Lyric Opera 2018-2019 Issue 3 Idomeneo

O P E R A N O T E S | L Y R I C O P E R A O F C H I C A G O October 13 - November 2, 2018 | 29 e 1951 Glyndebourne production that singlehandedly restored Idomeneo to the repertoire. Pictured are four of the most extraordinary artists of the postwar period. Foreground, left to right: Sena Jurinac (Ilia), Richard Lewis (title role), Léopold Simoneau (Idamante), and Birgit Nilsson (Elettra). chart their own course, and human reason proves capable of surmounting and replacing divine harshness. e great 19th-century musicologist and critic Eduard Hanslick judged Idomeneo inferior to Mozart’s more “Shakespearean” operas (his comparison), which, like Shakespeare’s tragedies, contain a mixture of tragedy and comedy. Hanslick was short- sighted. Although it is true that Idomeneo has no comic scenes or characters, it is its own remarkable mixture – of tragedy with happy love story – and indeed a story that ends up subverting and rewriting the world of tragedy, bringing about peace and reconciliation on the political plane as well. e opera is set in the aftermath of the bitter Trojan War, which, as Homer tells us, brought “thousandfold pains” even on the victorious Greeks, and more or less wiped out the Trojans. Ilia, one of the last of the Trojan royal family, is a captive along with other prisoners, “bereft of father and brothers.” Able at first to see the world only in terms of war and enmity, she feels at first a terrible conflict between her loyalty to her family and her love for the Greek prince Idamante. Quickly, however, the drama begins to reshape the world: Idamante has what we might call a more Mozartean view of loyalties, insisting that reconciliation can bring warring sides together in harmony and love. He frees the Trojan prisoners: “Now I will break their bonds and give them consolation.” As the opera progresses, it is Idamante’s capacity for love (soon joined by his father’s) that propels the plot, bringing it ultimately to its happy conclusion. The central conceit of the plot is Idomeneo’s promise, in return for his rescue from the storm, to sacrifice the first person he sees on landing, to the greedy god of the sea. Because that person is his beloved son, a terrible calamity seems in store. e sea-god’s rigidity is depicted already in the overture – along, however, with a chromatic theme working against it, which we come to associate with human initiatives against cruel fate. Greek tragedies sometimes have happy endings – Aristotle preferred this sort – but only by sheer luck, some intervening deus ex machina . In Idomeneo , by contrast, it is the evolving story of the power of love that prepares the way for the final scene. Idomeneo insists that his inner human nature rebels against the deed commanded by impersonal Nature. And all the human characters join in chorus to criticize the sea-god’s behavior: “Abate your anger, your rigidity!” In a very un-Greek and rather Masonic denouement, e ancient ruins of Gortina in Crete. Act ree of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s production at Lyric, 1977. TONY ROMANO