Semele (oratorio)
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- For the 1707 opera of the same name by John Eccles, also based upon Congreve's libretto, see: Semele
Semele is a secular oratorio by George Frideric Handel. The libretto was based on a work of William Congreve with additions by Alexander Pope, which drew on the Greek myth of Semele. It was first performed in London in 1744.
In the early 1740s, the performance of oratorios at Covent Garden represented Handel’s chief concert activity in London. His biblical oratorios had some relationship to Greek tragedy and it is perhaps not surprising that he decided to venture into the world of classical drama. Handel composed the music in June and July 1743.
Although Congreve, and its original composer Eccles, had wished Semele to be presented on the stage, Handel designed and performed it ’in the Manner of an Oratorio’, in concert form. It had only modest success; its amorous topic which is practically a creation of the late Restoration period did not satisy those who attended the Lenten seasons for a different kind of uplift, and irritated the supporters of true Italian opera. As Winton Dean suggested in his writings in his book Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios,
- “The public found its tone too close to that of the discredited Italian opera and set it down as an oratorio manqué; where they expected wholesome Lenten bread, they received a glittering stone dug from the ruins of Greek mythology.”
As previously stated, they were expecting another work based on a biblical character or theme and were greeted with one, which they were not expecting.
There were four performances in February of the same year, then two more at the King’s Theatre in December, with changes and additions, including arias in Italian, and with some of the sexually more explicit lines removed. It had no further revivals in Handel’s life-time and was perhaps unsurely matched to the spirit of the time. The original cast included Elisabeth Duparc (‘La Francesina’) in the title role, John Beard as Jupiter, Esther Young as Ino and Juno and Henry Reinhold in the bass parts (although in fact Handel seems to have interchanged some of the music between singers).
Semele was not formally revived for almost two hundred years. It had its first modern stage revival in Cambridge in 1925 and had its London stage première in 1954. It was produced on four occassions by the Handel Opera Society under Charles Farncombe (1959, 1961, 1964 and 1975) and entered the repertories of the English National Opera (then Sadler’s Wells Opera) in 1970 and finally returned to Covent Garden in 1982, which was conducted on both occasions by Charles Mackerras. Its stage première in the Americas was at Evanston, Illinois in 1959 and it was performed at Washington DC in [1980].
"Where'er you walk" is the most well-known aria from this work.
Today, Semele is performed regularly in concert halls and occasionally staged as an opera, but is not part of the standard operatic repertoire. There are a several recordings of it.de:Semele (Oratorium)