Wexford Festival Opera 2025: Deidamia

Deidamia. Image, Pádraig Grant

****

When it comes to spectacle, conductor and director George Petrou knows a thing or two. Petrou’s revival of Handel’s oft forgotten opera seria, Deidamia, announcing itself with the visual excitement of a theme park simulator ride. Dark billowing clouds, bodies arising from the dead, all gob smackingly gorgeous to behold. Petrou’s production a Grecian theme park in which myth marries modern. Homer colliding with Shirley Valentine’s tourists as the past contrasts, competes, compliments and bleeds into the present. Yet like all theme parks there's a painfully long wait before the ride kicks in. Paulo Antonio Rolli’s strained libretto trapped between duelling tensions it never resolved. Explaining, in part, why Deidamia disappeared after only a handful of performances following its premiere in 1741 and wasn’t revived till the twentieth century. It being a very good thing that it was. Handel’s Deidamia presenting one of opera’s most formidable and memorable heroines.

Deidamia. Image, Pádraig Grant

Story proves a lightweight affair, in which king Lycomedes hides the young Achilles, disguised as a maiden, to forestall the prophecy of Achilles death in the Trojan war. Prompting a disguised Ulysses to seek out the hidden hero. Whose love of hunting, amongst other things, rouses suspicions. The matter complicated by Deidamia, passionately in love with a bi-curious Achilles (remember Patroclus), being apparently pursued by Ulysses. The tension between love of country and the heart’s true love as old as time. Given modern resonance as the bittersweet end arrives.

Bruno de Sá in Deidamia. Image, Pádraig Grant

Whilst Rolli’s libretto trots along nicely when confined to narrative, a tendency to wax lyrical, and wax badly, produces long passages of asinine aphorisms and bad poetry one step from a Hallmark card and a million miles from wisdom. Meaning that lots gets said but little is of interest, with less of interest actually happening. Even in 1741 it must have presented a challenge. That, and Baroque going against the new, prevailing operatic winds was sure to signal Deidamia’s demise. But Baroque has many charms, including a high degree of individual vocal virtuosity and a love of visual spectacle, both very much in evidence here. Giorgina Germanou’s dexterous set elevated to heavenly heights by Arnim Friess’s spectacular projection designs. Which includes an underwater interlude and an AI Odyssey you never knew you wanted.

Deidamia. Image, Pádraig Grant

Sung in Italian with English surtitles, some ravenously beautiful singing proves divine in solo and rapturous when harmonised. A rollercoaster rise and plummeting through scales that’s near orgasmic at one point. Countertenors Bruno de Sá as Achilles, and Nicolò Balducci as Ulysses, delivering a superb blend of playfulness and passion. Baritone Rory Musgrave’s Fenice, in love with soprano Sarah Gilford’s Nerea, finds the object of his desire doing things with scales not done in polite company. Soprano Sophie Junker as Deidamia delivering a powerhouse performance as a strong, capable woman who refuses when accused to succumb to victimhood, or to accept what the fates have decreed without a fight. If the final image cedes the stage to Achilles, it’s the wrong choice; de Sa’s Achilles might steal the scenes, Junker’s Deidamia steals the show.

Sophie Junker and Bruno de Sá in Deidamia. Image, Pádraig Grant

Baroque and Handel don’t immediately top operatic best of lists. But Petrou has dusted off all reservations and delivered a top draw production with some truly sublime singing. One that reclaims Baroque opera as something to be enjoyed rather than endured. In which Junker’s towering performance reclaims one of opera’s true feminist heroines.

Deidamia by George Frideric Handel, libretto by Paolo Antonio Rolli, runs as part of Wexford Festival Opera 2025, in a co-production with Göttingen International Handel Festival, at O’Reilly Theatre, National Opera House October 18th, 22nd, 26th, and 30th.

For more information visit Wexford Festival Opera 2025.