition that, despite Congreve and Handel, is commonplace and logical. That’s for Act Two.
With crashes that make the squirming suits cower like a cult, and after Semele’s abduction, what looks like a fantastically encrusted ordinance survey balloon-basket descends with Semele and Jove in what’s now given to Semele (not a priest) as “Endless pleasure, endless love/Semele enjoys above” like a rather unpleasant visit in a Rolls Royce.
Harvey though is now in lyric flight, having started in a muted tone earlier. Harvey’s voice from here on is full and rich as well as effortless, secure, bouncing all the dotted rhythms with as much abandon as The Queen of the Night.
“Useless now his thunder lies” gets a ripple of laughter since Jackson’s slumped. Surprisingly the first interval doesn’t come there. But into Act Two.
Juno (Jennifer Johnston) and Iris (male soprano Samuel Mariño) garbed in jealous green crossing Turandot with the Wicked Witch of the West are a powerhouse unit. Mariño’s voice, pure and piercingly high, is one of the most beautiful of the evening. Laser-like rather than broad, its owns a purity, the kind to diffuse colour from its white. Bayley’s also knocked up as the comical God of Sleep Somus, woken with a sexual bribe to plague Semele; and breaking convention by dozing off, never finishing his da capo.
Johnson’s ringing mezzo fury is like an acetylene torch at moments. It burns down everything it touches vocally. Who needs thunderbolts? Juno’s jealousy at Jove’s overstepping the bounds of infidelity can hardly come as revelation. By impregnating Semele with a three-quarters or full god (Semele’s mother was Harmony, so surely she’s a demi-god) perhaps Jove’s ensured the god-quota’s been disturbed. In any case Juno’s nature is fidelity, the wound a livid scar.
Assuming rightly Semele wants immortality, Juno lays the trap: for Jove to promise to reveal his full glory. Originally this meant explicit fiery semen. So the moment’s muted. But the request gives us pause on a type of class politics. If you scroll the length of mortals made immortals by gods, you’re struck by quantity. Yet Jove declares “I must not understand her”; unless he’s been given a strict conversion-quota the artificial tension is one of those imponderables.
Jove’s first recourse is to distract: unite the sisters, easily the tenderest moment where again Wake-Edwards’ capacity to blend mesmerizingly with soprano as well as tenor makes both singers dazzle more, especially both listening to the music of the spheres. She’s even finer alone.
Act Two furnishes Jackson’s transfixing “Where’er you walk”; and Jackson’s now active throughout the rest of the opera, in acid fluorescent yellow (as if a kind of mutant from that soil) padded out to seem massive.
His ringing low tenor lines and baritonal reach create an instrument of flexibility and power in reserve. Yet Jackson can purr down to the lowest reaches. His two big arias rightly stop the show, where his plaintive “My lovely fair” with its descending figure much later, after Juno’s got at Semele, is even finer. Jackson makes of Jove a god incapable of his own powers, as it were; but detached too, if hyper-aware of his force.
It’s Semele, with her trumpet-tongued “Myself I shall adore” who nails a complex personality. When deceptively handed a distorting mirror by Juno-as-Ino, her looks enhanced, she steals the show in her selfie-moment. Proof positive she’s a narcissist, for some, but Pope’s and Congreve wouldn’t have thought it out of place. The second line “if I persist in gazing” shows a more ironically self-aware woman. Harvey rightly exultant gives a shade of knowingness to this.
As Semele’s ashes die in an overt Wicker-Man frame, which returns to a Juno shrine, we’re reminded that here is nothing but superstition. A blazing chorus is here subverted from its oratorio religiosity in Thomas’ depicting a Bacchic writhing: the black-clad choir sprawl and kick in the air as little Bacchus pops up from the ground; from Semele’s charred womb.
It’s the best moment of Emma Woods’ choreography. Tethered by characters trying to exit but necessarily yanked back to hear an aria, baroque blocking can prove thankless. Here finally, Woods give us apotheosis.
But Thomas isn’t done. Wake-Edwards’ Ino, now forcibly united with Cohen’s Athamas, is still grieving. She writhes against his forced kiss. Had it been earlier, it were welcome. She may warm to Athamas, but the message is clear. Semele was right. Get out of this toxic place.