This opera's claim to fame is that it was the first one ever performed in France. Well...maybe. The wikipedia page on French opera claims that this is the case, but the one on the opera itself claims that it was "presumably the second opera ever in France." OH WE PRESUME THIS, DO WE? So what was first? They're not saying. Nor is anyone else. I'm going to assume that this one holds the title until someone demonstrates otherwise. But regardless, the point is: "the opera is considered to be one of the most successful operas of the seventeenth century, and the first big hit of the genre."
I thought I wouldn't be able to see this, but hey, there's a production on youtube! With French subtitles. I looked on amazon to see if this or any other Sacrati operas were available commercially (he wrote nine of them, sez wikipedia, though it's not clear how many of those are extant); unsurprisingly, the answer is no, but I DID find this extremely inexplicable product:
Good for confusing all your friends and relations, for sure.
So what's this about, then? Well, it's about Deidamia and Achilles, which as you know was also the subject of Handel's last opera, called--wait for it--Deidamia. That is, the princess of Scryos who was Achilles' lover while he was hidden there disguised as a woman prior to the Trojan War. And this has a similar plot to that: Ulysses (here accompanied by Diomedes) comes to find him and bring him along to murder Trojans, and he's conflicted because of his love. Here, he's all ready to leave Deidamia, but she pretends to be insane (hence the title, "The Feigned Madwoman") to get him to marry her. IRL, I do not think that that's the best way to stop your lover from leaving you, but it works here. Well, he still leaves, and as we know dies at Troy, so I'm not sure that was worth the trouble. But it happens, anyway. There's also a subplot here where Diomedes had been Deidamia's lover in the past until she threw him over for Achilles. In the end, he's just left bitter and disappointed. I'm afraid he's been red-pilled.
So that's cool. Did I like this? Well...kind of. I like this kind of music, so there's no reason I wouldn't have, basically. I guess I was maybe slightly cooler on it than some. Just based on this, I don't like Sacrati as much as Cavalli, for instance, and it feels a bit overextended for what ultimately is a pretty simple plot. Also--I had this issue with the Handel opera too--Achilles is not a particularly sympathetic or likeable character, and I think Deidamia would be better without him. Ulysses is pretty amusing, though. Of course, honesty compels me to note that the subtitles were pretty rough going for me: I would have thought they'd be easy to understand, like they were for Cavalli's Erismena, but for whatever reason, that wasn't really the case, and it's possible I would have liked it more were it more comprehensible, not that I couldn't basically follow it.
Still, cool to have the opportunity to see it. As ever with these things, I really wonder that, given that they have the video fercryinoutloud, it's not available on DVD.
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