The counter-argument

Since the emergence of opera as a distinct genre in the seventeenth century, classical mythology has provided composers and librettists with an inexhaustible source of stage drama. If the primacy of antiquity as an operatic subject was challenged in the nineteenth century by naturalism, early-modern history, and national folklore, characters from the Greek tradition maintained a comfortable foothold in the twentieth century in the works of Strauss, Henze, Reimann, and many others. Cassandra, the new work by Bernard Foccroulle – which opened at La Monnaie in 2023 and recently had its Berlin première at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden – is perhaps the most recent opera to employ mythological characters as a means of addressing issues in the modern world, in this case the timely subject of climate change. Yet despite its nobility of purpose…