Giulio Cesare in Egitto

Theater an der Wien [ENA] This is "divine harmony", the combination of words which can be heard frequently while someone is speaking about the music of Georg Friedrich Händel, a German/British composer who lived during the eighteenth century. His baroque music is harmonious as the symmetric architecture of London of his time where he was living and creating the majority of his forty-two operas.

The Giulio Cesare in Egitto was performed at the Theater an der Wien during December 2021. The Theater an der Wien virtuously managed to combine the baroque music of Händel, the ancient Rome story and the modern performance techniques. The stage was built around the stage while creating several perspectives for the spectators, of the stage in the stage. This reminded about multidimensional aspects of our life or about the words of William Shakespeare that “All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players“.

The combination of different techniques, including video installations, shows multidimensionality of characters of protagonists and of the action, which could have happened any time, at ancient Rome, at the middle age Europe or during nowadays times. The innovative stage techniques also include the cinema on the stage with the ongoing black-and-white movie about Cesare and Cleopatra.

Cesare appears in the opera as an ideal hero and lover. For each of his arias Händel portrays different representations of his character. Bejun Mehta, who was singing Cesare, is not the first time at the Theater an der Wien. The last time spectators of the Theater an der Wien could enjoy his voice in the Benjamin Brittens opera “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. The complex arias of Cesare Bejun Mehta was already singing in the opera La Scala in Milan. The Countertenor Mehta was the first one who dared to interpret areas of Cesare at La Scala of Milan.

Louise Adler who was singing the areas of Cleopatra is a well-known star at the Vienna State Opera. She also went a path from winning the Young Singer Award at the International Opera Awards in 2017 to invitation by various best known opera houses such as the Royal Opera House in London, Teatro Real in Madrid or the State Opera of Bavaria.