tears and hope
by
Douglas Messerli
Nicola Francesco Haym (libretto, after Giacomo
Francesco Busani’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto), George Frideric Handel (composer),
David McVicar (director), Gary Halvorson (director) Giulio Cesare /
2013 [The Metropolitan Opera live HD broadcast]
Handel’s beautiful
opera, Giulio Cesare—along with Rodelinda, among his
post popular works—might be said to alternate between extremes: tears and hope.
And the Glyndebourne-created production performed by the MET plays with those
serial shifts, joyfully spoofing both Caesar’s / Cesare’s (countertenor David
Daniels) and Ptolemy’s / Tolomeo’s (Christope Dumaux) grabs for power between
the tearful tribulations of the proud and beautiful Cornelia (Patricia Bardon),
Pompey’s widow, and her son Sextus / Sesto (Alice Coote)—both of whom sang
particularly well in Saturday’s performance. David McVicar’s introduction into
Handel’s drama of British-like colonialists creates comic yet appropriate
tensions that turn Cleopatra’s Egypt into a strange amalgam of numerous
colonially controlled cultures from India (by the British) to Turkey (by the
Greeks). Marching and dancing their way through the newly captured country,
Cesare’s “legions” appear more like soldiers out of a Gilbert and Sullivan
operetta than conquering heroes, and their bumbling, often leering and jocular
behavior clearly predicts their third act defeat by Tolomeo’s troops.
Similarly, in this version Cleopatra (the ever-active Natalie Dessay)
represents the character as a series of contradictions. Beginning as a playful
if domineering sister to the ineffectual, but nonetheless boastful Tolomeo, she
quickly shifts to a scheming competitor for her brother’s crown, meanwhile
passing as a 1920s flapper named Lidia and, upon falling in love with Cesare,
turning into a seductress and, upon his apparent death, a lamenting woman (“Se
pietà di me no senti”) like Cornelia. By opera’s end, she has also danced—as
Dessay described it at intermission—in a Broadway-like chorus line and soon
after becomes a crowned queen.
This
production, in short, while at times audaciously anarchistic, even campy,
nonetheless emphasizes the dualities dominating Handel’s work, both musically
and narratively. In a work in which the proud, even haughty Roman Cornelia
later washes herself and her son in Tolomeo’s blood, and in which her seemingly
incompetent Hamlet-like son finally becomes enabled to enact revenge, we cannot
but see it as a series of ups and downs. Not only does Giulio Cesare alternate
between visions of tears and hope, between terrible deaths and love, but moves
in and out of sexual identity. Even in Handel’s day, with the performances of
several of its male leads by castrati, the work must have suggested sexual
incongruities of which the Glyndebourne production takes advantage. One
character, Nireno—who guides several of the opera’s figures to each other—is
played as a flamboyantly gay character. Tolomeo appears to be not only
bisexual—apparently attracted to his soldiers and his loyal Achilla—but early
on expresses incestuous desires for his own sister, as well as expressing his
prowess in his harem, while dressed like a gay S&M figure in harem pants.
Sesto (wonderfully performed by female “pants” specialist Coote), dominated by
his mother, seems to be almost sexless.
In
further extremes, loyal followers such as Achilla turn against their leaders,
while Tolomeo’s sister, as I previously mentioned, plots against her brother.
Even the dead, in this production, return to life, Cesare’s soldiers suddenly
springing up again upon his command, and the two bloodied corpses of Tolomeo
and Achilla joining up with other cast members for the coronation party at
opera’s end.
While opera purists and, perhaps, even Handel himself might not have approved
of this 21st century reading of this great opera, I would argue that the
constant alteration between the comic winking and the tragic melancholic
emotions of this work is already embedded in Handel’s music and the original
libretto, and is part of what makes this work so vital as it spins out its
tearful hopes, its sorrowful dreams of peace and love.
Los Angeles, April 30,
2013
Reprinted from USTheater,
Opera, and Performance (April 2013).
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