Imeneo is Handel’s penultimate Italian opera, and feels to me very much the end of a line. Though Handel had previously experienced enormous success in the genre, by the late 1730s when the piece was being put together, he was struggling financially and organisationally. With hindsight we know that he was on the cusp of switching tack professionally to the final phase of his career encompassing the greatest of his English Oratorios, and it is piquant to consider the opera’s theme in this context. The piece feels somewhat transitional in musical style, reinforced by the curious moralising function of the chorus, who sing from outside the action in the manner of a Greek chorus.
It is sometimes remarked that every genre ends in self-parody, and to me Imeneo is a fascinating instantiation of this pattern. At first glance, we are very much in familiar territory for a Handel opera - the characters are carefully orchestrated in a complex web of unrequited love, jealousy, and conflict, the twisting working out of their various sufferings is exquisitely inspected, dissected, and observed from all angles via Handel’s bottomless well of melody and unfailing insight into human behaviour and psychology.
But all over the piece are signs that the formula is breaking down, and the libretto repeatedly gently pokes fun at many of the conventions of Italian Opera of the period. It’s by no means intended as a side splitting comedy, but is definitely wryly humorous in many places and often very surprising. This gives the piece a very curious and rather unique character, perhaps comparable to some of Shakespeare’s later “problem” plays, and with its unusual mix of Seria and Buffa, its genre as a music drama is impossible to properly pigeonhole, and one that leads us to question the very conventions of opera itself.
An example: Imeneo heroically saves Rosmene and Clomiri from the pirates. But how manful and swashbuckling really was this rescue? Imeneo unabashedly informs everyone that he was abducted along with the women whilst dressed as a woman himself (hilariously, he was in drag as a tactic to attain an intimacy with the otherwise unattainable Rosmene!), and in this disguise, he murdered the pirates in their sleep. This bizarre and amusing twist on male heroism is the first sign that something is awry and that in this opera our expectations are going to be thwarted.
Tirinto is set up from the opening scene as the drama's yearning, long suffering, (which is to say ‘classic Italian opera’) male lover. His first aria is an ‘I want’ song, establishing his desires early in the drama to build an immediate rapport between the character and the audience as we empathise with him and unconsciously align our desire to see him succeed and be reunited with Rosmene. Throughout, his music is the most impressive and expressive of any of the male characters.
By contrast, Rosmene’s other suitor Imeneo is often rather terse and blunt in expression, and it is extremely clear that he not only pretends not to understand Clomiri’s desire for him, but also jarringly puts on the airs and graces and romantic vocabulary of the stock lover in Rosmene’s presence, yet when alone sings an entire aria dismissively warning the audience of the folly of romantic love. There could scarcely be an aria or personal philosophy more antithetical to the entire ethos of the Baroque Opera!
Tirinto was in the first production a castrato, the traditional male hero voice type, and Imeneo a baritone (rarely a romantic lead). This Opera Seria convention and the abovementioned dramatic construction of the piece would lead us to expect then that Rosmene will choose Tirinto. But at the end, we face a real narrative surprise: Tirinto doesn’t get the girl after all!
The real protagonist of the opera is Rosmene, in that she has the most agency of any of the characters, and has to make the key decision on which the entire plot hinges. On the one hand, she loves and is clearly devoted to Tirinto. He represents her youth, her life before her abduction. Imeneo on the other hand has done something intensely heroic, and despite the absurd irony of having used female disguise in his plan, cuts a more modern vision of masculinity - reserved emotionally, but a man of action, and unafraid to risk his own life to protect others. To reinforce this aspect of his character, in this production we have made him a naval captain. Clomiri is clearly very taken by him after this adventure so we know that he is desirable to at least one other woman.
This is the first clue that Rosmene might also be more taken by her rescuer than her words let on. One sophisticated aspect of the libretto is that the characters are self aware of their roles as lovers, and the gap between their true feelings and how they should behave in their roles. On the surface, we might see the story as one in which a hapless woman is pressured into marrying a man she doesn’t love, because it’s the proper expression of her gratitude. However, a more careful reading of the libretto starts to reveal ambiguities everywhere, suggesting that her feelings are much more complex, especially when one examines how she expresses herself differently in the presence of different characters, and also to the audience on her own.
In this production I have taken the view that her adventure has been formative for her, and as such, she has found herself changed by it. This seems very likely psychologically to me. On her return, Tirinto, the ardent italianate lover, seems a bit over-sensitive (even wet!), his focus on his emotions rather than taking action perhaps a shade adolescent by comparison to Imeneo. Rosmene is torn between her past self and youthful love of Tirinto, and her current self and more mature love of Imeneo - both feelings are real, but to which should she cleave?
In this context, the libretto links interestingly with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s six librettos that he penned centuries later for Richard Strauss. The central question that undergirds all of them is this: to what extent should we stick to our ideals and identity in the face of life’s ineluctable flux and the mysterious transformation we find in ourselves?
The resolution presents another surprise. Rosmene has managed her two suitors with incredible dexterity and evasion whilst she makes up her mind. Near the end, both suitors sing a final short aria as a plea to her. Both characters sing precisely the same words and music however: in a metatheatrical way, Handel is saying that there is nothing to choose between them! Very often an impossible situation is resolved in operas of this era with a Deus ex Machina - but here none arrives to save Rosmene, and so she has to manufacture one of her own. In the last parodic and unusual twist, she breaks the fourth wall and tells the audience in an aside that she will pretend to be mad, and “as a wise woman speak as if a lunatic”. So paradoxically by staging this little deception, she uses the convention of a theatrical mad scene to allow the other characters to accept her decision - in her apparent psychotic delusions she seems to be channelling some sort of divine will, and when she decides on Imeneo, once she ‘comes to’ she sticks with her decision. She compares herself to a little boat that left one shore (Tirinto) and arrived at another (Imeneo) - a telling metaphor that gives more credence to our theory that she has been irrevocably changed by the journey. Tirinto is a relic of the old world, Imeneo emblematic of the new one.