Imagine the hype: Ercole amante (Hercules in Love), a 300
year-old opera composed by a woman and never before fully performed. A story of sexual harassment reframed as a contemporary sensation because the composer, Antonia Bembo (ca 1640-1710), had to flee her abusive Venetian husband and seek shelter in France, at the court of Louis XIV. The hype about a special connection with the present-day MeToo movement made me wonder where the numerous damsels in similar distress of the classical repertoire had suddenly gone: from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni to Verdi’s Luisa Miller, Puccini’s Tosca, Stauss’ Salome, Rosenkavalier and so on.

There have been more women composers during the Baroque, especially in Venice, than is usually remembered, but the involvement of the Roi-Soleil is part of the sensation in Paris. How come Louis XIV commissioned an opera from the fugitive Bembo, an acclaimed Venetian singer and song writer, who was already in her late sixties and had never written an opera? Moreover, Ercole amante had already been commissioned by him forty-five years earlier. In 1662, acclaimed composer Francesco Cavalli had created the first Ercole amante as a tribute to the young king’s marriage to the Infanta Maria Theres. Why commission a second version from Bembo, who was a student of Cavalli and even used the same libretto? The king, it is said, was interested in a new score that would combine French and Italian styles, something like elegant French coloratura with Italian bel canto legato and rubato. The opera, Bembo’s first and last, was never performed at court. Could it be that it was amusing for the young king to watch an aging hero get caught with his hand in the cookie jar, but less amusing four decades later?

The many mysteries piling up here were caused by the chance discovery of the score at the French National Library, in 2023. Conductor Leonardo García Alarcón detected it and was convinced he had a masterpiece on his hands. But when the curtain finally went up in Paris at the start of June, not everyone agreed.

The story is still the same we know from Cavalli. The aging hero (here in a fat suit and yellow toupée) is tired of his wife Dejanira and lusts after Iole, the fiancée of his son Hyall. The Goddess Venus is on his side and helps him with a love potion so the poor girl ends up saying yes. Now Juno storms in (like Fricka in Wagner’s Ring) to defend marriage and seek revenge. The clash between the Goddesses is illustrated by a catfight between two dancers. Under Juno’s attack, old Hercules falls like Humpty Dumpty between the sculpted hedges of his castle. Problem solved?  Not quite. This is only the beginning of five acts almost four hours. The loyal Hyall saves the father who only wants the girl more than ever -- and the tug-of-war between gods and humans can go on. In the end, the preposterous marriage of Hercules and Iole is thwarted by a poisoned cloak that finally stops the lusty hero for good.

Iole and Hyall get their happy ending and Hercules gets his apotheosis: he is unites with Venus and with Beauty (who surely symbolizes the king’s queen).

Relevant for today?

I heard Leonardo García Alarcón on the TV show “Toi Toi Toi” play piano excerpts of the score he had discovered. He demonstrated why the director of the Paris Opera was enthralled by the project. It seemed clear as a bell: arresting harmonies and rhythms sounded seductively modern, almost predictive of the Romantic era. But I never heard this again in the vast, concrete bunker of the Bastille Opera. My companion, a Baroque enthusiast, didn’t hear it either. The music seemed swallowed up by the cavernous auditorium with its complicated acoustics.

It became quickly clear that the conductor and the London director Netia Jones, who also created the sets, video projections and costumes, had made a miscalculation when they chose Opéra Bastille for their world premiere.

The obvious venue would have been the smaller, plush  Palais Garnier. The old opera with its warm acoustics would have provided the intimacy needed to bring out the subtleties of the orchestration and, especially, the vocal writing by a composer who was after all a singer..

Most voices sounded muffled, as if stuck behind a curtain. The soprano voices seemed disturbingly similar as they forced their volume to get across the deep pit and the orchestra that the conductor had stuffed with multiple extra instruments (fifty-some in all.) The excellent soprano Julie Fuchs as Juno was more shrill than radiant, and the gorgeous voice of Sandrine Piau as Venus was caught in a vocal battle she couldn’t win.. The male singers fared better. Bass-baritone Andreas Wolf as Hercules boomed well enough but sacrificed beauty of tone. Alasdair Kent as the son seemed to relish his daunting high tessitura, and countertenor Theo Imart as the Page had no problem with his excellent metallic timbre.

Luckily the mellifluous voice of nezzo Deepa Johnny as Dejaniraa came through rather unharmed. She was the only singer who made an emotional impression, which was no wonder as Bembo had given the most beautiful laments to her alter ego, the spurned wife.

The problems were further aggravated by the director’s need to fill the vast plateau by spacing out the singers as if to “populate” the space. Singing across quite an expanse at each other inevitably watered down their dramatic engagement. It didn’t help that Jones added lots of “filler” movements by dancers, fencers  and servants to the cast. This created entertainment rather than interpretation or depth. Watching fencers rushing from left to tight and back again, and Badminton players in the French garden was very pretty but hardly original. She heavily leaned on video projections as illustration. The images were undoubtedly gorgeous, but their themes--mostly skies and clouds and water -- further distanced the poignancy of the central story.

The same distanciation came across in  Jones’ bizarre and occasionally amusing modern costumes. The  waiters were
Karl Lagerfeld look-alikes with ponytails and sun glasses. Venus looked like a stuffed red pepper in a tulle ball gown and Juno, in slinky white silk, like ready for an opera premiere. The hapless son wore thick glasses; the male Page scuttled about in a grotesque lime-green miniskirt and chenille bomber jacket.

Iole, the object of desire, looked dwarfed, indistinct between the giant Hercules statues that decorate scene after scene, all naked. She wore a stiff baby doll and combat boots, devoid of sex appeal, but Jones gave her a provocative moment, placing the seduction scene around a statue of Hercules sitting with legs spread in full -frontal nakedness. It’s a comically brilliant idea and I regretted that the director quickly dropped allusions to sex and sexual danger.

The French press was divided. Very few  risked comparisons with Cavalli’s Ercole amante. While some papers wrote about the fine musical qualities of Bembo’s score, others pointed to its flaws, especially the slog of excessive recitatives. Several felt the production did not do Bembo a favor. The most critical voice, Forum Opera, titled its review, “The mountain gives birth to a mouse.” Regret about the Bastille Opera was unanimous. (Small -scale productions have already been attempted a couple of times since the first discovery of the score: a concert version in Stuttgart and a chamber opera performance in San Francisco.)  A different musical concept (how about a few cuts?) that supports intimacy and vocal finesse might do wonders for Ercole. A more dramatic focus might even bring out an interpretations that could justify the hype about Bembo’s contemporary relevance.

Photos: Bernd Uhlig