Read on to discover all about Luigi Cherubini's terrifyingly blood-spattered opera, Médée and its best recordings...
Who was Luigi Cherubini? An unfairly overlooked composer...
As head of the Paris Conservatoire, Luigi Cherubini’s run-ins with brilliant but unruly student Hector Berlioz, as recounted in the latter’s Memoirs, have negatively impacted on our impressions of the great Italian-French composer ever since. Unfortunately, these attacks have tended to obscure the outstanding qualities of Cherubini’s music itself, which as well as his rarely performed operas includes two exceptional settings of the Requiem, a series of string quartets and a symphony, written for London in 1815.
Having decided in his mid-20s to seek his fortune outside Italy – first in London (1785-6), then in Paris (permanently from 1788) – Cherubini succeeded in surviving the long upheavals of the French Revolutionary period by maintaining a discreet distance from political trouble while occasionally writing works that sided with the regime. Simultaneously, he was building a high reputation for a series of operas whose mostly serious subjects were dealt with in highly original scores that captured the spirit of the age in their ambitious inventiveness and sheer novelty.
Luigi Cherubini... a talented opera composer
Works such as Lodoïska (1791), Médée (1797) and Les deux journées (1800) drew on classical models yet infused them with strikingly modern feeling and musical gestures, placing their author on the very border between Classicism and Romanticism. Beethoven became a huge fan, telling the visiting English composer Cipriani Potter in Vienna in 1817 that, of all his contemporaries, he regarded the Paris-based Italian more highly than any other: something that can readily be heard – if you know Cherubini’s originals – in the German’s own music. Sadly, Beethoven’s admiration was not returned.
Médée itself became a particularly well respected piece – Brahms once described it as ‘the work we musicians recognise among ourselves as the peak of dramatic music.’ But it has nevertheless remained infrequently performed, partly due to the near impossibility of locating a soprano able to carry off the hugely challenging title role, but also, perhaps, to a narrative that enters boldly upon some very shocking dramatic material indeed.
What is the plot of Médée? An ancient Greek tale of love, betrayal and bloody revenge...
François Benoît Hoffman’s libretto for Médée is derived from Greek myth, as told by Euripides, via the tragedy by Pierre Corneille (1635). And a gruesome tale it tells too. Having aided the adventurer Jason in acquiring the famed Golden Fleece, the treasure of her father and his people in Colchis – a far distant land on the shores of the Black Sea, comprising parts of modern Turkey and Georgia – the sorceress Médée has fled with her lover, not even balking at murdering her own brother to aid their escape. She has subsequently borne Jason two children.
Now, years later and safely in Corinth, Jason wishes to cast Médée aside and marry instead Dircé, daughter of King Créon. All fear Médée’s vengeance, but Créon allows her one further day before she must go into permanent exile – she uses this brief period to kill her rival by giving her a robe and crown containing poison that burns Dircé up at her wedding to Jason. Then she turns her attention to Jason’s and her own children, both of whom she stabs to death.
Médée the opera... an evolving work
The original French work was an opéra-comique – not (self-evidently!) a comic opera as the name might suggest, but one with spoken dialogue. Though it enjoyed limited success in France, it took off in Germany, where other composers keen to praise it included Weber, Schumann and Wagner. For a Frankfurt production in 1855, the minor composer Franz Lachner replaced the spoken dialogue with sung recitatives that soon became standard, despite their post-Wagnerian stylistic incongruity.
Medea (as it was called in Italian) appeared twice in Italian translation in London in the mid-19th century, but the first performance in Italy was given only in 1909 in a new translation by Carlo Zangarini – one of Puccini’s librettists. The main characters were now named Medea, Giasone, Glauce (formerly Dircé) and Creonte.
Médée or Medea... a vehicle for operatic star Maria Callas
In this form, the work was revived in the postwar period for Maria Callas – who would prove to be the title-role’s ideal interpreter – initially in Florence in 1953 under the baton of Vittorio Gui.
In all, Callas would sing the role live on 31 occasions – as well as a La Scala studio recording under Tullio Serafin (1957), there are live recordings in which she stars from Florence (1953), La Scala (under Leonard Bernstein, 1953), Dallas (1958), Covent Garden (1959) and again La Scala (1961), all in sound that is a good deal less than ideal. Other performances in Venice (1954) and Epidaurus (1961) have left no sonic record.
Many sopranos and conductors have followed Callas’s example in using this inauthentic Italian-language, through-sung edition, though over more recent decades productions and recordings have begun to return to the original French and to spoken dialogue, either that of the original libretto (though often with cuts) or a completely new text. Although Callas inevitably looms large in any survey of the work’s recordings, there are other possibilities, including some that return to a French text, if not always to Hoffman’s original spoken dialogue.
Cherubini's Médée: recommended recordings
The best recording
Christophe Rousset (conductor)
Nadja Michael (Médée), Kurt Streit (Jason) et al; Les Talens Lyriques
BelAir Classiques BAC076/476 (DVD or Blu-ray)
Filmed at La Monnaie in Brussels in 2011, director Krzysztof Warlikowski’s thrilling staging is sung in French, though with a new spoken text by the director and Christian Longchamp, which generally works well. Broadly in modern dress – there are only sporadic and tokenistic visual references to ancient Greece – the production is sharply and convincingly directed, conveying the ancient drama in a modern setting and with some references to the opera house where it is performed. Warlikowski spares the audience nothing of this dark tale and his cast commits entirely to the piece and its production.
Preceding the opera proper is a grainy old video featuring two small boys playing on holiday at the seaside and a joyous period wedding (a reference to, rather than depiction of, Jason and Médée’s). The silent children – remarkably acted by young boys – are a frequent and unsettling presence throughout. During the overture the old footage alternates with the present. The boys are shown with a clear hostility towards their new mother, Dircé; later on, they refuse to embrace her.
A powerful period-instrument interpretation
Christophe Rousset’s period-instrument orchestra provides a powerful version of Cherubini’s overture. Favouring fast tempos, as an interpreter Rousset may arguably be less observant than Tullio Serafin or Leonard Bernstein, but his realisation of the score is neat, precise and potent. The individual dramatic performances offer psychologically complex portrayals. If not in the Callas class, Nadja Michael’s dramatically commanding performance as Médée is often estimable, if vocally uneven; she is at her best in the spoken dialogue. Initially she is presented visually as a Goth, based on the late pop singer Amy Winehouse.
Kurt Streit’s Jason is beautifully sung in the lighter-voiced French tradition, quite different from the Italian approach – Warlikowski’s staging makes clear that he still has feelings for his former lover – and Hendrickje Van Kerckhove gives a fine account of the insecure, almost perpetually overwrought Dircé.
Morally uncertain and again fearful of Médée’s anger, Vincent Le Texier’s Créon is vivid, if somewhat roughly voiced, and Christianne Stotijn is highly sympathetic as Médée’s confidante Néris, particularly expressive in her mournful second-act aria with bassoon obbligato. Taken as a whole, this is a remarkable musical and dramatic experience, fully worthy of the opera itself.
Cherubini's Médée: three other great recordings
Tullio Serafin (conductor)
Maira Callas’s 1957 studio recording under Tullio Serafin is sonically her best version; though she is not in such commanding voice as under Bernstein, there is still artistic greatness in every word and note. Serafin takes a more classical view of the piece than Bernstein and makes fewer cuts, while building steadily towards the horrific finale. Near the beginning of her career, Renata Scotto expresses Glauce’s fear and foreboding. Miriam Pirazzini’s Neris empathises with her vengeful friend at every turn and Mirto Picchi gives a good account of Giasone. (Warner Classics 2564634083)
Leonard Bernstein (conductor)
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The poor sound would not be acceptable except in such special circumstances as this live 1953 La Scala recording, in which Callas is inimitable in declamation, intensity and sheer vocal power – her fearless performance is as imaginative as anything she ever did. Fedora Barbieri is impressive as her confidante Neris, with the other secondary roles decently done, though the La Scala chorus disappoints. Leonard Bernstein sets a furious pace in Cherubini’s finely composed overture and throughout his conducting is infused with dramatic tension. (Warner Classics 0190295844608)
Bart Folse (conductor)
Claiming to be the first complete recording (1999), this is the only version currently offering the entire original French text, including the (arguably too long) original dialogue. The period-instrument playing also marks it as a serious, groundbreaking enterprise. Not all of the singing is of the highest level, but the use of smaller voices matched to similarly scaled orchestral and choral forces places Médée firmly within the classical tradition of Gluck’s tragedies, giving us an idea of the soundworld Cherubini might have expected. (Newport Classics NPD 85622/2)
And one to avoid…
One of two studio recordings suavely conducted by Lamberto Gardelli, whose interpretation is not as characterful as either Serafin’s or Bernstein’s, this 1977 release stars Sylvia Sass attempting to follow in Callas’s footsteps. Vocally, she throws what she has at the role, but it’s not always enough, while her tone is apt to curdle. Magda Kalmár rustles up a nervous but sweetly sung Glauce, while Veriano Luchetti’s Giasone offers commitment if not quite enough heft. Excellent orchestra, weak chorus.