Xerxes – the name means “ruling over heroes”. But the power of the Persian Grand King and Egyptian Pharaoh had been crumbling at least since being defeated by the Greeks at the sea-battle of Salamis in 480 B.C. In the opera “Serse” (as the name is written in Italian) by Georg Friedrich Händel aka George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) also, Xerxes is hardly the figure of a great statesman. In the first scene he is found supine, dreaming under a plane-tree and expressing his musings with the famous larghetto aria “Ombra mai fù” (never was a shade …). As is the rule in baroque operas, the hero’s function is not to fight, but to fall in love with a woman whom he cannot have. The fair Romilda is faithful to his brother Arsamene and refuses the king her favours. For her sake he spurns the devoted Amastre, banishes Arsamene and plots with Romilda’s father to fix a date for the wedding – but in the end Arsamene can definitively remain sure of the fidelity of his Romilda, and the contrite Xerxes has to settle for Amastre.

It is a malicious comedy that Händel composed for the King’s Theatre on the Haymarket in London in 1738 as one of his last operas. Situations which are on the brink of tragedy keep slipping into farce because a man in love cannot cast off his fits of jealousy, a father mistakenly gives his daughter to the real suitor and His Majesty the King turns out to be a swindler. The way Händel’s music not only supports these vagaries, but even puts them with virtuosity into an even clearer light, bewildered his contemporaries, but with time it has assured the piece a very special position among his entire operatic output.

This production is by Stefan Herheim, who was declared “director of the year” in 2007 by “Opernwelt” magazine for his staging of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” at the Aalto Theatre in Essen and has since conquered the opera scene in Bayreuth, Salzburg, Brussels, London and Amsterdam. The “Xerxes” staging is a co-production between the Komische Oper in Berlin and Deutsche Oper am Rhein.

 
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Opera in three acts
Libretto after Niccolò Minato and Silvio Stampiglia

 
Sung in German
 

Musikalische Leitung Konrad Junghänel
Inszenierung Stefan Herheim
Szenische Einstudierung Annette Weber, Stefan Herheim
Bühne Heike Scheele
Kostüme Gesine Völlm
Licht Franck Evin, Stefan Herheim, Johannes F. Scherfling
Chorleitung Christoph Kurig
Dramaturgie Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach
 
Xerxes Valer Sabadus
Arsamenes Terry Wey
Amastris Katarina Bradic
Ariodates Torben Jürgens
Romilda Heidi Elisabeth Meier
Atalanta Anke Krabbe
Elviro Hagen Matzeit
Chor Chor der Deutschen Oper am Rhein
Orchester Neue Düsseldorfer Hofmusik