The only previous Cavalli opera I've seen is Egito with horrible AV quality, so he was definitely due for a revisiting. I mean, not JUST for that reason: he may not be particularly well-known these days, but he was definitely one of the most important figures in seventeenth-century opera. Lully made opera French, but post-Monteverdi, Cavalli was largely responsible for its direction in Italy. Further, he played a big role in making opera into an entertainment for The Common Man, not just limited to royal courts where only nobles could partake. ALSO, the fact that he wrote several dozen operas over the course of thirty years, most of which are extant, means that he's the only opera composer of the century whose work you can trace so extensively over such a long time period, charting his development and the development of opera as a whole. I mean, YOU can do that, maybe. It's probably a bit too high-level for me.
Interestingly, this opera had remained unperformed since its debut until this 2013 revival: a three-hundred-fifty-four year gap (I'm sort of surprised it remained extant after such long neglect). It's also--perhaps more commonly--known simply as Elena, but that title seems less interesting and more generic. And this is an interesting opera: even if you don't speak Italian, you can probably guess that that title means something like "The Abduction of Helen," but what you might NOT expect would be that this has nothing to do with the Trojan War: it's a zany romantic comedy (okay, in the prelude, Discord does tempt the three goddesses with a golden apple, but that's as far as that goes).
The idea is: Menelaus is in love with Helen from afar, so to get close to her, he dressed up as a woman and has his servant Diomedes present him to her (putative) father, Tyndareus. Meanwhile, you have the rather dimwitted Theseus and Pirithous, who determine to abduct Helen themselves. When they find her, they also find the disguised Menelaus, with whom Pirithous instantly falls in love. So they kidnap them, and there are other characters and love interests including Hippolyta, deserted by the faithless Theseus. things are kind of mixed up, and then in the end they work out for most of the characters (implausibly, Theseus falls back in love with Hippolyta for no reason, although then he has to beg her after she rejects him, which is satisfying). Note that this thing with Theseus and Pirithous IS from actual Greek mythology (though definitely not the books I read as a kid): they did kidnap Helen, though I'm pretty sure Menelaus in drag is a baroque invention.
The libretto isn't wholly satisfactory: it's very choppy, with all these characters who appear and sing with no introductions whatsoever, leading the viewer to think, wait, WHO are you supposed to be? It's very chaotic, and I think it presupposes a deeper knowledge of Greek mythology than most of us are likely to have these days. Also, you can't help noticing that there's really no sense of place: the characters appear to be mostly stumbling around in a void. This may just be because of how it was written, however: Cavalli's long-time librettist died, and it was finished years later by someone else. That might explain the incoherence.
Still, I basically enjoyed it, and not only because it's fun to see composers make an absolute hash of Greek mythology. I like the music, and the aria has been firmly established by this point; even if we don't exactly have any barnburners like we'd later see from Vivaldi and Handel, it's all good, and I think I'm going to see all the Cavalli I'm able.
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