Apollo e Dafne

by George Frideric Handel

Filmed performance available March 5-14, 2021

Virtual Opening Night Party: March 5 at 7:30pm

Program Information

Unrequited Lust in Handel’s Apollo e Dafne

Haymarket’s all-Handel tenth season continues with his radiant Venetian cantata Apollo e Dafne. HOC favorites Ryan de Ryke and Erica Schuller take on the title roles of lustful god and recalcitrant nymph. Members of the acclaimed Haymarket Opera Orchestra bring Handel’s virtuosic and colorful score to life. With exquisite scenery by Zuleyka V. Benitez, Apollo e Dafne is a sumptuous banquet for the eyes, ears, and heart.

SYNOPSIS: Apollo, Greek god of music, poetry, medicine, and the sun, has just slain the python that has been terrorizing the Greek island of Delos. As he struts triumphantly through the forests, he spies the beautiful Dafne, a follower of his twin sister Diana, goddess of the hunt. Apollo is smitten and tries every trick in the book to woo her, but to no avail. Dafne is no trophy nymph, and she makes a run for it! Just as he is about to catch up and force himself upon her, Dafne’s river god father changes her into a laurel tree. (So far, river gods are 2-0 this Haymarket season!) Apollo laments the loss of his beautiful nymph, but promises to crown great heroes with her branches.

PERFORMERS: Two of Haymarket’s most beloved artists, Ryan de Ryke and Erica Schuller, take the title roles. Ryan de Ryke’s rich and vigorous baritone is the perfect match for one of Handel’s most demanding and virtuosic roles. Apollo undergoes his own transformation from macho braggart to cunning sweet-talker to remorseful lover, all to Handel’s inspired music.

Erica Schuller lends her silvery soprano and musical mind to Handel’s introspective naiad. Dafne, herself a minor goddess, rebuffs Apollo’s salacious and unsolicited advances. She savors her rustic life of liberty and wants nothing to do with a boasting sun god. She flees on foot, pleading to her father, the river god Peneus, to transform her into a laurel tree in order to escape Apollo’s aggression. 

Cellist/conductor Craig Trompeter leads the Haymarket Opera Orchestra in Handel’s opulent score, overflowing with melody and rich orchestral effects.

PRODUCTION: Haymarket returns to the film studio for the second time, presenting Handel’s Apollo e Dafne in a visually stunning virtual production. Led by Creative Producer and General Director Chase Hopkins, HOC set designer Zuleyka V. Benitez’s historically-inspired paintings come to life through the modern technology of Resolution Studios with lighting by Lindsey Lyddan, filmed under the direction of Garry Grasinski and Grayson Media. “Dine in” on this sumptuous Handellian banquet!

Program Notes

by Robert L. Kendrick

The piece that HOC presents has, in Handel’s original manuscript, no title other than its first line, “La terra è liberata” (“The Earth has been freed”), sung by one of its two characters, the Greek god Apollo.  Since its first publication, by Friedrich Chrysander in the nineteenth century, it has borne the designation “Apollo and Dafne”.  It is in the genre of a serenata or a large-scale cantata with instruments (here transverse flute, two oboes, bassoon, strings, and basso continuo).

We are not sure exactly how this piece came into being.  Two scholars independently discovered that there are four different types of manuscript paper which Handel used, some from his 1709-10 stay in Venice (where he composed the opera Agrippina), and one from his next place of residence, the north German court of Hanover, where he started a job in summer 1710.  Thus the piece might have been worked on in transit.

Finally, its story, taken quite directly from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is not pretty.  Trigger Warning: This is a tale of an interaction that turns into an attempted sexual assault, stopped literally at the last minute by the transformation of the woman involved into a laurel tree. NB: Marguerite Johnson’s essay cited below is a good introduction to such issues in Ovid and in Classical literature generally. As Ovid tells it in Book I (thus in the early days of earth), Apollo saved Greece from the murderous serpent, Python, by killing it and taking over its shrine at Delphi. The Roman poet then tells the tale largely in third person, with very few direct utterances from the protagonists.  The god boasts of his achievement and mocks Cupid, who is playing with his arrows. For revenge, Cupid crafts an arrow of pure desire and shoots it into Apollo, and one of pure disdain, which is sent into Dafne (the two have not yet met).  The rest is literally legend: after first disdaining love, Apollo is overtaken by Eros (i.e., pure lust) upon seeing Daphe, who holds to her vow of virginity as a servant of the chaste goddess Diana.  Apollo’s pursuit of the nymph gets closer and closer, and just at the moment of attempted seizure, Daphne calls out to her father, the (minor) river god Peneus, to save her. As Apollo seizes her, she is turned into a laurel tree (a moment immortalized in sculpture by Bernini and in painting by Poussin), and Apollo is left to lament her, and to make the tree’s leaves his own symbol, that of his abilities as a poet and a conqueror. 

Tonight’s Italian text (by a competent literary person, certainly not the composer) is extremely condensed: the poetic narrator and Cupid are eliminated, and the syllabically declaimed (with just the basso continuo, i.e. the chordal support) sections—the recitatives—are reduced to the minimum.  This is typical of the kinds of Italian cantatas that Handel heard, and composed, during his Roman stay of 1706-09.  This kind of condensing came about under the influence of the literary movement known as the Arcadian Academy, and the effect is that of placing the emphasis on the changing emotions of the arias, the vocally florid sections with orchestra (for a discussion of changing pacing among the successive arias see Heller’s essay cited below, and for issues of musical and emotional voice, the passage from Ellen Harris’s book also in the bibliography).  It should be noted that Handel’s writing for the winds is quite sensitive, with the pastoral connotations of the transverse flute, and the switching of the oboes between Apollo’s martial pride (at the beginning) and the references to shepherds’ reed-pipes later.

Ovid’s telling of the story with greater emphasis on Apollo has a certain reflection in the greater numbers of arias for the god.  On the other hand, Dafne’s are longer, and so her voice sounds roughly as frequently as Apollo’s (and this feature is totally absent in Ovid; indeed, it would be worth it to retell the story from her point of view). A special feature, textually and musically, are the two duets, “Una Guerra ho dentro il seno/I have war in my heart” and “Deh, lascia addolcire/Più tosto morire//Ah, let your heart [be softened]/I would rather die [than accept your advances]. These kinds of numbers, which contrasted emotion, textual phrases, and musical motives, had been a characteristic at the court of Hanover since the presence there of the superb Italian composer Agostino Steffani (1654-1728).  Possibly they suggest that Handel had Hanover as a destination in mind for this piece, and wanted to show that he could equal Steffani in this highly prestigious form.

A look at details of text and music also intimate that the piece is more moral than it might seem.  Apollo opens with a kind of double hubris: he has “saved the earth” (but in reality, only Greece and really only Delphi, as the virtue of saving the whole earth belonged to his father Jove), and his “dissing” of Cupid (and thus Eros) could lead only to misfortune.  One might hear this in the ever-so-perfunctory nature of his opening arias (and it should be noted that, for whichever singer Handel might have meant the part, it was not the bass singer of his Agrippina, A. F. Carli, as Apollo’s part lies much higher in register and uses an almost tenor-like floridity in its highest range, compared to the opera).  In that sense, the god gets what he deserves at the end. On the other hand, Daphne does not deserve what she gets: Apollo is supposed to know that the followers of Diana (“Cintia” in the text) had taken vows of chastity, and so his sudden switch to violent attack towards the end of the piece, after attempts at persuasion, underscores that he has lost his reason, overcome by Eros. This moment is marked by what starts off as an instrumentally (here violin) virtuoso aria, “Mie piante, correte/My steps, race [to embrace the unfaithful beauty”; NB: she has actually not been ‘unfaithful’, merely refusing him], a moment of show-stopping display like the one that the composer had already written in his Roman cantata Il duello amoroso and would repeat in Act II’s famed closing aria (this time for a woman, the enraged Armida) “Vo’ far guerra” in Rinaldo.

Both these other pieces, though, come to a kind of emotional achievement.  But Apollo’s conquest literally melts in his hands (and it should be remembered that the violin was considered a bowed version of his traditional lyre), as Daphne turns into a laurel, thanks to Peneus’ intervention, the violin solo breaks off suddenly, and thus Apollo’s mistakes come back to haunt him for the rest of his existence.  Within this familiar, and somewhat awful, tale, Handel was able to suggest hidden ironies, mistakes, and undermining in the characters, beyond what might seem to lie on the surface of this piece.  He would borrow arias from it later in his London career, but there is overall no completely documentable performance until the twentieth century: Baroque Europe’s loss, but our gain.

Bibliography: Chrysander’s not entirely reliable musical edition is available on imslp.org; a clean text and translation can be found at: http://www.pameladellal.com/Apollo_e_Dafne.html.  

For Johnson’s valuable essay on sexual violence in Ovid, see https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-ovids-metamorphoses-and-reading-rape-65316. 

For Heller ’s article, see https://wendybheller.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/a_musical_metamorphosis_ovid_bernini_and.pdf

See also: E. T. Harris, Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 161-164; currently available as an ACLS Humanities E-book.

Robert L. Kendrick

University of Chicago

Musical Highlights

Apollo e Dafne dates from Handel’s 1709-10 residency in Venice. During this period, Handel made operatic history with his opera seria Agrippina which ran for an extraordinary 27 performances at its premiere, catapulting its composer to international fame. Since Apollo e Dafne does not have its own overture, the Haymarket Opera Orchestra performs the overture to Agrippina to paint a musical picture of Apollo’s battle with Python.

Like Mozart and Verdi, Handel understood the expressive potential of the human voice. In Apollo e Dafne he made extraordinary demands of the two soloists, rendering Apollo’s virile godliness through extreme leaps from high to low and Dafne’s inner fortitude through seamlessly long lines. No less masterful is Handel’s orchestral writing. Bellicose woodwinds recall Apollo’s battle with Python as he challenges Cupid in the aria Spezza l’arco. Plucked strings suggest a forest floor of pine needles during Dafne’s bucolic aria Felicissima quest’alma. In the breathless chase scene, Handel represents her fleet feet with lightning-fast violin figuration, played by HOC’s own concertmaster/triathlete Jeri-Lou Zike. Guest Chicago Symphony Orchestra bassoonist William Buchman portrays the god, fast on her heels until the music evaporates into confused recitative as Apollo searches for his lost nymph. In the cantata’s final aria, Cara pianta, Handel disrupts the vocal line with painful silences to reveal Apollo’s poignant regret,a musical technique he used frequently thereafter, most famously in the aria He Was Despised from Messiah.

The Cast

Ryan de Ryke as Apollo
Erica Schuller as Dafne

The Production & Creative Team

The Orchestra

Orchestra

Jeri-Lou Zike Violin I
Wendy Benner Violin I
Martin Davids Violin II
Emi Tanabe Violin II
Elizabeth Hagen Viola
Craig Trompeter Cello
Jerry Fuller Bass
Anne Bach Oboe I
Erica Anderson Oboe II
Lisette Kielson Recorder I
Patrick O'Malley Recorder II
William Buchman Bassoon
Brandon Acker Theorbo
Paul Nicholson Harpsichord

The Film Crew and Technical Team

Performance Photos