Semele

Semele is director Claus Guth's third production at the Bayerische Staatsoper. In 2007 he staged Giuseppe Verdi's Luisa Miller, and in 2022 Bluthaus by Georg Friedrich Haas. Guth lives in Munich, where he studied philosophy, German philology and theatre at LMU Munich, as well as theatre and opera direction at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich. Yvonne Gebauer (dramaturgy) and Guth have worked together for many years, as has Gesine Völlm (costumes). The first collaboration between Guth and set designer Michael Levine, Jenůfa by Leoš Janáček, premiered at the Royal Opera House London in 2021. Michael Bauer (lighting) and Guth have known each other since their work experience at the Bayerische Staatsoper during their student days. Guth's staging of the baroque opera Dido and Aeneas, his thesis, premiered at Munich's Reithalle in 1991. Handel and Guth have been a tradition ever since: Radamisto, Opernhaus Zürich 2004; Rinaldo, Opernhaus Zürich 2008; Messiah, Theater an der Wien 2009; Jephta, De Nationale Opera Amsterdam 2016; Rodelinda, Teatro Real Madrid 2017; Saul, Theater an der Wien 2018; and Orlando, Theater an der Wien 2019.

She is an extra in her own life. Her life’s reality is alien to her. Semele’s father urges her to marry Athamas, and she suddenly finds herself in her own wedding ceremony, hyped up by the marriage industry into a pompous Hollywood scene. By beginning to observe herself from the outside, she creates a parallel reality as an apparent way out, which she superimposes on her life, where all her longings are satisfied – an understanding father, a loving husband, self-determination, in short: fulfilment. However, temporary and above all, not real. In the end she would have to return to her real life, where she was quickly replaced as a wife by her sister Ino, because she could not fulfil the role assigned to her here. Semele, physically present, will psychologically not find the way back to reality. Her mind will glow through. She’s moved too far from normality. The rigid expectations of her as an individual coincided too little with her own will. This basic conflict of Semele was embedded by William Congreve and George Frideric Handel from Ovid's Metamorphoses into the narrative structures common to baroque opera. Today it might also be a perspective on the constricting power of the bourgeois corset.