Semele,
an opera by Georg Friedrich Handel,
directed by Barrie Kosky.
Komische Oper, Berlin,
April 2023.
Semele has variously been described as an oratorio and a music drama, yet it is nonetheless very much an opera, with all the thrilling complications and intense feelings that only a great opera can produce. The misnomers arose early in its life, when Handel wanted it to appear as part of Covent Garden’s Lenten program in February 1744 and hence labeled it an oratorio. But audience members expecting a solemn, Christian-tinged exhortation were predictably shocked by this tale of sexual cavorting among the Greco-Roman gods; even Charles Jennens, Handel’s collaborator on L’Allegro, sniffily called it “a baudy Opera.” Semele was performed just a few times in Handel’s lifetime, and it is only since the mid-twentieth century that opera houses around the world have perceived its true worth.
I have seen a good Semele or two before (the New York City Opera’s 2006 version, which used a Marilyn Monroe/JFK theme to convey the relationship between Semele and Jupiter, was vastly enjoyable), but nothing can come up to the Barrie Kosky production I attended in Berlin last April. I knew the plot would be great Kosky material: a love affair between two different kinds of creature, thunderbolt-hurling Jove and mortal Semele, with Jove’s jealous wife doing her best to bring about its end. We have many such tales inherited from the Greeks, of humans foolishly aspiring to immortality when they have been taken up by the gods, and it always ends badly. But the emotional truth behind this particular story—that an all-consuming, hotly burning love affair, if it does not have time to cool to feeble embers on its own, is bound to destroy the less powerful party to it—will never cease to make sense to us, as long as we remain thinking, feeling beings.
That fiery metaphor, which is inherent in the opera itself, and even in Congreve’s strangely noncommittal libretto, lay at the heart of Kosky’s interpretation. It came through as early as the opening moments, when the orchestra (beautifully conducted by Konrad Junghänel) played the overture in front of a dropped curtain while a few sentences of print flashed across the red cloth. The words briefly summarized the plot to come, explaining that Semele loved Jove and abandoned her earthly fiancé to live with him, but was ultimately destroyed by the machinations of the jealous Juno, who manipulated Jove into appearing before Semele in his true, fiery incarnation, as a result of which she was burned to ash.
The word “ash” carries heavy overtones in post–1945 Berlin, and Kosky—himself a Jew, though originally from Australia rather than Europe—was not afraid to confront them. When the red curtain finally lifted, what was revealed to us was a monumental, ominous, Anselm Kiefer-ish set colored in tones of soot gray; its most noticeable feature was a sizable pile of ashes on the floor. As the music played on, a figure began to emerge from the ashes: Semele, clothed only in a dusty white nightdress, frantically trying to figure out where she is and what she can do to get out of there.
Where she is, in one sense, is on the stage of the Komische Oper, from which she can never escape without turning to ash herself, and to which she is doomed to return, night after performance night, repeating the fate that her own passions and the passions of others (Jove, Juno, perhaps even her sister Ino and her father Cadmus) have brought down on her. And each time Semele reappears there, we in the audience go through that predetermined process with her. We may escape to the outside air in the end—to the nearby U-bahn station and the train that takes us safely home—but we nevertheless carry something of that ashy doom with us.
It would be wrong to take this Semele, or for that matter any Barrie Kosky production, as simply a belated commentary on the Holocaust. That is not what is going on here, not at all. The opera is given its full meaning, its own meanings, drawn from whatever characteristics of the outer world happen to lend it sense at any specific moment in time. You don’t have to think about burned-up Jews (and I didn’t, for most of the gripping three and a half hours) to receive the impact of Handel’s superb creation. All I am suggesting is that Kosky did not run away from the symbolism of the ashes; he let it sit in the background, and we could take it or leave it, as we wished.
But even that needs to be modified, for this Semele (again, like much of Kosky’s work) made me particularly aware of the way opera, at its strongest, can take over and transcend our individual wills. Nothing can be done simply “as we wish” when the ecstatic rendering of reality is this powerful.
The control Kosky exerts over his audience—the way he makes us his playthings, just as Juno does with both humans and gods—was evident in many ways, but nowhere more so than in the applause; that is, in the absence of applause. Normally, when you go to a Handel opera and someone performs a terrific aria, the aficionados in the audience burst into spontaneous clapping and everyone else follows suit. As a plot-oriented, character-oriented person, I find this incredibly annoying. Would people burst into applause in the middle of a Eugene O’Neill play, however good the actor’s performance was? No, because it would ruin the mood. But they seem to think that opera, because it is somehow overtly “fake,” is exempt from this rule. Yet for me opera is no more fake than straight theater (and in fact it is classified under the rubric “Theater” in the announcement columns of the Berlin newspapers, which is one of the many things I love about that city). So I am always delighted when someone can manage to quell the clapping.
Which is what Kosky managed to do here, at least until the very end. I am not a director, so I don’t fully understand how it’s done, but there are ways of signaling to an audience—by bringing on the next musical segment quickly, or assigning specific gestures to the actor-singers, or even through lighting changes—that something new is about to happen and you’d better pay close attention. This stops the applauders in their tracks. It is even better when they sense that something enormously powerful has just happened, leaving them so stunned with emotion that they don’t think to applaud. That occurred repeatedly during this performance, where certain scenes were so moving that, however great the arias had been, they were met only with silence.
This would not have been possible without the brilliant casting. Each and every person in this production of Semele was both a fine actor and an excellent singer, but that was far from the whole story. Physically, they were perfect for their parts in a way that I’ve rarely seen in opera. Semele herself was played by the lovely Elsa Benoit, who was capable of emanating intense sexuality, delirious vanity, wounded pique, and tragic regret, all with her body as well as her voice. For our Jupiter, we were given the enormous (and I mean huge in every way) Stuart Jackson, who wore long, light-brown ringlets, a full-dress suit, and, when his shoes came off prior to lovemaking, hot-pink socks. There were notable comic elements to his performance—during one difficult aria, he mockingly shot himself in the head with his forefinger—and this added to rather than detracted from the credibility of the love affair, for it was clear that this appealingly bearish, good-humored, irresponsible god was no match for his scheming wife. Stunningly played by Ezgi Kutlu, Juno was a smallish person with a gigantic presence: her elegantly powerful soprano, her close-fitting shiny-purple gown, her sinuous movement style, and her wide range of highly readable facial expressions allowed her to dominate the stage whenever she was on it. Her assistant, the messenger god Iris, was hilariously rendered by Josefine Mindus as a frizzy blonde dingbat. David Shipley, with his strong bass-baritone, did a fine turn as the somnolent yet highly arousable God of Sleep, and Philipp Meierhöfer was utterly believable as Semele’s father, the ambitious, superficial Cadmus. That Semele’s fiancé, Athamas, and her sister, Ino, were destined to end up with each other was forecast not only by their matching voices—Carlo Vistoli’s countertenor melding beautifully with Carmen Artaza’s mezzo-soprano—but even by their matching eyebrows, dark slashes which in both faces slanted upward toward the center.
The staging was so memorable that much of it is with me still. There was the scene in which Juno took the form of Ino to trick Semele into accepting a fatally deceptive mirror: Kosky arranged it with both Carmen Artaza and Ezgi Kutlu onstage at once, surrounding the diminutive Elsa Benoit as Juno voiced the words and Ino simply mouthed them. There was the initial pre-marriage scene, where Carlo Vistoli plays Athamas as such a klutz that he can’t even keep hold of the ring—a comic turn that both defines Athamas’s character (he’s a bit of a dolt, if a rich and good-looking one) and makes Semele’s longing for the always masterful Jove palpable. Above all, there was the scene in which we see Jove and Semele together and in love—a scene that Kosky placed just before the only intermission. The physical tenderness between the huge Jackson and the tiny Benoit, who really seemed to belong to an entirely different, doll-like species, was touching to behold. Yet there was also something eminently creepy in this moment, for as they danced slowly around the stage together—her head barely reaching to his chest, her bare feet on top of his sock-clad ones—she resembled nothing so much as a child dancing with a grown man.
And let me not forget the chorus, drawn in this case from the Komische Oper’s pool of talented regulars. Semele is unusual among Handel’s work in featuring such extensive and musically complicated choral interludes. I imagine that in most productions these male and female singers just hang around in the background, or even in the pit, but here Kosky de-ployed them as active participants in the drama. In their first appearance, as effusive wedding guests air-kissing Semele, they were dressed to the nines and frivolously exuberant. Later, after she’d been dragged off to Jove’s realm through a looming fireplace on the righthand side of the set, the chorus reappeared as sluglike enchanted creatures, creeping one by one out of that self-same hearth. This time they sang as if they were all, like Semele, victims of an overwhelming passion, obsessively intertwining with each other as they elaborated on her “endless pleasure, endless love” aria. Later still, they were brought into being by a snap of Jove’s fingers, when he needed them to illustrate some kind of lesson he was ad-ministering to his captured mistress. And then, toward the end, the chorus once again formed a chattering background of wedding guests, this time at Ino’s and Athamas’s nuptials—a cheerful celebration (Cadmus, in particular, seemed almost manic in his joy) that utterly ignored the corpse, or ghost, of the fatally burned Semele, who sat throughout on the mantelpiece, her ashes in an urn by her side.
The mixed messages here, which the opera itself possesses but somehow tries to disguise, were all brought to the surface by Barrie Kosky’s staging. Without Semele’s presence, for in-stance, the concluding festivities, with their especially lively Handel score, might indeed have seemed a happy ending, though a rather weird and oblivious one. Surely no one could sit through those final celebratory scenes without feeling a quiver of discomfort at the effort to forget the recent tragedy. Kosky, at any rate, was not about to allow us to get away with anything of the kind. For when the last moments of the opera arrived, with a dead Semele, a submissive Jove, and a triumphant Juno all silently present on the stage, he placed his choral singers in the four boxes that adjoined the stage at the orchestra and first-ring level. It was from this position, now closer to us in the audience than to the events we had been watching all evening, that they delivered their final round of “Happy, happy…” choruses. Their forgetfulness was presented as an ironic model for ours; their words and tunes reassured us, as their fellow seasoned opera-goers, that despite the dramatic intensity of our recent experience, we were once again going to get away unscathed.
Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review. Her latest book is Scandinavian Noir.
