By Jove, Handel!

Opera has several foolish women demanding to know who their lover is, but Semele's punishment was particularly harsh. She was the only mortal in Greek mythology to become the parent of a god. She was killed by lightning before the birth of her son, Dionysis (Bacchus) - but the child survived because he was a demigod. The lightning of course was his father (Zeus/Jupiter/Jove), who had succumbed to her pleas to see him in his godly form. For more on the myth, and Jupiter's inventive midwifery method, here's a Myth and Folklaw Wiki. And wondrous accounts from the great texts are here.

There's an intriguing piece here, on Handel's handling of the myth. "For Handel, the real focus is on Semele's inappropriate love.  She attempts to rise above her place in the order of things and mix with the gods, and in so doing she brings about her own demise.  The myth of Semele is one of many in which mortals go beyond the set boundaries and are consumed by a divine fire.  This is a lesson about order, both in nature and society--the very opposite of what we might expect today from a Bacchus myth!  It tells us that deceptions and artifice are necessary to maintain an orderly society, that there are dangers in stripping away all illusions.  Semele should have been content with Jupiter as she knew him and should not have demanded to see to his innermost being."

Luca Ferrari - Jupiter and Semele (1605-1654) Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

William Congreve, (master of Restoration comedy of manners) had written the libretto* decades earlier. But Handel turned to this clearly profane myth at a time when opera was out of fashion, oratorio in, and it was predominantly religious. He improbably created Semele for Covent Garden Theatre's oratorio-centred Lenten season of public concerts in 1744, inviting scandal. Charles Jennens, (librettist for earlier Handel works including Messiah) declared it "a baudy Opera".

Lookalike librettist in 1709 and composer 1728. (Two decades didn't change the pose or dress!)

And so it is: the finest arias celebrate love, and the drama and the music are much more opera than concert. It's all about seduction - condemning the opera to obscurity for a century but inviting embellishment from modern directors. But it's also about the right place for humans. For the history of the opera and the ways it handles the myth, go to Wikipedia. Barrie Kosky's brilliant production, back in 2018, turned the story inside out, starting with Semele's immolation. It was screened for us during Covid lockdown, and is explored here in my blog in 2021.

The opera that wasn't an oratorio

The synopsis says it all - this is not a work to be staged in concert! The libretto was for an opera, and Handel's music is a music drama. You can read the libretto here. It's a tight plot, moving fast across Semele's escape from an arranged marriage to elopement with her lover who happens to be king of the gods, to his rows with his wife Juno and the trapping of Semele into her own destruction.

Glyndebourne produced their first Semele in 2023, with Adele Thomas directing. Take time to listen to this excellent Glyndebourne introduction to the opera, its place in Handel's work and the amazing text and music - Jane Armitage singing the splendidly explicit Act 2 aria, "With fond desiring". As this reviewer comments, "Here, as everywhere, admirably clear enunciation makes us realise what a jewel Handel had to hand in the pre-existing libretto for Semele by William Congreve, its verbal wit and metrical deftness several cuts above the operatic norm." 

And the Handel best-known song from this opera?  'Where'er you walk'. It's usually portrayed as a simple love song, praising the beloved, and sung as a concert piece love song by mezzos and tenors. But in the opera, it's the song of the Jove as he cons Semele into his 'cool' lair.  Why? He's trying to distract her from her concerns that she's a mere (pregnant) mortal, and move her out of her normal setting. She and her sister, Ino, will be magically transported to his palace in the sky where gardens and grounds will be like paradise.

Here's John Mark Ainsley in the 1997 Semele at ENO.

By the way, Congreve didn't write the words of "Where e'er you walk". Handel, typically free with his sources, took those 4 lines from the middle of an over-the-top "Pastoral" by Alexander Pope about a simple shepherd's (not a god's) true love. You can read the original here - just plough through to p8 . Pope died in 1744, the year Semele premiered.

Here's Glyndebourne's synopsis.

Our production

Semele (Joélle Harvey) and Jove (Stuart Jackson) in those cool glades at Glyndebourne

 Glyndebourne's website has a lot of detail about the opera and their production. Click here!  

...and there's more here.

Their photo gallery is here.

A photovisit into the rehearsal room gives a sense of the energy in the production - and also its emphasis on action.

A younger, slimmer Jove from  Hugo Hymas

But what it doesn't cover is that the much slimmer Jove in their later recording is young baroque singer Hugo Hymas, jumping in for Stuart Jackson, presented as a nerdy and rather nervous god, in a quickly altered yellow suit!

Hymas had sung the part back in 2019 but apparently not since. Here's his version of 'Where e'er you walk'. He was a soloist in Glyndebourne's performance of Haydn’s Creation later that year.

The reviews, with one exception - are all of the performances with Stuart Jackson's Jove. Gramophone's is the exception, very critical of the production and its young director, and unenthusiatic about the cast. Bachtrack's review gives glimpses of the ways this production moves between modern and baroque - unimpressed by the former, and clearly favouring the latter.

"There are two effective nods towards Baroque opera’s devotion to spectacle. Jupiter and Semele descend into view embowered in a roseate bed, he dozing while his latest paramour sings “Endless pleasure, endless love”. And when this relationship and the plot has run its course, and Semele is tricked into demanding Jupiter appear to her as his true incandescent self, she is forcibly entombed in a statuesque capsule, which bursts into flame. Few Brünnhildes are granted so splendid an immolation."

Juno (Jennifer Johnston) and Iris scheming with God of Sleep Somnus

Tim Ashley, in the Guardian agrees, unkeen on the dour setting of most scenes, but praising the immolation! "When we reach the denouement, the eponymous heroine – the mortal mistress of Jove, fatally tricked into demanding he cast off his human disguise and reveal himself in his full, cataclysmic divinity – is immured in a massive wicker effigy of her rival Juno, which goes up in flames as the chorus look on. It’s a striking coup de théâtre in an otherwise somewhat lacklustre staging and a dour take on what is essentially a barbed Restoration comedy."

Review here from the Standard.

And here's the Express.

Read more in the Arts Desk review here, for a thoughtful analysis of the production and its strengths.

Rethinking Semele

None of these reviews interpreted the production as we did after our discussion. Rethinking after viewing the whole, I remembered someone remarking on the boxing-in set of vertical walls, which contained the chorus of drably dressed citizens bullying a visibly pregnant Semele at her wedding day. Those walls surrounded the patch of flowers when the heavenly garden bloomed - and died. They boxed in the crowd as they forced Semele into a cage-effigy of Juno that destroyed her in fire, a fate more like a burning of a witch than a thunderbolt from Jupiter.

At the last scene, they boxed the dark, drab crowd's violent mockery of her sister Ino, finally brutally taken by the prince whom the pregnant Semele was to have married.

Did Handel intend this interpretation? Certainly not - he'd have agreed with the Gramophone crit: "Adele Thomas's staging of Handel's oratorio committed to narrowing-down the celebratory work... Thomas sees in Semele – this great, fiery explosion of exuberance, sensuality, hubris and nemesis – just another tale of a woman undone by the wicked world of men. .. But it’s a peculiar thing about Thomas’s view of this celebration of pleasure and delight that it is itself such a joyless experience – because Semele is absolutely the opposite of that."

But Adele Thomas was surely not denying the pleasure and delight of Handel's opera - rather showing it as a dream-escape from human society's control and yes, containment. I found a review of one production that took a somewhat similar approach. "There is one key element that in the libretto is not expressed before the final scene, but that surely has an enormous impact on Semele's thoughts and actions: she is pregnant. When we encounter her, she has been carrying Jupiter's child for three months. The young princess is in big trouble. No wonder her first aria is a prayer to Jupiter for his help. Semele has been made pregnant by a god, is supposed to marry a prince, and fears her secret will be discovered soon."

Just one review I found later suggested this. But like all the rest, assumed the pregnancy was Jove's doing.

But what if the whole passionate, joyful experience with Jove was her escape fantasy, unlike the very human pregnancy and the bullying it caused? Escaping the crowd at her arranged marriage, praying for help from Jove, she dreamed up joy and 'endless passion, endless love', always flower bedecked, her lover-god all kindness and promises, from her first improbable descent with him in a suspended pouch of flowers till the human tyranny caught and punished her.

Lyn, 23/6/25