There is something about Handel’s operas and oratorios that stimulates an astute inventiveness in modern-day directors. Or so it seems, at any rate, from the five fully staged productions I’ve attended in the last three years. Of these, one was a dud, one was a fascinating near-miss, and three were all-out terrific — amazing odds that have not been matched, in my experience, by any other composer.
The latest in this series of triumphs is New York City Opera‘s production of Semele. From the libretto (written by William Congreve, with emendations by John Milton and Alexander Pope) to the title role (performed with antic grace by the beautiful Elizabeth Futral), everything about this production is first-rate. And though the onstage talent is superb, a great deal of the credit must go to those who conceived of the production — namely, the director Stephen Lawless, along with his set and costume designer, Anthony Baker, his lighting designer, Pat Collins, and his choreographer, Lynne Hockney. Each of these people contributed to a central vision which is so powerfully unified that it seems to be Handel’s — if one can imagine a Handel who, at the ripe old age of three hundred or so, could work out the parallels between the royal politics of the early eighteenth century and the presidential affairs of the late twentieth.
Lawless’s brilliant conceit is to transpose the Olympian court of Jove and Juno, which in Handel’s time stood in for the Hanoverian house of George II and Queen Caroline, to the Camelot of JFK and Jackie. Jove’s mortal love-interest, Semele (a heroine borrowed from Ovid, but with a brassy, ambitious patina imposed by Congreve), thus goes from being George II’s German-born mistress to the Kennedys’ Marilyn Monroe, and the jealous Juno acquires a pill-box hat. Hefty Secret Service men in dark glasses surround Juno and (as needed) clear the stage; the bright flashes ofpaparazzi cameras, wielded by the ever-resourceful chorus members, stand in for the lightning bolts hurled by Jove. All of this may sound forced or silly in my description, but the analogy has been so fully thought through that everything works: even Jove’s embodiment as an eagle — alluded to in the libretto when he flies down to earth to capture Semele — reappears in the form of the Presidential Seal.
This successful transposition would be nothing more than a good trick, however, if the opera itself lacked a solid core. What propels this production of Semele, finally, is the deep emotional reality that fuels the opera’s plot. Like virtually all Handel plots, it involves the behavior of obsessives (which is why it makes sense that Handel characters have to repeat their lines over and over), and here they have been given appropriately obsessive emotions: luxuriant self-indulgence and burning ambition on the part of Semele, unbridled lust on the part of Jove, equally unbridled jealousy on the part of Juno, and pathetic, soul-destroying envy on the part of Semele’s less attractive sister, Ino. But the true genius ofSemele‘s construction, in psychological terms, lies in the fact that the roles of Juno and Ino are played by the same soprano (in this case, the marvelously persuasive Vivica Genaux). Not ony does this double casting account for Juno’s ability to disguise herself as Ino in the crucial scene where she tricks Semele into asking for her own death; it also gives a powerful meaning to the end of the opera, when Ino is left free to marry Athamas, the suitor Semele left at the altar when she took off with Jove. Browbeaten and black-clad, Genaux’s Ino is evidently in love with Athamas from the start, but is too shy or oppressed or hopeless to do anything about it. Yet the whole arc of the opera — Jove’s abduction of the bride, Juno’s carefully engineered deception, and the annihilation of Semele when she sees Jove in his immortal form — seems, at the end, to be a product of Ino’s unconscious wishes; and the fact that she is both the reporter of Semele’s fate (in her Ino incarnation) and its manipulator (in her Juno incarnation) only strengthens this impression.
The things that lie behind superficial appearances — the unconscious wishes, the hidden jealousies, the secret stratagems of the spurned, the private lives of public rulers — are at the heart of Semele, and the production at New York City Opera makes the most of that fact in its staging. We begin by looking at a relatively bare, shallow stage set up for a chorus and four soloists, with an organist seated in their midst; a sign tells us that we are about to witness “Semele, A Secular Oratorio.” The unsuspecting audience member might be forgiven for thinking that he is about to endure three hours of stand-alone, stilted singing. But no sooner have the singers appeared onstage, all clad in black and white to match their surroundings, than a screwball comedy element enters in. Semele misbehaves from the start: she won’t enter on cue, but needs to be dragged on by her father (played by the wonderful baritone Sanford Sylvan, who also doubles as Somnus, the God of Sleep); she won’t open her score when it’s time for her to sing, and instead voices her complaint as if she has just made it up herself; she won’t marry the chosen bridgegroom, Athamas, and openly prefers her lover Jove. And then, when Jove comes down to rescue her, all hell breaks loose, and the set cracks open to reveal the Olympian universe behind the false front — in color now, like the land to which Dorothy descends after leaving drab Kansas in The Wizard of Oz.
Here, in a three-sided room that moves forward to meet our gaze, Jove indulges Semele but also keeps her prisoner. Here Ino comes to visit her sister, carried there as a gift from Jove. Here, in perhaps the most musically thrilling moment of the opera, the back wall glides open to reveal the instrumentalists seated behind the set (the gods behind the gods, as it were). And here Juno enters like a tempting worm, offering the platinum-haired Semele a series of false mirrors that show her as a goddess and stellar celebrity. The movies and their gossip industry are pertinent here, for they were both the making and the breaking of the actress on whom this Semele is modeled. When the slip-clad body of the dead Semele lies across her bed at the end, captured in the flash of the same cameras that initially fed her self-regard, we cannot help but think of Marilyn Monroe’s sordid death scene.
How are we supposed to feel when Semele dies? “Happy, happy!” sing the resilient chorus members, who by this time have taken up their public role and stand behind the reunified Juno and Jove. But even without Lawless’s explicitly pessimistic staging (Jove spies a new platinum blonde in the crowd), we might sense that this song is heavily ironic — or, if not ironic, then insufficient to the complicated feelings the opera has aroused in us. Handel’s Semele is not a purely innocent victim, like Ovid’s, but she is nonetheless a victim of forces beyond her control. Whether these forces lie inside or outside her — whether we choose to call them ambition, self-love, and uncontrollable lust, or Juno, Somnus, and Jove — is up to us. But Handel cannily suggests that the choice doesn’t much matter, because we are all subject to their influence, just the same.
—October 1, 2006