• by George Frideric Handel
• In English with projected English texts
• Approximate Running Time: 3 hours, 18 minutes

The war follows everyone home.

This emotional shocker was inspired by a Greek tragedy written more than 2,500 years ago...and director Peter Sellars blows the lid off any idea that it isn't piercingly relevant today!

Handel's brilliant music matches Sophocles's drama every step of the way as Dejanira, wife of supreme warrior Hercules, waits years for him to return from battle. Finally, he does — and it's to a hero's welcome. But there's danger in his latest victory. This time Hercules didn't kill some mythic monster; he's killed a mortal enemy and enslaved the man's lovely daughter. Now he's brought her home...threatening everything Dejanira holds dear.

Mad with jealousy, she sends her husband a gift that promises to rekindle his passion. And burn he does — engulfing himself and everyone around him in emotional devastation!

Alice Coote! Eric Owens! David Daniels! Lucy Crowe! Richard Croft! These celebrated artists — Baroque masters all — possess all the vocal allure and acting charisma this incendiary masterwork demands!

LYRIC OPERA PREMIERE

NEW PRODUCTION

Hercules is a co-production of Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Canadian Opera Company.

New Lyric Opera production generously made possible by Julie and Roger Baskes, Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, Richard P. and Susan Kiphart, Sidley Austin LLP, American Express, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The story could be ripped from recent headlines: Triumphant return of war hero turns tragic. The final chapter for the legendary Hercules and his wife Dejanira is a timeless tale about what happens when the war follows the warrior home.

Marriage to an absent hero means constant anxiety. Dejanira’s joy at Hercules’s homecoming evaporates when she learns of his infatuation with Iole, the beautiful young princess he’s abducted after sacking her kingdom and murdering her father. Not only that – he’s brought her home. Dejanira knows her husband’s appetite for conquest, but this is unbearable. She resolves to recapture her husband’s heart with a magic charm: blood from the centaur Nessus, mortally wounded years earlier by Hercules’s poisoned arrow when the lusty beast got fresh with Dejanira. The dying centaur claimed this tainted blood was so powerful that Hercules would never covet another woman. Disastrously true: when she gives her husband a garment infused with the supposed love potion, it melts his flesh – the centaur’s posthumous revenge. Hercules dies horribly; now fully mad with guilt and grief, Dejanira kills herself. Fulfilling his father’s last wish, their son Hyllus marries Iole, the orphaned beauty whose presence triggered the tragedy.

The ancient Greek playwright Sophocles told that hair-raising tale in Women of Trachis, a slender play of enormous impact. More than two millennia later G. F. Handel (1685-1759) composed his musical drama Hercules (premiere 1745), using a libretto by the Rev. Thomas Broughton that toned down the story considerably. The vicar’s version places the hero above reproach, making the wife seem irrationally jealous, and omitting her suicide. Fortunately, the ferocity and poignancy of Handel’s music match the original source brilliantly.

Lyric audiences will have an unforgettable experience when Hercules receives its company premiere Mar. 4-21. Expertly guided by Baroque-specialist conductor Harry Bicket and stage director extraordinaire Peter Sellars, Lyric’s stellar cast, orchestra, and chorus will reveal Handel’s genius as a musical dramatist and psychologist. The score teems with eerie half-step scales that snake through the harmonious orchestral and vocal lines, conveying the creeping spread of conflict, anguish, and madness that drives drama. Through the underlying hints of dissonance one hears and feels “the strangeness of what's missing from the [central] relationship,” the director notes. “This is not the world of Messiah.”

Sellers considers Women of Trachis “one of the greatest plays in the history of drama” and Handel “simply the greatest dramatic genious in the history of music theater.” In Lyric’s new production of Hercules, he’ll create “a direct collaboration between Handel and Sophocles that will be red-hot. We’re cutting the padding and the speed bumps to [restore] the shape of the play, which takes you from shock to shock. Sophocles and Handel are heartbreaking and emotional; they give you the story in extreme closeup, [revealing] these people in their most private and psychologically charged moments. Those arias capture how people get lost in the labyrinth of their own emotions, how much we’re prisoners of our own imaginations when we’re waiting (like Dejanira). The same is true for those on the battlefield and the way they think of home. This opera is so beautiful and touching because it deals with how separate those worlds are, and how intense and deep the disconnect is. It’s really powerful and dark and extraordinary. The central characters have tragic stature, and the music takes story to a place of high tragedy.”

The director’s previous triumphs at Lyric — Doctor Atomic, Tannhäuser, The Mikado — have all channeled the cultural zeitgeist into riveting music theater. Sellars sees haunting parallels between Hercules and America’s current wars. In Lyric’s new production, the title character is an American general whose “palace” is a California mansion. “This beautiful Aegean-holiday picture turns into a smoldering hell on earth,” Sellars says. “You thought you were fighting the war far away in a foreign land, but you’ve brought it home.”

Handel describes Hercules as a “charming brute,” and much of his music has a jaunty swagger. Sellers, however, says he’s come to appreciate “how beautiful those arias can be — they can be made soulful instead of public-relations statements. [American bass-baritone] Eric Owens will make Hercules a more complex character; this music will speak in new ways. Hercules is genuinely in anguish. The characters are in all kinds of states of denial — just as when the current wars’ vets come back — and we — don’t know how to talk about it.”

Dejanira’s journey from depression to hope, jealousy, and despair plays out in six arias and a breathtaking mad scene equal in intensity and technical difficulty to those of Lucia and Ophelia. Hercules’s mad scene precedes Dejanira’s, as the unintended poison takes effect; as they’re bound in marriage, so their music is linked, especially as each becomes unhinged.

The chemistry between Owen’s Hercules and English mezzo-soprano Alice Coote’s Dejanira should be incendiary: “When Alice sings, it invades my very soul,” raves Owens. “It’s so good, you almost can’t take it. She shines in Handel and Mozart — she really surrenders herself to the work, and her passion is unparalleled. She’s the star of this show, big time!” Having created General Groves in Doctor Atomic, Owens adds, “I enjoy working with Peter so much — he’s a brilliant and compassionate soul.”

David Daniels recalls working with Coote when she sang Sesto in Julius Caesar at the Met: “She’s a really amazing performer, incredibly electric to be onstage with and to watch. Dejanira is a perfect role and an amazing vehicle for her. I’m thrilled to work with Peter again. He’s so knowledgeable and passionate; it’s always a learning and spiritual experience working with him.” Lichas, Hercules’s messenger, Daniels adds, “is probably the whole character I’ll ever play who’s neither heroic nor the lover! He’s a presenter of news, whether it’s good or bad.”

“We’ve got extraordinary singers — such a brilliant cast,” Sellars enthuses.  “I’ll be thrilled finally to be in the same room as Alice Coote! David is the most celebrated countertenor in the world, and for a reason! He has such charisma and vocal allure — he was just incredible when I directed him in Handel’s Theodora. Richard Croft [Hyllus] sings the music like no one else. I’m really looking forward to working with Lucy Crowe — Iole is a character with her own ideas and her own complex and intense sense of destiny. And Eric is literally a titan of the stage, one of the great, great singers of his generation. It’s a very compelling group.” The creative team has worked with Sellers since 1980: George Tsypin (sets), Dunya Ramicova (costumes), and James F. Ingalls (lighting). “It’s beautiful to have collaborators who understand each other very deeply, which gives a freedom to our work,” Sellars notes. “Each is a very creative artist, so they each make bold and inspired contributions.”

Sellars proposed doing Hercules at Lyric 15 years ago, and is grateful the moment is finally right. “It’s a good time in American life for us to do this — the piece has special resonance right now. For me the primary thing is finding the emotional thread and elevating some of the topics we are genuinely struggling with now in America into the kind of mythic scope and grandeur that we rarely detect in the headlines.

“It makes me very happy to be back at Lyric again after Doctor Atomic, and it’s great to be bringing in something with its own strange apocalyptic energy that is also heartwarming,” Sellars says.  “After all this horrifying stuff, Handel ends with the love duet of the young people, Hyllus and Iole, saying ‘We’re not going to do what our parents did.’ They meld even though his father has killed her father, which is pretty intense. Handel’s final image is actually very beautiful, and doesn’t just end in ashes. A new generation is going to have to start from here, and is ready to go. Which is great.”

On the Record

Roger Pines, dramaturg at Lyric Opera, recommends these recorded performances. 

On CD

von Otter, Daniels, Dawson, Croft,  Saks; Les Musiciens du Louvre, cond. Minkowski (DG Archiv)

Walker, Denley, Dawson, Rolfe Johnson, Tomlinson; English Baroque Soloists, Monteverdi Choir, cond. Gardiner (DG Archiv)

Highlights

Hunt Lieberson, with J. West; Orchestra of Emmanuel Music, cond. Smith, Harbison (Avie)        

Neither of these performances is complete, although there are fewer cuts in Gardiner’s version than Minkowski’s.   I have a preference for Gardiner’s native English chorus over Minkowski’s French ensemble, although the orchestral forces are entirely comparable. The choice between the vocal teams is an impossible one, for the singers are all impeccable as to style .  Two of the finest Handelians of our time,  Richard Croft (Hyllus) and David Daniels (Lichas), who are appearing in Lyric’s Hercules, have documented their superb portrayals in the Minkowski  recording.  It’s purely a personal preference when choosing between two interpretations of such high quality as the Dejaniras of the regal Sarah Walker and the fiery Anne Sofie von Otter — each sings with complete command of both the vocalism and the psychology of this highly emotional character. The sopranos, Jennifer Smith (Gardiner) and Lynne Dawson (Minkowski), both devastate the listener in the powerful opening aria. Gardiner’s Hercules, English bass John Tomlinson, has an advantage over his counterpart on the Minkowski recording, Gidon Saks, in singing his native tongue, but both singers are similarly vigorous and forthright as Hercules. If you want a more complete version, go with Minkowski, but otherwise I would suggest going online, finding clips of each performance, and let listening to them decide your choice.

Highlights from Hercules are included in a CD of Bach and Handel sung by the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. This is essential Handel singing by one of America’s most profoundly expressive artists.  In addition to all seven of Dejanira’s arias, Hunt Lieberson performs the “Joys of freedom” duet with Jayne West singing Iole. This material was recorded with a Boston-based ensemble, Emmanuel Music, with whom Hunt Lieberson was closely associated (as she was with the disc’s two conductors, John Harbison and the late Craig Smith).

On DVD

DiDonato, Bohlin, Ernman, Spence, Shimell; Les Arts Florissants, cond. Christie, dir. Bondy (Bel Air Classiques)

Only one choice here, but fortunately the performance is exceptional. Luc Bondy’s relentlessly stark, modern-dress production focuses attention squarely on the individuals, especially Dejanira. Joyce DiDonato has immersed herself heart and soul in this complex character, giving a blazing, ferocious performance bursting with dramatic commitment and astounding musical imagination. The team surrounding her is similarly memorable: William Shimell (handsome and hugely charismatic in the title role), whose big scene with DiDonato is riveting; Toby Spence (Nanki-Poo in The Mikado at Lyric in 2010-11) as Hyllus, Malena Ernman (looking somewhat androgynous but very striking nonetheless, and singing Lichas with a very pure-toned  mezzo) as Lichas, and the lovely Ingela Bohlin, whose Iole makes her first entrance clutching her father’s ashes before launching into her first aria. The whole of this cast — and the musically and dramatically very accomplished chorus — make a coherent and dedicated ensemble, under the baton of one of today’s most distinguished Baroque specialists, William Christie.

BOLD TYPE = Artist appearing in this opera at Lyric in 2010-11

PART ONE
Dejanira waits for news of her husband Hercules, the world’s strongest man, who has been away at war for 18 months. His bloody labors have included 12 impossibly punishing tasks and a conflagration in the state of Oechalia. In the absence of news, her fears for him, her resentments, her helplessness to help, and the anxiety of separation itself, she finds herself unexpectedly weeping at strange times of day and not knowing how to stop.

Lichas, Hercules’s herald and a close family friend, visits to console this inconsolable woman (“…disconsolate his absence she laments…”). He prays with her for Hercules’ safety and safe return (“Preserve, great Jove, the hero’s life”).

She has been sitting for days alone in a room with the blinds drawn, lamenting the light that is missing from her life (“The world when day’s career is run”).

Her son Hyllus has asked priests to perform a divination ceremony at the temple. He returns with a shocking prophetic image – a vision of his father’s corpse surrounded by flames (“I feel, I feel the god”).

Dejanira reaches for tranquilizers to find some calmand serenity. She imagines her own death and a meeting with her husband in the world beyond (“There in myrtle shades”).

Hyllus is determined to go to the ends of the earth to find his father – from the polar caps to the Middle East (“Where congealed the northern streams”). He is frightened and does not know where to start. A divinely inspired chorus of neighbors and friends gives him courage and hope (“O filial piety! O gen’rous love!”).

Lichas brings official confirmation that Hercules is alive: he has sacked and leveled Oechalia to the ground and is on his way home. Dejanira begins the process of telling herself that she can let go of her fears and anxieties (“Begone my fears”).

The first planeload of returning troops arrives with disturbing cargo – among the prisoners of war, the princess Iole, who saw her father killed before her eyes and her countrymen massacred at the hands of Hercules. Her appearance in chains shocks the spectators and moves Hyllus, who instinctively wants to help her. Stunned and disoriented in a new and hostile land, she prays with all her strength and every fiber of her being to the goddess of liberty (“Daughter of gods, bright liberty!”), affirming a world order based on hope andpleasure, plenitude and grace.

A somewhat perfunctory triumphal march heralds Hercules’ return. He is exhausted, but retirement is also a challenging prospect; at least on the battlefield abroad he knew his job and his place. Facing his family and himself will be the most difficult battle of his life. He has brought Iole home as a war trophy, but also as a love interest on the side. He is marked as a man who has difficulty giving, receiving, and accepting love.

Iole experiences recurring traumatic flashbacks of her father’s grisly death (“My father”).

Hercules doesn’t want to talk about the war, or the bloody things he has seen and done, but it is also hard for him to imagine what is next (“The god of battle quits the bloody field”).

At a party with neighbors and friends, Hercules feels strangely out of place in his own home, and his wife still can’t figure out how to respond to him (“Crown with festal pomp the day”).

Iole’s memories of a quiet peaceful life in the mountains of her ravaged country stirs, haunts, mystifies, and touches her new neighbors (“How blessed the maid”). She rejects Hercules’s fumbling advances, but Dejanira has seen enough. The arrival of a new young woman in their household is an affront. Of course, everyone’s heart goes out to the war victim, particularly if she’s pretty, Dejanira snaps (“When beauty sorrow’s livery wears”).

Iole, beginning to grasp the unhappiness of the world she has entered, pleads with Dejanira not to give in to jealousy which will exchange all her peace and love for endless pain (“Ah, think what ills the jealous prove”).

Lichas, on very shaky diplomatic ground, still trying to protect his boss but somehow acknowledge that there are real problems, tries to reconcile husband and wife, but neither of them is ready. They will need time to heal and find each other again (“As stars that rise and disappear”).

The chorus calls out jealousy for what it is: the tyrant that burns in every human breast, kindled with every trivial glance and gesture, dividing us, gradually turning us into monsters that we no longer recognize (“Jealousy”).

PART TWO
The gods themselves descend to earth to taste the deeper joys of love among humans (“From celestial seats descending”). Hyllus offers Iole the safety and refuge of his enfolding love, reaching beyond his own childhood of blame, growing up in his father’s shadow with an abiding sense of unworthiness for love or greatness. He finds his own homeland in the exiled mind and heart of a courageous refugee.

Wishes, sighs, and soft desires ripple through the night (Chorus: “Wanton god of am’rous fires”).

During a late night of alcohol and wild emotion, Dejanira congratulates her husband on his new honors and promotions. She observes that he has become an abject slave to his passions and unfulfilled emotional hunger. He shouts back at her that he deserves some applause and headlines (“Alcides’ name in latest story shall with brightest lustre shine”), referring to himself by his birth name, Alcides. But all the parades and hero’s welcomes leave him with a bitter aftertaste, an emptiness, and overwhelming, unresolved anger. The idea of a new generation emulating his career and exploits first fills him with pride and then sickens him.

Dejanira, her feelings also ricocheting around the room, mocks him, humiliates him and emasculates him. She calls him a whining boy. Dangerous, brittle violence hangs in the air. She tells him to put away his weapons and learn to help around the house (“Resign thy club”). She only succeeds in driving the man she loves further away from her bruised and hurt body and heart.

After lying to her face point blank about his marital infidelities, Hercules shuts down and retreats behind a wall of silence. He lets his wife know that she has a problem and that she needs to fix it. He leaves for another award ceremony.

Dejanira, at her lowest moment, pleads for the sun to no longer rise in the sky, leaving herself and her husband silent and dead in an endless night (“Cease ruler of the day to rise”).

She prays to a kinder power to inspire her. She wants to recover. She wants to regain Hercules’s alienated love. A radical idea comes to mind. Years before, a centaur, Nessus, had tried to rape her. Hercules rescued her, shooting Nessus with a poisoned arrow. As he died, his grip on her skin loosening,Nessus whispered to her that his blood would transform into a magic potion capable of reviving “the expiring flame of love.” She kept and hid this liquid in an urn and now she will use it to draw Hercules back to her. She buys Hercules a beautiful jacket, and rubs the love ointment into the lining. She gives the treated coat to Lichas, and asks him to take it to her husband as a reconciliation gift. She wants Hercules to wear it with honor during his ceremony. No sooner does Lichas disappear with the magic garment than Dejanira turns to see the wool rag on the floor, the rag that she used to rub in the potion, begin to smoke, sputter, dissolve and burn.

Lichas recounts the horrifying experience of offering the coat to a pleased and proud Hercules and watching him put it on, then writhe and scream in agony as poison seeped into his joints and the hero’s burning, mangled flesh fused with the coat’s malignant fibers. Lichas tries to pull himself together for his funeral oration at the memorial service, to say farewell to a brave but very unhappy man (“Oh, scene of unexampled woe”).

The chorus acknowledges the end of an era: “Tyrants now no more shall dread on necks of vanquished slaves to tread. All fear of punishment is gone.” We are helpless in front of ever new forms and new faces of tyranny. “The world’s avenger is no more.”

We watch Hercules, twisted in unbearable pain, burn in the relentless flame of his own rage. He calls for help and no one answers. He rages on, furious and alone.

His body and mind pushed beyond the last limits of pain and endurance, Hercules curses his wife and orders his son to bear his body to a mountaintop to be received by the gods.

Now it is Hyllus’s turn to watch his father die before his eyes, and with no space for grief, he has a panic attack. He turns on Iole, who is Oechalian, as a possible spy – news of Hercules’s death must be hushed up and hidden from a hostile world. Hyllus can trust no one now, overwhelmed with his father’s legacy and beginning to run inHercules’s shoes.

Dejanira is drowning in guilt and unassuagable grief – Hercules was killed by her hand. Her last gesture of love was Nessus’s final act of revenge. She will be haunted for the rest of her life by relentless demons, steeped in remorse and self-blame (“Where shall I fly”). She watches as the phantoms of her own mind lead her to a place of horrible isolation, entrapment, and finally, suicide.

Iole intervenes. With her aria (“My breast with tender pity swells”), Handel offers a compassion that reaches beyond Greek tragedy and moves us into an Enlightenment world of understanding and recovery, the recognition of suffering as a path towardshealing and gradual transformation.

Iole transcends her own grief and offers her hand to Hyllus who responds, at first, tentatively, in what becomes a duet (“Oh, Prince, whose virtues”).

The community emerges from shock with the resolve to honor, praise, and offer gratitude to the men and women who have sacrificed lives, hearts, and limbs, and the families who have supported them, with their own wounds and resilience (“To them your grateful notes of praise belong”). The song of liberty welcomes all strangers: the wedding of Iole and Hyllus suggests the birth of a new America and a new Middle East.

—Peter Sellars

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