Barrie Kosky directs Handel's Hercules on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from 18 June to 9 July 2027.
Handel called Hercules a musical drama, which was his way of saying it was neither an opera nor an oratorio and that the London public should come anyway. They did not: it opened at the King’s Theatre in January 1745, in concert, and failed. He never staged it. Thomas Broughton’s libretto came from Sophocles’s Women of Trachis and the ninth book of Ovid, and the subject is not Hercules at all. It is Dejanira, his wife, who believes he has brought home a mistress, sends him a robe soaked in what she has been told is a love charm, and destroys him with it.
The jealousy music Handel wrote for her is the finest psychological writing of his career, and the piece has been rediscovered in the last fifty years as one of his three or four greatest. Handel wrote it in a month, in the same period as Belshazzar, at a point when the London public had turned against him and he was mounting seasons at his own financial risk.
Barrie Kosky directs it on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from Friday 18 June to Friday 9 July 2027. Kosky also directs the house’s Götterdämmerung in January, which makes this his second production of the same season and the second of his two very different arguments about what an ending is worth.