Sarrasine

”À la Balzac” is what literary nerds call a story that follows the model of the “realistic” novel. This is just how much the French writer Honoré de Balzac shaped the literary genre. The whole world is reflected in his books, his characters behave like real people, and you look in vain for average characters in his work.

In the novella Sarrasine, Balzac merged two narrative threads into one parable: Madame de Rochefide is sauntering with the first-person narrator at a Paris ball. When the resident of the house appears, something bizarre happens: upon Madame’s touch, the old man begins to scream. Afterwards, she wants to learn all about him. In a secluded room, she finds out from her companion that the old man once performed in Rome as the opera singer Zambinella. The sculptor Sarrasine, who did not know that the singer was a castrated man, fell in love with her.

It is a story about the uncontrollability of love, says George Petrou, who, together with director Laurence Dale, is reviving the novella as a Handel opera. After all, gender-swapping and sexual ambiguities on stage were completely normal in the 18th century: sopranos embodied male title roles, male and female protagonists alike were portrayed by castrati. With their luminously brilliant voices, they were predestined for heroic roles and mistresses and they were pretty much idolized by the audience. Petrou has selected arias that Handel discarded when composing operas. Not because they were of inferior quality, according to the Artistic Director; they were downright masterpieces that Handel discarded at the time for dramaturgical reasons. Petrou collected them for years and has now rearranged them to Balzac’s narrative. He has created a piece of musical theater for the 21st century, with a text published in 1830 and shockingly good music from the 18th century. Balzac would have been thrilled by the “being all one” narrative.