Some of the duller evenings of my life have been caused by Cavalli’s Messa Concertata, as performer and audience. I was therefore slightly hesitant about spending an evening at one of his operas. However, I was at a loose end, and the opera Giasone (or Jason as it became in English) is one of the rare ones that deals with the Argo’s voyage, the subject of my one-time PhD thesis. (Jason’s subsequent problems with Medea have been rather more popular. The only one about the voyage itself that comes to mind is a lost early work by Mahler.) English Touring Opera were performing it at Bath’s Theatre Royal.
The liberties taken with Greek legend were indeed great. The plot brings the two main love intrigues in the story together; Jason and Medea are married with her father’s blessing (!), but are blown off course on their return to Colchis and arrive back at Lemnos where Jason has abandoned not only Hypsipyle (renamed Isiphile here) but a whole family. The plot resolves after various twists and turns, involving some low-life comic relief and a rejected suitor of Medea (!)
The music is certainly more interesting than the Messa Concertata‘s, but what I found lacking was ensemble singing – mostly the characters just sang arias at one another and only occasionally did two voices sound at once. This was partly the fault of the libretto. Opportunities for dramatic confrontations were also missed – if I (or Handel) had been running the show, Isiphile and Medea would have had a good old spat at some point, and indeed Medea was rather under-characterised throughout. (The singer playing her had a rather disconcerting resemblance to the Duchess of Cambridge). Heracles made a brief appearance and gives a version of his speech on Lemnos from Argonautica 1, but is also under-used. Jason however emerges as even more of a rat than he is in Apollonius or Euripides.
It was all competently performed, but I don’t think this opera, popular though it was in its day, would make converts to baroque opera. But it beats his Mass anyway.