George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Just as some are searching for the great Australian novel – or play, or indeed opera – others are searching for the great English opera – opera in English, that is. Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is almost always cited as the nearest approach until more recent times, but usually with regret that there couldn’t be more of it. But as Handel enthusiasts quickly say: ‘Don’t forget Semele!’ Wilfrid Mellers thinks Semele is a full-scale heroic opera, the only one created in England, ‘if we discount Purcell’s Dido because of its brevity’. But he goes on, in a parenthesis ‘though conditions prevented [Semele] from being staged as such’. Semele will be staged in Australia, soon, as an opera, by people who take Mellers’ view of it, one increasingly shared by scholars.
Experience of Semele here so far has come largely from performances of the kind Handel himself mounted – it has been presented as a concert. Handel himself seems to have been uncertain. He advertised the first performance of Semele in 1744 as ‘The Story of Semele’, performed ‘after the manner of an oratorio’, and a contemporary wrote that it was ‘after the manner of an oratorio an English opera, but called an oratorio’. All very confusing.
The story’s tragic dimensions are obvious from a summary. The libretto was written in 1706 by the comic dramatist William Congreve for the composer John Eccles. Eccles’ work was never produced, but the text was printed in Congreve’s works, whence it was taken and adapted by Handel and an anonymous literary collaborator. The story is a classical Greek legend known principally from the version in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The myth concerns the consequences of Jupiter’s love for a mortal woman, Semele, daughter of Cadmus, King of Thebes. She is on the point of marriage to Athamas, Prince of Boeotia, but also intoxicated with love for Jupiter, who has appeared to her in mortal form. He sends an eagle to snatch her away to a palace prepared for her in the heavens. There Semele, living in an ecstasy of sensual pleasures, becomes obsessed with wanting to become immortal and keep Jupiter’s love. Juno, Jupiter’s jealous consort, sees the opportunity to revenge herself and defeat her mortal rival – she assumes the appearance and voice of Semele’s sister Ino, bribes the God of Sleep to gain her admission to the heavily guarded palace, and, by working on Semele’s vanity, persuades her to ask Jupiter to grant her immortality by making love to her in his true godly form. Withholding her favours to fan the flames of Jupiter’s desires, Semele achieves her wish – he swears, passion overriding his judgment and alarm, to appear to her as a God, but sees only too well that the granting of her wish will deprive him of Semele and mean her doom. Too late, she too realises the nemesis of her pride and vanity. Jupiter appears in a cloud with thunder and lightning, and Semele is burnt up. The chorus, at first in terror, reflect on the vaingloriousness and wrong direction of human ambition. Then the god Apollo, deus ex machina, prophecies Semele’s transformation into a phoenix, and the inauguration of a reign of eternal love and freedom from care.
The story of Semele is treated by composer and librettist in a thoroughly human way. Gods and humans are put on the same plane, and the passions of both are depicted with unvarnished realism. Congreve’s text is urbane and sometimes witty. Handel grasps enthusiastically the opportunity for the portrayal of an explicitly sexual passion, in some of his most intense love music.
Handel’s uncertainty as to how to produce Semele is explained by the historical context. The many operas he composed in London to Italian texts had very mixed success, and on the whole he had failed to woo and keep the taste of the British middle-class public for this art form. On the other hand, by 1744 he had already had considerable success when he adapted the conventions and techniques of heroic opera to Biblical themes in his oratorios – including Saul (1739), Israel in Egypt (1739), and Samson (1743). Horace Walpole reported in February 1743 ‘Handel has set up an Oratorio against the Operas, and succeeds’. The subject of Semele appealed greatly to Handel, and he poured into it consistently inventive and inspired music. If he had not given up, by 1741, producing operas, Semele would possibly have been staged. By presenting it as a concert entertainment, Handel may have been hoping to repeat the success of Alexander’s Feast (1736), a non-dramatic setting of an ode by Dryden on a classical subject. Alexander’s Feast was a ‘hit’ partly because it was in English. As it happened, Semele was a failure. Audiences didn’t know what to make of it – its subject was too close to the out-of-fashion Italian operas, and even among opera supporters the anti-Handel cabal damned it – they found it an affront because they considered it an opera rather than an oratorio.
Charles Jennens, Handel’s librettist for Saul and later for Messiah, described Semele as ‘No Oratorio, but a baudy Opera’. Even when it was new, oratorio audiences found the pagan profanity too far from the wholesomeness of oratorio. Semele had only four performances, and only one revival in Handel’s lifetime. The story and its treatment, rather than the music, has cut off Semele from many Handel lovers. Nineteenth century prudery found its sexual explicitness shocking, or when not shocking, trivial. Only by bowdlerising the text could the guardians of cultural morality allow themselves to make the music available for oratorio performance. But even worldlier 18th century audiences were thrown off balance by the directness and intensity of some of Semele – the sensual involvement, the rages, passions and anxieties of Semele herself, Jupiter, and Juno break the bounds of classical order and operatic artifice. Handel has entered into the sufferings of his characters and brings them alive with compassion: ‘smiling as well as feeling, but never sniggering or shrugging his shoulders’.
These are the words of the authority on Handel’s dramatic works, Winton Dean, who also suggests that the libretto of Semele must have seemed to the composer a gift of the gods. Very far from regarding it, as one critic asserts, as ‘a fable of no consequence’, he took the tragedy seriously. Handel’s music lends many parts of the opera a great emotional directness which disturbed its first hearers. But Semele has another side to it, an imaginative world of often ravishing beauty. The setting of the story in classical antiquity suggested the Arcadian, idyllic scenes. Handel seized all his opportunities for this kind of writing, of which the aria ‘Where’er you walk’ is such a beautiful example. Jupiter, to distract Semele from her raging ambition, has changed the scene to Arcadia. He sings ‘cool gales shall fan the glade; trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade…and all things flourish, where’er you turn your eyes.’ The musical landscape of Semele has a very English feel and shows Handel’s affectionate knowledge of the countryside of his adopted land, as he thinks the poet Marvell’s ‘green thought in a green shade’.
The musical characterisation in Semele is masterly and inventive to a degree unusual even for Handel. A revealing feature of the score is the high proportion of accompanied recitative and arioso. These passages heighten the dramatic tension and mirror the changing emotions of the actors. The most striking examples are the climax of the opera where Jupiter agonises over his folly in granting Semele’s wish, then she in turn repents, and dies in an arioso of great span, sighing suspensions, and nagging dotted rhythms of pain. Juno has a large share in these recitatives; she is one of Handel’s fullest characterisations, appearing for the first time in Act I in an amazing passage whose wild modulations convey every facet of her power, godly majesty, jealousy and rage. This is followed by a rage aria, headlong and furious, with a brief contrasting section evoking the powers of Somnus, the God of Sleep. Juno, the manipulatrix, is the chief agent of the drama.
Semele herself, the incarnation of female love in all its moods, is introduced poignantly, perplexed by having to choose; the straining upward interval of a ninth in her first arioso, at the words ‘Oh Jove!’ illustrates both her distress and her ambitions. In Jupiter’s palace we find her awakening from the sleep of sated love (‘O sleep, why dost thou leave me?’) and wishing her sleep would return – a preference for the deceptive dream over the reality. When Jupiter shows Semele her reflection in the mirror, she sings ‘Myself I shall adore, if I persist in gazing’ – the mirror echoes between voice and violin create, in Wilfrid Mellers’ felicitous phrase, a delirium of narcissism expressed in fantastic coloratura. One of Handel’s ‘featherbrained heroines’, perhaps, this Semele, but one whose utter absorption in her own feelings makes her an affecting, a richly and variously expressed character. The role is also a godsend for a singing actress capable of meeting its varied and brilliant demands, while incarnating an exasperating and fascinating female!
Jupiter is portrayed straightforwardly as a man in love, rather than a forbidding divine figure. His urgent passion is obvious, as is his dilemma: man-self or god-self? Somnus is introduced in a typical Baroque sleep scene. But this lethargic bass comes amusingly tripping to life at Juno’s mention of the nymph Pasithea. Cadmus, Ino and Athamas express the public world of ordinary human beings. Nothing more obviously illustrates the fullness of the interaction of characters in Handel’s treatment of the story than the quartet for Ino, Cadmus, Semele and Athamas in Act I, one of the very few such ensembles in Baroque opera, where the four express their conflicting feelings in what Percy Young calls ‘an extravagantly truthful demonstration of human frailty and perplexity’.
Handel’s music for Semele makes the audience experience the immediacy of its story and people in a setting remote and artificial, yet of curiously telling human relevance and truthfulness. As so often in great opera, Handel’s music makes this more vivid, especially at the climax of the story, than almost any staged production one can imagine.
There are problems in making Semele work as a staged opera. The chorus is one. In Baroque Italian opera chorus scenes played either a very small role, or more usually no role at all. But Handel and his collaborator, when they adapted the libretto for Semele, added a substantial number of choruses. At some points they represent the crowd, but they also comment very significantly on the action, in the manner of oratorio choruses, or the chorus of ancient classical drama. The danger in a staged production is that the chorus will tend to interfere with the creation of the visual atmosphere, especially in the scenes of Jupiter and Semele’s heavenly delights.
The puzzle as to what kind of music drama Semele represents can be made to disappear if its presentation helps the audience to allow Handel’s music to bring Semele to life in the theatre of the imagination. We may be fortunate to have transcended certain prejudices: those which in the 18th century made sophisticates recoil from the directness of Semele’s emotion, and the earnestly religious avoid its pagan profanity and lack of improving tone; and the prejudices that encouraged the 19th century to bowdlerise it and try to render it harmless, even to sanctify it by bathing it in the aura of the oratorio tradition.
Semele’s vitality as music and drama is no longer in doubt, and it is one of those Handel works whose freshness is inexhaustible. Gustav Holst, the composer, referring to two other Handel works celebrating, with English words, a secular Arcadian world, Acis and Galatea and L’Allegro, said of Handel ‘Why didn’t the old chap write more of that sort of thing?’. He was forgetting Semele, which besides has greater scale than either, and deeper dramatic substance, while sharing all their distinctively English charm.
First published in Opera~Opera, 2002