George Frideric Handel, Giulio Cesare (1724)

That's "Julius Caesar" to you greasy proles. There are a lot of operas based on Shakespeare plays, so you might think this would be one of them, but holy shit you would be wrong as heck. Actually, the full title--which seems to never actually be used--is Giulio Cesare in Egitto (in Egypt), which might give you a hint. But, really, no title could ever give you more than a hint.

This is a comedy. Well...kind of. We'll get back to that; it's very interesting. BUT: Caesar and Cleopatra fall in love and have to defeat her louche brother Ptolemy and also there are the widow and son of Pompey, whom Ptolemy had had killed to try to curry favor with Caesar, which--clearly--backfired. It seems almost like Julius Caesar fanfiction.

I haven't seen a lot of pre-nineteenth-century opera. Dido and Aeneas and some Mozart, of course, but that hardly seems to count. This is certainly stylistically distinct from later operas I've seen. It features a lot of sequences with characters repeating the same phrase multiple times which are really just excuses for Handel's beautiful score to roll over you as they embellish their singing.  A lot of later operas do this to an extent, but this is on a different level.  It also features a number of roles, including the lead, that were originally written for castrati--that is, men who'd been castrated pre-puberty to prevent their voices from changing. I know the past is a foreign country, but it still boggles me that this was ever considered acceptable. Art is important, but the idea that mutilating people in its cause could ever be acceptable--my goodness. You can hear possibly the last-ever castrato singing,and while it's certainly distinctive, the idea that it's so mind-bogglingly sublime as to justify that? I mean, to be clear, I don't think anything would be, but if it were, it certainly wouldn't be that. Anyway, these roles are now sensibly played by countertenors--men with naturally high singing voices like women or boys. Those guys are lucky pieces like this exist, because there are very few later operatic roles specifically calling for their talents. But you have to ask: if these guys make acceptable substitutes--and I think they pretty clearly do--maybe don't just start cutting kids' balls off in the first place? Just a suggestion.

Anyway. Caesar is played by David Daniels, and it must be said, at first hearing this super-high singing coming from this largish bearded dude is verystrange. One does get used to it, but it never stops being at least a little weird. Obviously, people in the eighteenth century had different aesthetic sensibilities than we do. Still, he's very good in the part; even better, probably, is Ptolemy, deliciously hammed up by another countertenor, Christophe Dumaux, who is made up (intentionally?) to look very much like Sacha Baron Cohen (and whose incestuous attraction to his sister is obviously a directorial decision, but one that works). Natalie Dessay--we can admit it, surely? was kind of miscast in La Fille du Régiment, but she's just perfect as Cleopatra; the fact that the historical Cleopatra was long dead by Dessay's age could not be less relevant. Also of note is our third countertenor, Rachid Ben Abdeslam, as Cleopatra's faithful (and strongly coded as gay) servant Nirenus.

Right. So this production is set, sort of, in the nineteenth-century, amongst British imperialism. But it's certainly not wedded to this setting: at one point you see battleships and zeppelins in the background, and after their first meeting Cleopatra makes the "call me" sign at Caesar. Also, much of the comedy comes from bits and pieces of Bollywood-esque dancing, especially from Dessay, who had trained as a dancer when younger.

So about that, here's what I wonder: to what extent is the piece as written by Handel actually a comedy, and to what extent is that a function of David McVicar's production? I was not around in the early eighteenth century (yes, it's true!), but--in spite of having absolutely no expertise in this area!--I have the strong feeling that the production would've been a lot less elaborate. Certainly, whatever stage direction the libretto includes must be pretty definitively drowned out by contemporary embellishments, and such comedy as there is really doesn't have much of anything to do with the sung text (okay, Cleopatra initially visits Caesar disguised as a serving woman, which at least sort of has the shape of comedy, but that's about all). And for a comedy, there are sure a lot of scenes of characters bemoaning their doleful fates. I know anything with a happy ending is generally thought of as "comedy," so in that sense this would qualify. Then again, anything considered a comedy also doesn't typically include a body count. So...what? I find this whole thing intriguingly uncategorizable. Obviously, there's a lot of leeway for creativity in the production of any opera, but I think more than any other I've seen, the whole has to be considered a collaboration across the centuries between Handel and McVicar rather than a Handel thing tout court. And that is hella cool.