Handel's Hercules, an opera that failed at its premiere and stayed neglected for two centuries, opens in Barrie Kosky's production at Covent Garden.
Handel’s Hercules, which he never staged again after its premiere failed, opens in Barrie Kosky’s production at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden on Friday 18 June 2027. The run continues to Friday 9 July.
Handel called it a musical drama, neither an opera nor an oratorio. He wrote it in a month, in the same period as Belshazzar. The London public had turned against him, and he was staging seasons at his own financial risk.
It opened in concert at the King’s Theatre in January 1745 and failed. Thomas Broughton’s libretto draws on Sophocles’s Women of Trachis and the ninth book of Ovid.
The central figure is Dejanira, Hercules’s wife. Believing he has brought home a mistress, she sends him a robe soaked in what she is told is a love charm, and it destroys him.
The jealousy music Handel wrote for her is some of the most exact psychological writing of his career. Over the last fifty years the piece has been rediscovered as one of his major achievements. Kosky also directs the house’s Götterdämmerung in January, his second production of the season.