Médée
Opera in 3 acts
Cast:
Medée (soprano)
Jason (tenor)
Créon, king (bass)
Dircé, daughter of Créon's (soprano)
Néris, slave of Medée (soprano)
Two handmaidens (sopranos)
Captain of the guard (speaking role)
Chorus
Program Notes by Martin Pearlman
Cherubini's Médée is known today as a challenging, dramatic vehicle for great sopranos, most famously for Maria Callas, for whom it was revived and who sang it numerous times from 1953 into the early 1960's. But what we hear in Callas's and in most recordings is not the work that Cherubini originally wrote.
At its Paris premiere in 1797, Médée was sung in French with spoken dialogue between its musical numbers. In that sense, it followed the conventions of the French opéra-comique, a term which by that time connoted not a comic opera but rather an opera with spoken dialogue. Indeed, Cherubini invested his opéra-comique with unprecedented emotional intensity. The libretto by François-Benoît Hoffmann tells the story of the sorceress Medea, who, having been abandoned by her lover Jason, sacrifices everything to her revenge, including their two children. It is based on the myth as told in Euripides' tragedy and Corneille's play Médée, and, together with Cherubini's music, it presents the Medea story in all its horror. The sustained drama of Medea's struggle, ending in vengeance and murder, and the dark focus on the psychological states of the main characters go beyond anything that had been seen before in opera.
Although the first audiences were lukewarm to the work, it was acclaimed by critics and was admired and highly respected by musicians as eminent as Beethoven, Schumann and Wagner. Brahms called it "the work that we musicians recognize among ourselves as the highest peak of dramatic music."
Five years after the Paris premiere, the opera was translated into Italian for its premiere in Vienna, and some years after that, Cherubini shortened it for another Italian-language production. But then, a little over a decade after Cherubini's death, the opera truly changed. In 1855, the composer and conductor Franz Lachner presented the opera in German in Frankfurt. For that production, not only did Lachner use the shortened version and have it translated into German, but he replaced all the spoken dialogue with recitatives that he himself composed. Médée was now a more traditional opera, sung throughout, with recitatives in a later style.
In the early twentieth century, Lachner's version was translated back into Italian for its premiere at La Scala. It was this Italian-language hybrid Medea, in its shortened version and with Lachner's recitatives, that was revived for Maria Callas in 1953 and that is heard in most productions and recordings since that time. Only since the mid-1980s have a few productions attempted to go back to Cherubini's original French opéra-comique.
Boston Baroque Performances
Arias from Médée
October 15 & 16, 2010
NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor
Soloist:
Barbara Quintiliani, soprano