Antonio Draghi, El Prometeo (1669)

Draghi was a hugely prolific seventeenth-century composer--wikipedia lists somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred fifteen operas (!), and given that said list doesn't include this one, it's clearly incomplete. But in spite of this, he's barely been recorded, even in audio-only format: seriously, check youtube: you'll find this, and excerpts of this, and a few short excerpts of other things and...that's really truly all. Look on amazon; the CD of this is the only thing you'll find. Nobody seems to care about Antonio Draghi. He can't be that bad! Can he? Well, let's see!

The amazing thing about this--maybe you already figured it out from the fact that it has an "el" rather than an "il," you clever clogs--is that it has a Spanish-language libretto. Holy shit! What the heck?!? Well, it's because it was written for the Queen of Spain's birthday. Surely that it must make it the first-ever Spanish-language opera, and therefore the first first opera in any language I've ever seen, other than languages where the first is almost certainly the only (Esperanto, Sanskrit) (okay, on reflection, that's wrong; John Blow's Venus and Adonis is the first English-language opera.  But it's still fun!).

It's about Prometheus, as you will have gathered, but it's a very strange mixture--based on some play or other. There is definitely no mythological precedent for a lot of the story here. So...here, Prometheus is not a Titan but just a mortal human, and also the brother of Peleus, who would go on to marry Thetis and father Achilles. Here, both brothers are vying for her hand, but, obviously, she goes for Peleus. Their romance is complicated by the fact that Jupiter also wants to marry Thetis (isn't he, uh, already married? Well, he's Jupiter!), but obviously things work out in the end for them. Prometheus, meanwhile, is apparently channeling Pygmalion, as he's creating a statue of a woman that he wants to come to life so he can be in love with. He steals fire from the gods and uses it to make this happen, but she blows him off, and the Gods tie him up to be vultur'd. Oh, and while this is going on, there's also Arachne, who's going to be turned into a spider for daring to place herself above the gods. "Because your name is Arachne, like arachnid, we're going to turn you into a spider," Minerva explains. I'm...pretty sure that's getting cause and effect backwards, but whatever. The point is, she intervenes on behalf of both Prometheus and Arachne, and they are freed. And there's also a nymph, Nessea, who gets with Prometheus.

Strictly speaking, this opera isn't wholly authentic: the entire libretto was extant, but the score for the third act was lost, and thus conductor Leonardo Garcia Alarcon took it upon himself to complete it. Definitely a tall order to recreate a seventeenth-century baroque style like that, and to his credit, he really does a seamless job: I certainly would never have known that it wasn't all Draghi if I hadn't been told. The less positive news, however, is that, whether it's Draghi or Garcia Alarcon, on the whole I found the piece...a little boring. I don't mind the silly plot, but musically, it feels a kind of monotonous, with few real high points. It's one of Draghi's earlier efforts, so it would be unfair to judge him based upon it, but if I were going to do that, I would say that he's no Cavalli. If not for the novelty of the language, it's hard to imagine anyone would've been interested in reviving the piece.

In fairness, the production is pretty fun: Prometheus dressed in a lab coat working on his automata (just like the modern Prometheus), Arachne wearing a spider hat, Mercury zooming around the stage on a scooter--if nothing else, it was clearly fun to put on. No times people ask me, "how do you discover obscure operas?" In this case, it's because Scott Conner made such an impression on me in Eliogabalo that I looked him up, and on his website if listed his roles, and one of them was Peleas in El Prometeo, so I looked that up to see what it was, and Bob's yer uncle. Anyway, he's impressive here as well.

That is all.