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, Christiantinged 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 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,
