Medea by Cherubini

Glimmerglass Opera is a more challenging venue that Caramoor for those of us who are downstate.  It is a particularly lovely summer opera house, and has the advantage of a Cooperstown location which means access to a lovely town with some fine local museums and the Baseball Hall of Fame.

This summer they are presenting a varied program which I leave the curious to check out.  We went for the Medea.

Medea is the legendary woman who helped Jason steel the golden fleece, killed her brother to slow the pursuers, was left by Jason for another (well-placed) woman and then killed the other woman and her own children for revenge. The opera takes place in the palace of King Creon as Jason and the king attempt to get Medea to just go away.

I have always thought that Medea got a bad rap--she is often presented as only the jealous wife who killed her children for revenge which turns her into the latest headline or a case study.  But Euripides, the Greek playwright who started the story, was interested in much more, and he wrote her  as a much more cornered character--she had committed murder and treason for Jason and had nowhere to go.  As written she makes a very good argument for women's liberation.  When Jason decided to marry the king's daughter and render his first marriage null, it meant Medea had no country, no position and her children would be bastardized--they would have no position and no future..  She really had no way out (Moral of this story for my grand-daughters: never give up EVERYTHING for a man).  Euripides seems to have been interested in the ways man tries to manipulate fate (or the gods) and the price to be paid.

The Cheubini version of the story (the Francis-Benoit Hoffmann version as he wrote the libretto avoids some of the pitfalls if not all of them.  The music is quite lovely as were all of the performances.  Alexandra Deshorties, who sang the title role, gave the most powerfully moving performance I have ever seen.  I was actually glad for the applause to have a moment to get myself under control.