Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Gervais: Hypermnestre

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

The tragédie en musique, established by Lully in the seventeenth century, continued well into the eighteenth. Lully had many successors in French baroque opera. One of the best of the generation of composers coming after Lully was Charles-Hubert Gervais (1671-1744), whose Hypermnestre (1716) both Parisian audiences and music critics alike regarded as one of the best examples of the tragédie lyrique and praised it especially for its dramatic power. It was revived five times up to 1766. Thereafter Lullian-style opera went out of fashion altogether and Gervais's music was completely forgotten. Even the musicologists have overlooked him.

The 1717 version of the score of Hypermnestre, arguably the best one, was the one recreated in recorded performance by the Purcell Choir and Orfeo Orchestra, both musical groups based in Budapest and working in cooperation with the Center for Baroque Music of Versailles. In this world premiere recording György Váshegyi directs the musical forces, who are joined by six vocal soloists. The Spanish Glossa record label issued Hypermnestre on two compact discs in 2019.

This tragédie en musique is played out on the banks of the Nile in ancient times, and Hypermnestre is a princess, the daughter of King Danäus of Egypt. Her tragedy is bound up with the bloody fate of the Danaides, her father's other offspring.