Wedding crashers: Louise Alder in Claus Guth’s revived Semele at Bayerische Staatsoper

The useful part

Instagram Facebook Bluesky X/Twitter LinkedIn YouTube Apple Podcasts Photo: Less than usual is the ensuing chaos, as the runaway bride's new beau happens to be the king of the gods, married to a very jealous wife — ensuring that the divine love affair ends in death and destruction. Wrapped in the respectable robes of antiquity, Semele, performed "after the manner of an oratorio" at its 1744 premiere, was demeaningly characterized by Handel's friend and librettist Charles Jennens as "a bawdy opera".

How it works

• Dazzling, too, was Claus Guth 's staging of the work at the 2023 Munich Opera Festival.
• She reappears in Cadmus's palace just in time to disturb Athamas and Ino's wedding, where nothing of the ceremony shown in Act I has changed, only the bride.
• At her side, Michael Spyres often threatens to steal the show, flexing his full versatility as a singer and an actor.
• This is undoubtedly why it has been one of the most often staged works of Handel's oratorio output, too, mixing the essentially dramatic nature of an opera libretto with the greater musical–structural...
• The heav'nly sphere turns round." Marina Viotti showed off a remarkably sonorous, pleasantly dark voice as Juno, thundering through "Hence, Iris, hence away" with virtuosic ease, and offering great stage...

What to take from it

Being picture-perfect is what this society is obsessed with, offering only empty rituals and a superficial existence. Unusually for Guth, yet most welcome as a new addition, the depiction of all this empty glamour is bitingly comical, a masterclass in ridicule with the chorus expertly directed and the stage action perfectly attuned to the music. Guth's approach to Semele's plight, though, is entirely serious and empathetic.

Example or evidence

• whither is she gone", calling his Jephtha to mind in his woeful enumeration of a hasty vow.
• This duality, the fateful in-betweenness of Semele's existence, is eloquently demonstrated through the stage design.
• A flash of the divine is represented during the overture by a single black feather falling down on the white set, disturbing Semele, previously hand in hand with Athamas in cake-topper stillness.
• Semele, now empowered by Jupiter's intervention, takes an axe to the walls at the end of Act I.

Details worth keeping

Wedding crashers | Bayerische Staatsoper Review. For a good reason: its libretto had originally been written by William Congreve in 1706, and its subject stands out among Handel's oratorios, as it is concerned not with allegorical, Biblical, or Christian themes, but Jupiter's romantic exploits. At its premiere, the production offered some of what Guth does the very best: a stark psychological reading of a woman fatefully caught between two worlds, and a critical look at the repressed, oppressive nature of the patriarchal, bourgeois family.

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