Hercules by George Frideric Handel (review)

Handel’s Herculeshad a two-night run in 1745 and was rarely performed again for 250 years. This work along with Semelewere Handel’s attempts at a new kind of “musical drama” (he did not call them operas)—unstaged, secular works in English, modelled on his oratorios but with plots and characters more like those in his operas. Neither Herculesnor Semelesatisfied audiences, and Handel abandoned the experiment. Each has emerged in recent years as a stage-worthy masterpiece; opera companies have adopted them as operas, and the past generation has seen a significant number of successful productions.

The libretto for Herculeswas adapted by Thomas Broughton, an Anglican clergyman and respected, if minor, man of letters, from Sophocles’s The Women of Trachisand augmented with material from book 9 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Broughton adapted Sophocles’s play in order to promote Christian virtue for a middle-class, London audience that was used to oratorios on biblical themes. Given that his source text has a hero laying waste to a city and killing its king in order to gain access to his daughter, a hero who, when poisoned, gives literal meaning to shooting the messenger, and a hero whose dying wish is for his son to marry his mistress, Broughton’s decision to sanitize his version made good sense. And it was clearly endorsed by Handel, who found the text most worthy of his talents. The result is now recognized as one of Handel’s finest dramatic works.

It was no surprise to anyone familiar with the work of Peter Sellars that his Hercules, a co-production with the Lyric Opera of Chicago (staged there in 2010), proved to be his own adaptation of Broughton’s. Sellars prefers Sophocles’s version of the story of Hercules, and he restores the darker and more brutal plot line wherever possible. In all three versions, Hercules is the war hero returning home to end his life in domestic peace. In all three versions, those hopes are destroyed by the jealousy and misunderstanding of his wife, Dejanira, who poisons him with a cloak that she thought would restore his love. Sellars sets the work in our century and superimposes recent wars in the Middle East to bring the work up to date. Hercules returns home suffering from PTSD, and, as a result, his behaviour is characterized by wild and inconsistent mood swings caused by his illness. The contemporary setting and motivation has, of course, proven controversial. (The Toronto reviewers were split between those who found the production convincing and those who damned it as trivial deconstruction.) I found the production quite moving once I got past my resistance to Sellars’s freedoms with the original.

While Sellars was in Toronto, he presented his thoughts about the production at a day-long symposium at the University of Toronto. He explained that he had wanted to direct Herculesfor many years; by the time he was given the opportunity by the Lyric Opera in Chicago (where this production was first mounted), the US was dealing with the consequences of a prolonged war that was understood by few because of censorship. Herculesallowed Sellars to explore the war in the heart of middle America. The title character has been implicated in the horrors of war, horrors that are given visual impact when he enters with the Princess Iole, now his prisoner and probably his mistress, wearing an Abu Ghraib orange jumpsuit with a black hood over her face. Iole is, for Sellars, the moral centre of the opera, though just one of its walking wounded. Hercules’s son, Hyllus, is on crutches, but most of the characters’ wounds are psychological. Sellars sees Handel himself as sharing in the kind of mental illness seen in Hercules, the result of a person seeking spiritual comfort and peace in a world of tragic horrors. This production takes Sellars’s characteristic moral high road to equivalent artistic heights.

Those heights were enabled by a dream cast...