Glyndebourne: George Frideric Handel: Semele

Revenge is served blazing hot in Semele, Handel’s sexiest and most scandalous oratorio. The 2023 Festival presents Glyndebourne’s first ever production, directed by Olivier Award nominee Adele Thomas and conducted by baroque music specialist Václav Luks, who makes his Glyndebourne debut leading the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. The original audience of Handel’s Semele must have had quite a shock. Instead of a traditional biblical drama that they might have been expecting for lent, they were faced with something entirely different. Replacing the familiar biblical heroes were a host of lascivious Roman gods, and their mortal playthings. Far from being a sacred drama, Semele was a provocatively secular story of seduction, adultery and revenge. Semele is engaged, but secretly in love with someone else. Her lover is none other than Jove, King of the Gods. When he carries Semele off, it invokes the wrath of his wife Juno who devises a scheme to punish her husband and destroy her rival once and for all. Combining the sexual intrigue of classical myth with the solo virtuosity of Italian opera and the choral splendour of oratorio, Semele is the best of all worlds, a piece that rewrites the theatrical rules.

© Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Richard Hubert Smith