Handel's Penultimate Opera - Rubbish

The biennial Cambridge Handel Opera Group's production this time was Imeneo. Apparently it only had two performances in his lifetime and one could see why. The music was fine, the singing lovely, and the plot was in some ways no more silly in its premises than any other, but the whole experience was marred by the decidedly unsatisfactory ending.

The opera opens with a young man of Athens called Tirinto bewailing the loss of his betrothed, Rosmene, abducted by pirates with a whole group of young Athenian ladies. However, sorrow turns to joy when they are all returned safe and well by Imeneo. This young man had been with the girls when they were abduced, it turns out, because he was infatuated with Rosmene and used to go about with the young ladies in disguise, dressed as a girl. When they were all in the clutches of the pirates he had waited till they were asleep, murdered them, and brought the girls home.

Now this transvestite creep demands as his reward the hand of Rosmene in marriage. The rest of the opera consists mostly of Rosmene singing about whether she should marry Tirinto (an attractive trouser part) or the loathsome Imeneo. She sees it as a conflict between duty and love. She should marry Tirinto because she is engaged to him and loves him, but she also thinks (egged on by the idiot chorus) that it is her duty to marry Imeneo because he has saved her life. Never mind the fact that he has also saved lots of other girls, and never mind the fact that there is in the cast a girl who is madly in love with him.

Now I am quite happy with the idea of duty. We probably ought to do it more often these days. But when the silly Rosmene choses Imeneo at the end of the opera because she considers duty more important than love, then it spoilt the whole thing for me. Duty can involve all sorts of thing but I refuse to see that it should involve a young girl's forsaking her fiance for a man who has saved her life. I imagine the first audiences thought this too, and that is why it flopped.

Well it wasn't the fault of the Cambridge Handel Opera Group that the plot is as it is, but the production itself was inadvertently rather silly. During the overture the chorus came in with much ceremony and made offerings to Ceres. It all looked like a Monty Python skit to Handel's music and did not set the tone. Not for the irreverent me anyway. Later on there was a scene where they came in bearing poles with the owls of Athene on them. These looked like chocolate Easter egg owls wrapped in coloured silver paper. There was a Christmas tree on the stage in this scene (don't ask) and one of my companions suggested it was for the owls to roost in.

However, the music did win, despite the plot and staging.