For Handel’s Semele (1744) Oliver Mears and designer Annemarie Woods draw inspiration from the films of Luis Buñuel for their surreal horror. Cross that with The Marriage of Figaro and you get the interpretation they impose on this Classical drama or Lenten oratorio (staged, as frequently nowadays, as an opera). It purports to examine the politics of class and inequality in the relationship between Jupiter (here simply a mortal plutocrat) and Semele (a servant in his and Juno’s household – never mind the fact that, in the original myth, she is the daughter of Cadmus, king of Thebes). The only real indication that she is a servant comes at the very beginning when, like Cinderella, she scrapes away the ashes from a fireplace in a rather gloomy chamber – presumably the basement of Jupiter’s mansion – which he collects into an urn. The open-plan penthouse to which she is brought for Jupiter’s erotic pleasure looks so like this other room, however, that there is no evident contrast between life below stairs with all the other household staff, and the social promotion she has now attained.
At the end of the drama, she is murderously punished for overreaching herself in wanting to participate more in Jupiter’s exalted social status than he (and his wife Juno) can ever permit. After she is shown the urns of the incinerated remains of Jupiter’s previous lovers, and a caesarean section is performed on her so that Bacchus is saved, she is promptly despatched, before a new female servant is brought on. Perhaps, then, it is more a melding together of Les liaisons dangereuses with Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, but less edifying than either. Whatever it may be, it is little more than a crassly prurient horror story that rewrites (and therefore contorts) the narrative and moral of Handel’s work and failing to illuminate it. However much the audience’s sympathies for Semele are meant to be engaged (in her conflicted motivations she is made almost to address the audience directly, right from the sides of the proscenium arch) the original scenario does make her culpable to some degree for her ambition and pride, and it is clear that Jupiter is the unwilling (and unwitting, in being forced to make an oath) cause of her demise. Mears’s strategy is like that of a misbehaved adolescent wanting to try and shock the parents.
It might have passed muster if the characterisations in this re-interpretation were better distilled but, on the whole, they aren’t (a few theatrically weak jokes and cliches aside – for instance Jupiter’s cynical intentions conveyed by the well-worn stage trope of his singing ‘Where e’er you walk’ as though a song from a record). Jupiter is meant to be sinister (we’re told) but he’s really little more than a haughty, self-interested lover (and he doesn’t even lead Semele into the furnace himself – bafflingly, she goes more or less willingly). Juno sulks and skulks around, rather than venting any imperious rage (though she does effectively pimp for Somnus by viciously urging Pasithea to entice him into action); and her using a drunken or drugged Ino as a puppet from behind which to speak to Semele, as though in Ino’s guise, is ludicrously improbable. Somnus seems to be some dishevelled antiquated retainer, wallowing in a bath and surrounded by a mountain of empty drink cans, which is no more than silly. In general, there’s a lot of shifting around on stage instead of dramatically meaningful action. And without the supernatural element of the myth – even in any allegorised form – the flashes of thunder and images of fire become no more than pieces of pathetic fallacy, rather than inherent elements of the tragedy.
Musical standards are variable, even if inadvertently that partly aids the cause of characterisation. Given the production, Pretty Yende avoids a typically dazzling, seductive account Semele, oscillating between a fairly wiry, delicate virtuosity and a more reflective stillness as she works her way through her confused thoughts, in the one notably subtle and well devised portrayal of the performance. Ben Bliss has a slightly rough nasal edge – especially on high, forcefully enunciated notes – which expresses no more or less than Jupiter’s caddish behaviour, rather than any commanding might or lustre. Alice Coote can only be said to be a shrewish Juno with a shrill, squally upper register.
As Athamas, Carlo Vistoli is a florid, almost wayward countertenor, whose musical persona only properly comes into its own for his aria ‘Despair no more shall wound me’, when he is given in marriage to Niamh O’Sullivan’s excitable Ino, following her sister’s death which is his cue to remonstrate with Jupiter. Brindley Sherratt evinces stern authority as Cadmus (evidently dispassionate and disinterested as Semele’s father) and modulates into an apt drowsy lyricism as Somnus. Marianna Hovanisyan (a member of the Jette Parker Artists Programme) is an impressively agile and sparkling Iris – it’s a pity we don’t hear more of her.
Christian Curnyn conducts the ROH Orchestra in a generally sober, not invigorating reading of the music, though slower, meditative numbers are moving in their hushed, sometimes tense, concentration. The Chorus are disciplined but also don’t seem to summon a huge amount of enthusiastic energy. This Semele really has lost much of her allure.
Further performances to 18 July
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