Antonio Bembo - Ercole Amante at the Opéra Bastille in Paris

ONP Bastille, Paris, Tuesday June 2 2026

Conductor: Leonardo García-Alarcón. Production, sets, costumes, video: Netia Jones. Lighting: Ellen Ruge. Choreography: Maud Le Pladec. Ercole: Andreas Wolf. Giunone: Julie Fuchs. Iole: Ana Vieira Leite. Dejanira: Deepa Johnny. Licco: Marcel Beekman. Hyllo: Alasdair Kent. Venere, Bellezza: Sandrine Piau. Paggio: Théo Imart. Pasithea: Teona Todua. Nettuno, L'Ombra di Eutyro: Alex Rosen. Una grazia: Danaé Monnié. Grazie: Giulia Fichu-Sampieri, Dina Husseini. Mercure: Samuel Desguin. Cappella Mediterranea. Chœur de Chambre de Namur.

Photos: Bernd Uhlig/Opéra national de Paris

Another long article, I’m afraid, but with a virtually unknown work by a virtually unknown composer, it’s hard to avoid…

Antonia Bembo was born in Venice in 1640 or thereabouts, and studied there with Cavalli. But in the 1670s, she fled with her children to France to escape a husband who, when not neglectful, was abusive. Her singing won her the protection, including a pension, of Louis XIV, and she spent the rest of her career in France, where today the National Library holds several volumes of her music, much of it dedicated to the King. The collection includes the complete manuscript of Ercole Amante, purchased at auction in the 1930s. Like the scores, manuscript or printed, of many forgotten operas (some of which, as it happens, I’ve been translating for eventual performing editions) it can be consulted in full by anyone, free of charge, here.

 

Bembo’s one and only opera dates from 1707. Possibly in tribute to her illustrious teacher, she chose to recycle the libretto, by Francesco Buti, of Cavalli’s own Ercole Amante. This had been commissioned by Mazarin for Louis XIV’s 1660 marriage to Maria Theresa of Spain, but eventually performed (with lengthy balletic additions by Lully, to Cavalli’s annoyance) in 1662. While it may or may not have been performed privately, Bembo’s new Ercole was not seen on stage in her lifetime (she died, like Louis, her patron, in 1715), so it gathered dust for 300 years, until recently.

 

 

In 2023, Jörg Halubek and Il Gusto Barocco pipped Leonardo García-Alarcón to the post by giving the nearly-complete work in concert in Stuttgart, orchestrated for about 15 instrumentalists. It was recorded live, and issued on disc. Ercole was then bravely staged last year by Ars Minerva in San Francisco, with an instrumental ensemble that, from what I’ve seen on video, would appear to comprise no more than ten. The manuscript is not fully scored, but if the work had ever been performed for the French court, more numerous forces would probably have been fielded. So in the gaping pit of the 2,700-seat Bastille, García-Alarcón surrounds himself with fifty-odd musicians: strings (including da gamba), oboes, recorders, bassoons, harp and harpsichord, at least one lute and theorbo, brass, an organ, drums, bells, a wind machine… not to mention a curious whistling sound and, cloth-eared though I may be, didn’t I even hear chimes and castanets?

 

So what of the work, and the decision to revive it in Paris’s biggest house?

 

In brief, the plot is more or less Hercules-as-usual. Hercules fancies his son's fiancée, Iole. His wife, Dejanira, has Iole present him with a shirt soaked in the poisoned blood of Nessus, a centaur he had killed. Nessus had told Dejanira it would keep Hercules faithful. Hercules puts it on, and dies: Nessus had lied, and is avenged. Bembo’s opera (like Cavalli’s, for obvious reasons) also involves the Three Graces, the cave of Sleep, a magic chair, a prison tower by the sea, temporary drownings (annulled by the gods), the return from the grave of Iole’s murdered father, etc. You have, after all, to do something to fill the five acts required in France at the time. The Paris Opera’s Website offers a complete synopsis in English. 

 

Musically, Bembo’s synthesis of the styles of Cavalli’s Venice and Lully’s Paris is even more piquant than I expected, with the added spice of some surprising harmonic progressions and unusual twists and turns between voices seasoning a varied assortment of solos, duets, trios, a quartet, and choruses (i.e. not just recitative, as the inevitable detractors claim). Some of these are showstoppers, reducing the audience to a breathless silence. Ercole may not be a lost absolute  masterpiece brought miraculously back to life (just wait till you hear the forgotten wonders I’ve been translating), but I certainly found it more interesting to hear than, say, Campra’s nearly contemporary Tancrède. Admittedly, when I saw that in Aix, Malgoire was conducting, so the fault may not have been wholly the composer’s.

 

 

Netia Jones has worked for the Paris Opera before, but this was the first time I’d seen one of her productions. She’s evidently a very talented woman: as well as directing, she’s also credited with the sets, costumes and video. Her good-humoured staging deals delicately with the post-me-too potential in the plot and its relevance to Bembo’s own turbulent life story, by poking fun at a Falstaffian Hercules while still taking seriously Dejanira’s grief, as expressed in a magnificent lament. This is a better solution than going for camp slapstick and sending absolutely everything up, comic or tragic alike, a failing that undermines many contemporary productions of baroque-era operas. (Händel’s Cesare has been a frequent victim.) To summon up anew the merveilleux of court productions under Louis XIV, she makes good use of the Bastille’s space and resources; her clever deployment of video, a seamlessly integral part of the production from beginning to end, ought to reduce to silence those (there seem to be lots of them) who moan about its use on the opera stage.

 

The curtain rises on the hero’s palace. Its rows of tall Georgian windows and the blue skies beyond are projected at the rear. So are the remote controlled blinds and toile-de-Jouy-style wallpaper which, being virtual, comes to life - with grappling he-men - to illustrate an aria. To left and right (all evening) are tall steel structures supporting monitors, at first all showing identical portraits of Iole, but which of course change as the action requires. On an endless, slow-moving conveyor, a bed appears; various items of neo-baroque furniture, black and red, will enter on the right, glide at a snail's pace across the stage, and exit on the left as the early scenes progress.

 

On the bed is Jones's, fat, slobbish, philandering Hercules, a far cry from the muscular statues dotted around on pedestals at various points. Girls in sporty white skirts and red stockings haul him into fencing gear and a blond toupee. Then to his goggling delight his Lagerfeld-lookalike flunkies (white ponytails, dark glasses, black tailcoats, white gaiters) bear in, under silver cloches, a copious breakfast of multiple Big Macs, fries and Coke. This reminds us of someone. The Three Graces giggle together in pink mini-dresses - the same as Iole’s - on a button-backed sofa. Venus, promoting free love, wears ruched and billowing puce; Juno, defending marriage, is a swanky blonde 60s society hostess in a slender white dress with a space-age silver cape reminiscent of Courrèges. They come to blows - doubled by dancers, who will appear, as required, in various kinds of sports gear, including red Adidas tracksuits with white stripes.

 

And so it goes on, through scene after scene, some comic, colourful and brightly-lit, others dark and serious and decidedly beautiful… The cave of Sleep: writhing videos (on both a translucent gauze in front and the wall behind) mirror the writhing bodies, half undressed, of the Namur chamber choir, relaxing after an orgy. The sunlit, topiaried bushes and neatly-trimmed labyrinths of the gardens of Eochalia. An ingenious and visually striking marine tableau, with Hyllo imprisoned in an octagonal tower; the hapless Paggio struggles to reach him in a tiny boat, videoed live on the left and embedded in a vast vision of oily waves at the rear. Both disappear through trapdoors, drowned. A profusion of marble tombs in an infinitely deep hall (prolonged on the screen at the rear), and a stately procession of mourners in red. The tomb lids slither aside in the gloom to disgorge the dead, including the shadow of Euthyrus, shrouded in copious folds of black silk, faceless. The wedding (aborted, of course) of Hercules and Iole, under a domed pergola on a mound of green grass, where the bright blue sky turns bloody red as Hercules dies. At the end, the hero is united by Venus with Beauty, an erratic, robotic Barbie doll, arms flailing, played by a dancer.

 

I can't go into it all - my post would go on forever - but this was a fine production, neatly directed and with lots of ingenious little details, by turns funny and moving, three hours long but never flagging. ‘C’était très bien,’ it was very nice, said my neighbour at the end - the same one who’d quit Cavalli’s La Calisto, three weeks before, at the earliest opportunity because it was ‘all the same.’ Anyway, it’s sure to be out on video soon, so everyone interested can see for themselves.

 

Leonardo García-Alarcón has justified scheduling Bembo’s Ercole at the Bastille, Paris’s biggest house, by recalling that the ‘salle des machines’ constructed at the Tuileries in time for Cavalli’s could hold, so it’s said, nearly 4,000. (I don’t know if he also mentioned that its acoustics were supposedly dreadful for the singers.) For the present production, he assembled a strong cast, with voices well-picked for their respective characters, but naturally best-suited to the ‘baroque’ repertoire, not Wagner or R. Strauss. As a result, when not lined up on the edge of the pit it was an ongoing struggle for them to make themselves heard; or at any rate, however the singers felt about it on stage, it was an ongoing strain for us, the audience, to hear them properly over the rich and sometimes loud - though permanently indistinct - chuntering of the 50 instruments below Fortunately, to be sure of having a good view, I was on row ten of the stalls, so I could enjoy nearly all of it; what people heard 30 metres (i.e. 100 feet) behind and 20 above, I can’t say.

 

Some of the cast I knew, some not. I’ll start with the women.

 

To fans of the period, Sandrine Piau (Venere) needs no introduction: she’s been charming them, so at least it feels, since Bembo’s day. Her voice is darkening now, but her subtle artistry, vocal and physical, and engaging presence remain undiminished. Hers has never been a big voice, but, at least from where I was sitting, she projected better than I’d feared. She was pitted against rival goddess Julie Fuchs (Giunone), whose topmost register was her greatest asset in a house that’s said to be kind to sopranos. It was less kind to her middle and lower ranges, curiously dull. She played the blasé rich bitch, looking down her nose while waving a cigarette, well.

 

I first heard Ana Vieira Leite in Charpentier’s Médée at the Palais Garnier which, as I keep saying, while smaller than the Bastille, is not a small house. She ‘sings beautifully,’ I wrote, ‘with a pretty, silvery sound,’ but ‘the women's voices were, all round, a couple of sizes too small.’ She fared better at the Opéra Comique (1,200 seats), in Rameau’s Les Fêtes d’Hébé. At the Bastille, her singing was just as fine, but sounded distant indeed whenever she moved away from the very front. This was also true of young Teona Todua, ‘voice from above’ in last year's revival of Don Carlos at the Bastille, singing Pasithea from the middle of the heap of bodies in that beautiful cave-of-Sleep scene, but sadly quite hard to catch.

 

 

Most impressive of all among the women (and the most loudly applauded), as Dejanira, was Deepa Johnny. She was more at liberty here than in Satyagraha two months back to develop her warm, rich, even mezzo  in fury or sorrow: she gave us a magnificent, poignant set-piece lament (the one I mentioned earlier) in the third act.

 

Hercules was Andreas Wolf. For a while, I wasn't sure he should really be cast in the title role. His voice can be plain ugly, as I noted when writing up Atys at Versailles in 2022, and it thins and bleats at the top. But as, in this production at least, Hercules is such an ugly yob, I decided it fitted the part. Marcel Beekman, Platée in Carsen’s production at the Opéra Comique over a decade ago and more recently the star of Kosky’s overstuffed Les Brigands at Garnier, is now well into rasping character-tenor territory, perfect for the sardonically comic role of Licco.

 

Three of the men were new to me. Alasdair Kent - our floppy-haired, teenage Hyllo, in green school uniform with yellow braid and white socks - is a remarkable Australian lyric tenor singing, e.g., the killer Rossini roles. He clearly revels in his healthy top and ability to tail off into melting pianissimi, as called for when imprisoned in his tower by the sea. His acting was full of nicely-judged details. Théo Imart (Paggio) is a character countertenor whose edgy voice carries well in sustained passages but not in the rapid patter of recitative. Alex Rosen, a Californian bass, took the deep, dark roles of Nettuno and Ombra di Eutyro. He’s had a lot of praise online, but I found that the higher or lower he sang, the less I could hear him. But cloth-eared, I am, as I said.

 

As I also said, Leonardo García-Alarcón’s period band, the Cappella Mediterranea, was big for the period. This didn’t always help the singers in their Herculean labours: at times it nearly drowned them. But the stalls aren’t the best place to hear the orchestra well at the Bastille; that’s a trade-off I unfortunately make when choosing to sit there for a closer view of the action. Perhaps it explains why, though plethoric, the orchestra seemed confined to an accompanying role, rather than actively participating in the drama. What I heard, most of the time, was a kind of harmonious, mumbling drone with few striking details.

 

But still, this unknown work and its box-fresh production were unexpectedly enjoyable and have scored a great success. The show has sold out. It’s just a pity that it wasn’t staged at Favart - the Opéra Comique - rather than the Bastille.

 

 

Note: an edited version of this post may be published on Parterre.com.