We’ve waited long enough to experience this jewel of the French Baroque – Charpentier’s Médée.

You know the old saying: better late than never? Well, almost 330 years after its premiere on 4 December 1693, Charpentier’s magnum opus – and one of the crowning glories of the French Baroque – Médée has finally made it down under. Originally intended as part of Pinchgut Opera’s 2020 season, there was the small matter of the pandemic to contend with. But now we can scarcely believe that opening night of the Australian premiere season is almost upon us. 

Médée is an anomalous work, both in its composer's career and in its time. Most of Charpentier's vast output was for the private devotional use of his noble employers. But he was no stranger to dramatic music, having composed lots of “dramatic motets” around stories from the Bible. And, once he succeeded Lully as the in-house composer for Molière's Comédie Française, Charpentier upskilled in all things theatrical, comic and dramatic. That appointment, incidentally, put him right in the firing line of Lully’s professional jealousies and saw Charpentier all but excluded from music making in the court of Louis XIV.

Other than the privately performed David et Jonathas (which Pinchgut presented in 2008), this five-act + prologue opera is Charpentier’s only foray into the tragédie lyrique, a form codified by Lully. The stories were almost always drawn from Classical mythology, and didn’t have to have unhappy endings. No spoilers here. Generally the atmosphere of these tragédies would be suffused with the affect of nobility and stateliness, and this is certainly true for Médée.

Charpentier dedicated the work to Louis XIV, but there’s no ticket stub to suggest that the King ever actually saw a performance. He would have had to be quick, for premiere season lasted only ten performances. Louis did casually acknowledge Charpentier to be ‘a good man’ and was reported to have said that he ‘knew there were very fine things in his opera.’ Some say the King’s no-show was out of deference to his composer-in-waiting, Lully. Others think that maybe it was more delicate than that: Médée’s sorcery and poisoning of her rival bore quite a strong resemblance to an infamous episode, known as the “Montespan affair”, in which the royal mistress Françoise Athénaïs, Marquise de Montespan, tried to hold the king's affections through a combination of witchcraft, aphrodisiacs, and various attempts to poison a new favourite. Too much a case of art imitating life for The Sun King perhaps?

One of the very few Charpentier works to have been published in his lifetime, Médée was produced again in Lille in 1700. This time the revival was cut short not by poor reception, but because the theatre on that occasion, burnt to the ground. Had Médée’s SFX gone awry? History doesn’t document. Let’s trust that all sprinklers ARE GO at City Recital Hall, and sit back to await the colossal conclusion to Charpentier’s majestic epic.