Le Sommeil’s concert, led by mezzo-soprano Margarita Slepakova, will be an encounter with opera music by three Baroque composers: George Frideric Handel, John II Eccles, and Marin Marais. The common thread in their featured works is the character of Semele. In Greek mythology, she was a Theban princess and lover of Zeus. A jealous Hera, deciding to punish her rival, disguised as a mortal woman, persuaded her to test Zeus by forcing him to reveal his true form. The god of thunder granted her request, but the woman was killed by a lightning bolt. Yet her unborn child survived and was sewn into its father’s thigh. A few months later, the god of fertility, theatre and wine, Dionysus, was born. 

George Frideric Handel’s three-act opera Semele was premiered at Covent Garden in London in February 1744. It was performed only six times during the composer’s lifetime. Apparently, Lenten audiences, expecting a story based on biblical themes, were disconcerted by the erotic tale based on mythology. The work was then presented in concert form. Handel used a pre-existing English-language libretto by William Congreve – it had been written in 1705 and 1706 for an opera by his friend John II Eccles, and was based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. However, Congreve and Eccles’s work was even less successful than Handel’s composition, as it was never performed after its completion… not even once, under the pretext of changing audience tastes. The Eccles opera was first performed in 1964, over two hundred and fifty years after its completion.

The story told by Ovid also inspired the French composer Marin Marais. His Sémélé was first performed in April 1709 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal. The libretto, prepared by Antoine Houdar de la Motte, was divided into five acts. This work was also unsuccessful, but this time the obstacle was… the climate. The winter of 1708/1709 was exceptionally harsh (remembered as Le Grand Hiver), and the famine caused by the lack of food led to riots in the streets of Paris.

The strangely disappearing pieces will speak again. Inspired by Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of archetypes, the musicians treat the concert as a vehicle for myth. Their difficult goal is to retell Semele’s fate as a triumphant story. Dionysus’s mother longs for knowledge – does this lead her to punishment or liberation? “Humanity has always retold the same stories, because the archetypes contained within them still live within us and are necessary to us. From Eve to Pandora, mythological women have for centuries plucked forbidden fruit from the trees of knowledge, rejecting the illusion of a gilded cage in favour of truth. It is no coincidence that in most ancient tales, it is the woman who reaches for knowledge and is punished for this act. The stigma of original sin is a tool of control that guards the old hierarchy,” claims Le Sommeil.