Medea

4 things to know about Medea

1° From Colchis to Corinth

In Greek mythology, the sorceress Medea is the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, niece of Circe and the granddaughter of Helios. Her father’s kingdom was located on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, centred in present-day western Georgia and extending into present-day Turkey and Russia. It was described as a land rich with gold, iron, timber and honey that would export its resources mostly to ancient Greece, but it is best known as the destination of Jason and the Argonauts in their hunt for the Golden fleece.

When Jason arrived to claim the Fleece as his own, Aeëtes promised to give it to him only if he could perform certain tasks. Medea fell in love with Jason and promised to help him, but only on the condition that if he succeeded, he would take her with him and marry her. Jason agreed, and together they were able to take the Fleece. But there was still the matter of Jason and the Argonauts sailing away with Medea, and for this the princess was prepared to do the unthinkable. As Aeëtes pursued them in his ship, Medea killed and dismembered her brother, Absyrtus, and threw pieces of his body overboard. Aeëtes paused to gather the pieces of his son one by one, and thus Jason and Medea escaped.

As may be expected from two such balanced individuals, their relationship was not the most stable. Medea bore Jason two children, but when she tricked the daughters of Pelias into killing their own father, she and her family was exiled to Corinth. There, Jason became engaged to Glauce, daughter of the King of Corinth, in order to strengthen his political ties. When Medea confronted Jason about the engagement and cited all the help she had given him, he retorted that it was not she that he should thank, but Aphrodite, who made Medea fall in love with him. That is where the opera begins.

2° From myth to stage

The myth of Medea and Jason appears in Hesiod's poem Theogony around 700 BC and in Apollonius of Rhodes’s 3rd century BC literary version, the Argonautica. Halfway between those two publications, Euripides adapted the story into a tragedy, which he entered into the main competition of the City Dionysia festival of 431 BC. The Athenian audience were not enamoured with the play, and it ranked third out of the three tragedies performed. Largely forgotten for 400 years, the play was rediscovered by Ovid, Seneca the Younger and other Roman tragedians, who adapted it into successful Augustan dramas. Since its subsequent rediscovery in 16th-century Europe, Euripides’s Medea has become a classic of the Western canon and is the most frequently performed Greek tragedy today.

In the mid 1790s, Luigi Cherubini was inspired to write an opéra-comique based on the Medea myth. The subject had already proven popular for opera, with Francesco Cavalli’s Giasone, Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Thésée and George Frideric Handel's Teseo all having been staged before. For the text, Cherubini turned to François-Benoît Hoffman, a playwright and critic who had recently written several librettos for “the most important opera composer in French during the revolution,” Étienne Méhul. Hoffman based his Médée on a 17th-century adaptation of Euripides’ play by the French tragedist Pierre Corneille.

Cherubini’s opera received a lukewarm response when it opened on 13 March 1797 at the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris. It was revived in Frankfurt in 1855 in a German translation by Franz Lachner, who also composed recitative for the spoken dialogue. Carlo Zangarini created an Italian translation for La Scala in 1909, but the opera then fell out of fashion. That is until 1953, when Maria Callas played Medea in Florence. It became one of her signature roles, which she went on to perform in Milan, London and Dallas, and she also played the vengeful sorceress in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film Medea - her only film role.

3° Bright stars of Moscow

The title role of Medea is a formidable challenge that requires vocal mastery and a commanding stage presence. No opera house would dare to produce Cherubini’s work without a stellar soprano to do it justice. When Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre decided on the oprea they were fortunate enough to have not one but two singers in the company who possessed powerful and expressive voices as well as brilliant acting skills: the world-renowned Hibla Gerzmava; and Natalia Muradymova, one of the brightest stars of the Moscow opera scene.

4° Silent sentinels

Vladimir Arefiev’s set designs for Medea consists of dozens of tetrapods – not the superclass of four-limbed vertebrates that includes mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds, but the tetrahedral concrete structures used to enforce coastal structures such as seawalls and breakwaters.

For the first half of the 20th century, rectangular or cubic artificial blocks were a common sight along vulnerable sections of shoreline, but these were in fact less stable than natural rocks of the same weight. Then in 1950 engineers based at the Dauphinois Hydraulics Laboratory in Grenoble developed a new, interlocking structure that was rougher, more permeable and more resistant. Lead engineer Pierre Danel explained at the International Conference on Coastal Engineering three years later that ‘after various preliminary studies, the outline took shape: a sort of sea monster with four tentacles which was patented under the name “tetrapod”.’

First used in Casablanca, this French invention can now be found all over the world, from the gateways to the Venetian Lagoon to the waterfront of Mumbai. They entirely surround the capital of the Maldives to protect her from rising sea levels, and they cover half the coast of Japan to defend against typhoons. Tetrapods may attract scorn for not fitting into their natural surroundings, but these silent sentinels have saved – and continue to save – countless lives.