This December Pinchgut will perform Charpentier’s 1693 opera, Médée.  The story of Medea will be familiar to many listeners — it’s a myth that enjoys a long tradition from antiquity to the present day.  But it’s a story that presents its audience with difficult questions about betrayal and revenge.  Parts of Medea’s story encourage us to sympathise with her, and yet we cannot deny the horror of her actions.  What is it about Medea’s story that makes it so enduring?  And is it possible to be sympathetic towards such a terrifying character?

Médée tells the story of the Colchian princess Medea who, after falling in love with the hero Jason and helping him to capture the Golden Fleece, escapes with him to Corinth.  There Medea faces hostility and suspicion from the king, Creon, who wants Jason to ditch his foreign wife and marry his daughter, Creusa.  When Medea finds out she is to be exiled and that Jason — for whom she has sacrificed her homeland, family, reputation — plans to remarry, she decides on a course of revenge that will entail murdering not only Creusa and Creon, but also her own children by Jason.

There’s no escaping the fact that Medea carries out some horrific acts of violence.  Even before she arrives at Corinth, she has orchestrated the killing of her brother, Apsyrtos, and through an act of misdirection she has engineered the death of Jason’s evil uncle Pelias.  Add to this the murders she commits in the course of a single day at Corinth, and it’s no wonder she developed a reputation as a ruthless murderess!  But other parts of Medea’s story make her an object of sympathy.  We recognise, for instance, the sacrifices she has made to guarantee Jason’s safety first at Colchis, then in Greece at the court of the tyrant Pelias, and later at Corinth.  Knowing that Jason would have failed miserably in his mission without Medea’s help, we feel the sting of indignity she suffers upon learning that — despite all her efforts on his behalf! — Jason plans to dump her in favour of a new wife.  Even her decision to commit infanticide is not without its pathos, as we witness the emotional turmoil Medea experiences before finally arriving at the horrifying — but to her, necessary — decision to kill her and Jason’s children.

Medea’s skill as a sorceress makes her a formidable opponent.  But her use of witchcraft — concocting potions, singing spells, raising spirits from the Underworld — also makes her a target of suspicion and fear.  Medea’s status as a witch receives more or less emphasis depending on which version of her myth you read.  Euripides, for instance, downplays her magical abilities, while Ovid and Seneca both make it a focal point of their retellings of her myth.  But while Medea’s status as a witch made her a maligned figure for the ancient Greeks and Romans, for whom witchcraft was associated with undesirable foreignness and the untrustworthy, dangerous nature of women, it’s an aspect of her character that modern audiences might respond to a little differently.  Medea’s virtuosic displays of witchcraft, capped by her final spectacular getaway in a chariot drawn by enormous flying serpents, might be terrifying, but — you have to admit — it’s hard not to be a little impressed!