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It's been a good time for baroque opera on the ol' Operavision lately: last year we had Orpheus month in October, featuring not only an excellent production of Monteverdi, but also a thing fusing Orfeo with Indian classical music, to stunning effect. Then earlier this year there was a new production of Agrippina--very traditionally staged but still very good. Later this month, it's rarely-staged Vivaldi--but right NOW, it's THIS guy, an opera seria by a composer I'd never heard of. Boom!
And it's really good, man. It has more or less the same plot as Handel's Deidamia, but a completely different libretto--yup, it's another Metastasio, recognizably so, although it lacks the typical tangled Metastasian romantic convolutions. It's all about Achilles being disguised as a woman (careful--this'll be banned in Florida before you know it!) so as not to have to go to war, and he's in love with Deidamia, the Scyrian princess, but doggone it, he really wants to go off to murder Trojans, so when Ulysses shows up to convince him to do just that, all bets are off! It's actually not a very edifying story when you come right down to it, is it? I know it's not useful or meaningful to approach Greek mythology with a contemporary sensibility, but I can't help it: the Trojan War was some bullshit! There, I said it. Cancel me if you must, but I stand behind everything I've said.
That doesn't really matter, though, because there's some really great music here. It starts a bit slow, I feel, but ultimately, even minor characters get their chances to shine. There IS one mild disappointment, which is that Franco Fagioli was originally meant to sing Achilles, but had to cancel at the last minute due to illness or some such. So instead we get this Gabriel Diaz dude, who, you know, is fine, but I do miss Fagioli--although either way, the decision to give the character a long curly red wig when in disguise makes him look like the offspring of Weird Al Yankovic and the Wendy's girl. Anyway, as countertenors go, I prefer Tim Mead--another guy I didn't know--as Ulysses.
Corselli spent most of his career at the Spanish court, where this opera was written. It is above my pay-grade to say whether there's anything in it, musically, that was written specifically to cater to Spanish tastes--although it is notable that the acts all open with honest-to-god choruses. That's not generally a thing in opera seria, the only choruses in which tend to be brief celebratory things by the protagonists at the end. But be that as it may, it IS obvious that the libretto was somewhat modified: there's a sort of confusing thing at the end where Achilles and Deidamia getting married is equated to a union between Spain and France--I do not know the specific cultural context of the opera, but it must have been written to commemorate some wedding that was supposed to cement some sort of Spanish-French alliance. Bit of a stretch, given that neither of these characters have anything whatsoever to do with western Europe, but there you have it. It's kind of interesting, at any rate, and it sort of explains the confusing thing in the generally very traditional production where various figures which one can only surmise are French and Spanish nobility (one woman in particular) wander around the sets. Hmm!
