MY GOODNESS is Greek mythology ever a tangled, contradictory mess. When you're a kid (at least if you're me), you learn some cool, fairly simple stories about various heroes and gods bopping about, but you probably don't learn about the sheer mind-boggling proliferation of alternate narratives and realities. Also, people back in the day seemingly had a way better handle on these things than we do, so they could write stories about them assuming that the audience would understand the background. Less true now, I think.
This is one of those "reconstructed" operas: as I understand it, we just had the libretto, the music thought to have been lost, but then (recently, but there doesn't seem to be any available information about exactly when), thirty arias and two duets from it were found in archives. What archives. You know: archive archives. So then the opera was rebuilt, with music for recitatives taken from other Vivaldi works. But are ALL of the recitatives from elsewhere? Are ALL the arias performed here from those archives? And what percentage of the final product is originally from the opera itself? These are questions that I can't find answers to. Still, whatever the case, the final result (by Alessandro Ciccolini, who has an instagram account) feels seamless. Ciccolini also did the reconstruction work for Vivaldi's Motezuma, which I hope to see very soon.
So this is based, kind of, on Hercules' ninth labor, in which he was meant to obtain the belt of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. In what's usually presented as the original story, he kills her, but there are of course variations where that doesn't happen, and it doesn't happen here. Hippolyta meets up with one of Hercules' companions, Theseus (I'm just using the English versions of the names because it's easier--also, it does seem kinda pretentious to insist on the Italian all the time), and falls in love with him when he saves her from a ferocious bear (which he instantaneously kills off-stage, somewhat humorously). Meanwhile, there's also Hippolyta's sister and...co-queen? it's not quite clear, Antiope, whose daughter Martesia is captured by the Greeks and ends up falling love with Alceste, king of Sparta. Theseus is captured by Antiope who wants to kill him, Diana supposedly demanding the sacrifice of a Greek, but Hippolyta begs for mercy. Hercules (a smaller role than you might think) is pissed off and wants to not just take the belt but kill him some Amazons, but when Theseus is feed and begs him to show mercy, he calms down and agrees to just take the betl but let the Amazons keep doing their thing. Antiope is going to commit suicide rather than be disgraced, but Diana manifests and tells her not to, that instead the two couples should be married and everyone should be happy. And that is that. I sometimes think: considering how anti-man this Amazon society is meant to be, they all sure do fall in love with and marry outsider men with very little prodding. Hard to imagine how this society would have ever had the chance to develop.
Really, this is pure baroque enjoyment: if you like this kind of thing, you will like this, no question. The thing that everyone (including me, apparently) talks about re this production is that for most of the opera, Zachary Stains as Hercules is wearing only the skin of the Nemean lion as a cloak. I've seen full-frontal nudity (both male and female) in operas before, but never quite so prominently and consistently as here. Given how we're socialized, it can't help but be a little distracting, but the justification for it does make sense: first, you have the enraged, vengeful Hercules, wearing this skin ripped from an animal in anger; but then when he calms down, moved by mercy and justice and love, only then is he dressed in normal clothes (well, normal for these guys--they're all still wearing super-short skirts). It does work, and it is moving, and it's impressive that Stains was able to, apparently, avoid any self-consciousness. It's somewhat less great that he's a pedophile. So it goes.
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