Pinchgut Opera’s production of Médée is the company’s third exploration of the music of Marc-Antoine Charpentier, following the Messe de minuit (2020) and David and Jonathan (2008). Today, the five-act tragédie mise en musique with libretto by Thomas Corneille, which premiered at the Paris Opéra in December 1693, is considered Charpentier’s magnum opus. Even Louis XIV complimented it. Yet, it didn’t endure, and there were no listed performances after March 1694 apart from a revival in Lille in November 1700.

Pinchgut Opera’s Médée. Photo © Cassandra Hannagan

Charpentier’s Médée shares its fate with Euripides’ Greek tragedy from 431 BCE on which the opera is based. The play came ‘just’ third in the City Dionysia. But when your rivals comprise Sophocles and Euphorion, whose father was the playwright Aeschylus, you know it’s going to be a tough competition.

As a drama, Médée is extraordinarily sophisticated and insightful, given its early origins. Before Norma, the Queen of the Night and Herodias challenged the stereotypes of motherhood in opera; before Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis; before the feminist movements, there was Médée. Sorceress, filicidal mother and vengeful lover; a woman seeking her place, spurned by...