Handel's Semele returned to the theatre where it was first heard in 1744, in a new staging by Oliver Mears with Pretty Yende in the title role.
Oliver Mears directed a new staging of Handel’s Semele at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden from Monday 30 June to Friday 18 July 2025. Pretty Yende, the South African soprano who sang at the coronation of King Charles III, took the title role.
William Congreve wrote the libretto around 1705. Handel took it over in 1743, wrote the music in just over a month and presented it in the same theatre in Lent 1744, in the manner of an oratorio.
The tale of Jupiter’s affair with a mortal woman, and of the jealous Juno who tricks her into demanding that he appear in his true form, was secular. It was not what the Lenten audience expected, and it was heard only six times in his lifetime. It holds one of his best-known airs, “Where’er you walk”.
The Royal Opera last staged it in 2003. Mears’s production, made with the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and seen in Paris first, joined the house’s Handel at Covent Garden series after Susanna, Alcina, Jephtha and Theodora.
Ben Bliss made his Royal Opera debut as Jupiter, and Alice Coote sang Juno. Brindley Sherratt and Carlo Vistoli completed the principals under Christian Curnyn.