Sarrasine is an opera pastiche (pasticcio) conceived and created by George Petrou and Laurence Dale and premiered on 10 May 2024 at the Göttingen International Handel Festival. The overall story and the dialogues of the opera are based on the eponymous novella by Honoré de Balzac published in 1830. The music consists of arias, duets, and other pieces that George Frideric Handel composed for specific operas but then either cut entirely or replaced with significantly modified versions. The opera sets Handel's unperformed music within the narrative from the Romantic era that is itself preoccupied and inspired by the issues of voice, gender, and art that emerged during Handel's time. According to its co-creators, the opera engages the issues of "identity, gender, sexuality and love."
Cast and musicians
+RoleVoice typeCast of the 10 May 2024 premiere and all festival performances Zambinella male soprano Samuel Mariño Sarrasine tenor Juan Sancho Madame de Rochefide soprano Myrsini Margariti Balzac bass-baritone Sreten Manojlović Monsieur de Lanty, Cardinal - Florian Eppinger Madame de Lanty - Marina Lara Poltman Viennese Fop - Ronny Thalmeyer
Instrumental and choral music was performed by the musicians of the FestspielOrchester Göttingen under the direction of Maestro George Petrou and the singers of the University of Göttingen Chamber Choir (Kammerchor der Universitat Göttingen) directed by chorus master Antonius Adamske.
Production team Musical Director: George Petrou Director: Laurence Dale Stage and costume designer: Giorgina Germanou Light designer: John Bishop Light designer Choreography: Carmine De Amicis Production manager and assistant director: Constantina Psoma Stage manager: Anelia Kadieva Jonsson Set and costumes assistant designers: Marisa Soulioti, Myrtò Kosmopoulou Répétiteurs: Fernando Aguado Set realisation: ARTorna Veranstaltungstechnik Costume realisation: Daphne Tsakota, Margarita Xanthaki, Alaadin Halawany Make-up: Dimitris Garis, Ingo Grygat, Sylke Schmidt, Maika Lenga Set technical advisor: Eva Andronikidou Orchestral floor manager: Michael Rathmann Supertitles: André Sievers Performance photography: Alciro Theodoro da Silva
The production was also supported and facilitated by the management, production, technical, workshop and performance support staff of the Deutsches Theater Göttingen.
Premiere and Festival Performances The premiere took place on May 10, 2024 at the Deutsches Theater in Göttingen and was followed by four more performances on May 11, 15, 19 and 20. The new work was billed as the festival opera, i.e. the main attraction of the 2024 festival season. There was also a family version of the opera presented in the afternoon of May 20, 2024. Half the length of the complete opera, it had many additional entertaining and educational touches without compromising the cultural and social import of the new opera. Anelia Kadieva Jonsson adapted the staging for the family version and the actor and entertainer Juri Tetzlaff contributed the story telling, mystery solving, and loads of interactive fun. Among the several special elements of the family version were a friendly coloratura singing lesson from Myrsini Margariti as Madame de Rochefide and a mini-interview with the soprano extraordinaire Samuel Mariño about the mystery of his gender-defying voice, bullying, and overcoming adversity. The young audience also got a chance to ponder how in the world there could be a new opera by Handel who, after all, has been dead for 265 years, and to decide how the opera should end: in a tragic way of Balzac's story or with a happy ending, or at least the one where no one dies. They kids chose the latter.
The opera was broadcast by NDR Kultur radio as part of the ARD (Association of Public Broadcasters in Germany) Radiofestival 2024 on Saturday, 31 August 2024.
In the spring of 2025, the International Handel Festival made the complete video recording of the opera available on its companion video site, the Haendel Channel, and on its YouTube channel.
Libretto: Source, Significance and Modifications
George Petrou, conductor and artistic director, collected Handel's rejected or reworked opera music for a long time. He initially thought of recording them as an album but eventually came to favor the idea of presenting them on stage, as an opera pastiche or pasticcio, a form that was widely used during the Baroque era, including by Handel himself. In collaboration with the English tenor and opera director Laurence Dale, Sarrasine by Honoré de Balzac was chosen as a literary narrative of the new opera. The pairing of Balzac's novella with Handel's music to create a twenty-first century pastiche was not accidental choice but stemmed for the co-creators' belief that this "work from the Romantic period is a love letter to Baroque opera - and addresses questions that still concern us today".
The Plot of Balzac's Novella Novella's story-within-a-story is set in the 1750s and its main character is a star of the Roman opera stage called Zambinella. The stunning soprano is so beautiful that the young French sculptor named Jean-Ernst Sarrasine, who is new to both Rome and Italian opera, declares her to be the embodiment of the very ideal of female beauty. He passionately falls in love with the singer, attends every performance, incessantly draws and sculpts her image, and fantasizes of declaring his love to her. He succeeds in putting himself in the situation where he can confess his love but the singer insists that she needs a friend, a brother, a protector. Soon after, Sarrasine has an opportunity to get into another private party where Zambinella would perform and it is there that the love-struck young sculptor sees his beloved in man's clothes. Confused and unsettled, he demands an explanation and receives a mocking answer that, of course, the star of the Roman stage cannot be a woman. Sarrasine is given to understand that the singer is 'in fact' not a female soprano but a male castrato soprano and, still refusing to fully believe this, the young sculptor nevertheless begins to feel that both his personal and artistic worlds are crashing to the ground. Balzac gives this story-in-the-story a tragic end.
The framing story of the novella takes place in the 1830s Paris, in the lavish mansion of the wealthy and mysterious de Lanty family, where unbeknownst to most gossipy members of Parisian society, Zambinella lives out his last years in near total seclusion in the care of his niece, her husband and their two children. The story of Zambinella is what the male narrator offers up to the attractive Parisian socialite Madame de Rochefide, who is his guest at the party and an object of his desire, when the two of them accidentally encounter the 'ghost' of the de Lanty family.
20th Century Scholarly Interest For over a century after its publication, Sarrasine was relatively little known but, starting in the 1960s, Balzac's novella has garnered considerable interest among the scholars in the fields of literary theory, philosophy, semiotics, as well as history of culture, music, voice, gender and sexuality and, eventually, among general reading public. Thus, the choice of Balzac's novella as a literary basis for a contemporary Baroque opera pastiche is notable not only because it speaks to present-day cultural issues but also because it contributes to over half century of growing intellectual, cultural and social engagement with this work.
Plot and Character Modifications in Opera Libretto The structure and narrative of the opera closely cleaves to that of Balzac's novella but the modifications are notable in their interest and significance. One notable staging decision made by the creators of the opera pastiche was to recast the unidentified narrator of the novella as Balzac himself. As Balzac begins to tell the story of Sarrasine and Zambinella to Madame de Rochefide, the opera proceeds as if the two Parisians have travelled back in time and find themselves 'literally' in the company of the young French sculptor, the opera star and all the other participants and witnessed of their fateful story. In the final twist, it is the Cardinal's men but Balzac himself, and perhaps even Madame de Rochefide to some degree, who save Zambinella from Sarrasine's murderous intention and, in the resulting scuffle, kill Sarrasine instead, intentionally or not. While one reviewer, notable for his overall hostility to the project and its literary source, managed to find fault with these staging choices, the known facts about Balzac's Parisian lifestyle and social circle, as well as the significant autobiographical elements of his literary work, make this staging choice not only dramaturgically effective but also coherent and historically grounded. Moreover, Balzac's and Madame de Rochefide's apparent 'presence' and 'participation' in the story of Zambinella, Sarrasine and the Cardinal are easily 'readable' by contemporary audiences who are broadly familiar with fantastic realism and post-modern literary devices. That it is Balzac, rather than the Cardinal's men, who kill Sarrasine in the opera is a particular treat to those in the audience who know the novella and can appreciate that it is indeed the novella's author who, in the very real sense, 'decided' how his title character's story would end. All of this is underscored in the opera co-creators' understanding of both their process and product as "a modern, post-modern production" that deliberately overcomes boundaries, "temporal, spatial and the supposed boundaries between fiction and reality."
Another significant modification of Balzac's story is the opera creators' decision to change the character of Madame de Rochefide from a wealthy society lady to a feted soprano singer. In the novella, the beautiful singer at the party is Marianina, the daughter of the de Lanty family, and at the end it becomes clear that her vocal talent is an inheritance from Zambinella, who is her great uncle. While the 'transfer' of the vocal talent from Marianina to Madame Rochefide results in the loss of this narrative nodule, it creates an interesting new connection in its place. As a soprano herself, the opera's Madame de Rochefide can be interpreted as having a deeper - and thus more terrifying - identification with both the brilliant Zambinella and the death-like old man that she is now. Recast as a singer in the prime of her life - vocally and otherwise - the opera's Madame de Rochefide can be understood to feel even more existential angst as she learns that the ghastly walking corpse that so repulsed her was once an incomparable soprano whose stunning beauty inspired artists to represent her or him as both Venus and Adonis. The opera's Madame de Rochefide can also be more easily interpreted as realizing that, like Zambinella herself, the age of the illustrious castrati and the kind of passion and sublimation that they evoked had irreversibly faded. Thus, the time and disenchantment in the new opera pastiche - about which more is said below - work on two different registers of biological time of individual life and historical time of culture, art and mores.
The 'release' of Marianina from the character imbued with an echo of Zambinella's voice allowed the staging team to intensify the meanings implicit in Balzac's sister-and-brother character pair. Balzac narrated the beauty of both de Lanty children - Marianina and Filippo, female and male - in lengthy and gushing prose characteristic of the period. The opera's creative team fashioned the pair into an explicit personification of gender, desire, and transgression. Dressed in the obvious pink and blue of the contemporary gender binary, the siblings' incestuous closeness - particularly their mutual caresses of and near the gender-indeterminate artistic representations of their grand uncle - invited reflection on the binary, the fluid, the transgressive and the transitional.