Semele

Our second production at Glyndebourne. Award-winning director Adele Thomas makes her Glyndebourne debut with the festival’s first-ever staging of Semele and period specialist Václav Luks conducts an exciting young cast.

Semele is engaged, but secretly in love with someone else. Her lover is none other than Jove, King of the Gods. When he carries her off his wife Juno devises a scheme that will ensure a swift and brutal end – both to her husband’s infidelity and to Semele herself.

With a plot full of lusty Gods and beautiful mortals, where intrigue and desire take centre-stage, Handel’s Semele combines the drama of Italian opera with the choral splendour and richness of English oratorio. Ovid’s colourful Metamorphoses provides the starting point for a work that scandalised 18th-century audiences, a story of transformations, seductions and illusions that drew new sensuality and ecstasy from the composer.