Exploring the Legacy of Cleopatra Through Opera

Even in opera’s earliest days, there was a glut of Cleopatra-inspired content. There was Antonio Canazzi’s Cleopatra in 1653. Antonio Cesti’s Cleopatra in 1654. Daniele da Castrovillari’s Cleopatra in 1677. In one composer’s hands, she could be a warrior queen. In another’s hands, she might be a doting lover. Or a temptress. Or a snake.

Fast-forward to the present, and opera’s fascination with Cleopatra’s love affairs—few though they may have been—remains prominent.

In 1966, composer Samuel Barber was chosen to open the Metropolitan Opera’s new home, Lincoln Center, with a world premiere. His choice of topic? Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. In 2022, San Francisco Opera plans to celebrate its centennial year with a new opera from composer John Adams. Its topic? Antony and Cleopatra.

The real-life Cleopatra was a talented scholar and leader, leading a kingdom that was among the final hold-outs against Roman rule in the Mediterranean. Hardly the lustful vixen of insatiable appetite, she chose her romantic partners sparingly and strategically, allying with two prominent Roman generals, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, to assure Egypt’s security.

And yet, as one of the few women to rule in the Mediterranean, her gender became a bulls-eye for her rivals in the male-dominated realm of Rome.

The narrative of her femininity helped fuel larger narratives, namely that of Orientalism. The scholar Edward Said—himself a voracious opera critic—helped popularize the term to describe the white Western views of the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa.

The Orientalist mindset was used as justification for imperialism: The West, often drawing on Roman roots, was seen as superior to the more feminine East, a place of fantasy and exoticism.

Cleopatra’s various appearances throughout opera offer a lens onto those attitudes. Here, we explore three examples of Cleopatra’s reign across the centuries of opera, from three different vantage points: one in the tradition of Italian Baroque, one French, and one American.

They each capture an aspect of the fiction that has arisen around Cleopatra: her irresistible charm, her elemental cruelty, and her larger-than-life persona.

HANDEL’S 1724 GIULIO CESARE IN EGITTO

George Frideric Handel’s 1724 drama Giulio Cesare in Egitto—or Julius Caesar in Egypt—immediately establishes its characters as a play in contrasts: West versus East, good versus evil.

The curtain rises on a scene of joy. Pursuing his rival Pompey across the Mediterranean, the Roman general Julius Caesar arrives on the shores of the Nile only to be hailed by a chorus of well-wishers. “Viva viva il nostro Alcide,” they sing to Caesar. “Long live our Hercules!”

Soon, the noble wife and son of the defeated Pompey arrive before Caesar. They beg mercy, acknowledging that—just as Jupiter rules in heaven—Caesar rules the earth. And a benevolent Caesar agrees: “The virtue of great men is to forgive offenses.”

But into this congress of fair and just Romans come the rulers of Egypt: the bickering siblings Ptolemy and Cleopatra, each vying for power over the other.

Ptolemy has sent Caesar Pompey’s decapitated head as a token of friendship, only to turn against him when Caesar condemns the gift as “barbarity.” Cleopatra, meanwhile, disguises herself as a lowly victim of Ptolemy’s cruelty and infiltrates Caesar’s camp to seduce him.

The duplicity of the Egyptians is matched by the honor of the Romans. And while Cleopatra is redeemed—having fallen in love with Caesar—her brother Ptolemy takes on the role of outright villain, a “wicked tyrant” who attempts to rape Pompey’s widow and kill Caesar.

This story would remain one of Handel’s most popular, a Baroque masterpiece that testifies to a composer hitting his stride. Giulio Cesare in Egitto is longer than much of Handel’s earlier Italian work, and its detailed, character-driven orchestration included innovations like the horn solo, one of the first in opera history.

But Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto didn’t exist in a bubble. His librettist Nicola Francesco Haym adapted the lyrics from an earlier opera script by Giacomo Francesco Bussani, used in a 1677 setting of the same story.

MASSENET’S 1914 CLÉOPÂTRE

Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt at the start of the 19th century had left a powerful cultural legacy: a French version of Orientalism that fired up a fascination for the ancient world.

Jules Massenet was part of that legacy. Born in 1842 Paris, Massenet composed upwards of 30 operas, several of which set Orientalist themes to the lavish proportions of grand opera.

His first major Parisian success, The King of Lahore, tells the story of a forbidden love between a priestess and a king in what would be modern-day Pakistan. His later opera Thaïs was set in ancient Egypt, where a monk sets out to convert a beautiful courtesan, only to fall for her instead.

Massenet would return to Egypt in his final years, as he wrote his opera Cléopâtre, posthumously performed in 1914. And again, he would return to themes of taboo, religion, and eroticism, constructing a world where desire was expressed in the language of conquest and slavery.

Cléopâtre begins with yet another image of Roman dominance and Eastern decadence: The Roman general Mark Antony sits surrounded by gifts of gold. “Rome is great and shines across the world,” a chorus of enslaved people sing. “The people of Asia, oh conquerer, beg you to accept their tributes.”

When a slave announces the imminent arrival of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, Antony—blind to his own weaknesses—mocks her as a “courtesan with a crown on her brow.” He is confident he will not succumb to her “enchantress” charms, unlike Julius Caesar before him.

“Je maintiendrai ma gloire et la fierté romaine,” he sings. “I will maintain my glory and my Roman pride!”

But of course, within moments of meeting Cleopatra—dressed in a transparent tunic—Antony is in love. And he is sucked into a deadly love triangle with Cleopatra and her slave Spakos, whose blood lust and deceit serves as his foil.

HADLEY’S 1920 CLEOPATRA’S NIGHT

The very first conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, the Massachusetts-born Henry Kimball Hadley returned to the American East Coast to premiere a string of high-profile compositions, including the 1920 two-act opera Cleopatra’s Night.

The opera made history. Never before had a composer also conducted his own work at the Metropolitan Opera. And critics of the time were impressed with the result.

“Cleopatra’s Night is the tenth American opera given at the Metropolitan Opera House under its present management,” the New York Times wrote, “and it may be said at once that it is the best of the ten.”

In a forward to the libretto, Hadley explained that he was a student in Vienna when he first stumbled across the opera’s source material: a short story by the French writer Théophile Gautier.

But it was a trip to Egypt that sealed the deal. “It was only after I went to Egypt, saw the landscape and the vivid coloring that I determined to write something with this wonderfully romantic and mysterious country as its background,” he wrote.

“The Orient has always had a peculiar charm for me,” Hadley continued. And yet, he found the theaters of Cairo “so crude and primitive and atrociously out of time” that he “fled” to the countryside, “to seek inspiration from nature.”

What he came up with was an opera in which the Roman general Mark Antony is merely a shadow—heard off-stage but never seen—thereby allowing the narrative to shift toward a new tragic hero, ensnared by Cleopatra’s irrepressible beauty.

Cleopatra’s Night paints a portrait of over-heated desire under the red desert sun: Cleopatra longs for love—true love, not the trappings of a queen.

Suddenly, an arrow flies into her garden, bearing the words “I love you.” They come from a “brave and chaste” lion hunter named Meïamoun, who has grown besotted with the queen.

Cleopatra finds herself attracted to the young hunter. But Meïamoun’s effrontery cannot go unanswered. So Cleopatra offers him a choice: Meïamoun can either take his own life right away, or he can spend a night of pleasure with her before facing his doom at sunrise. He picks pleasure.

But as the sun arrives, so does Antony, leaving Meïamoun—the taboo, the dream, the fantasy in the dark—to perish with the dawn.

San Francisco Opera unveils the world premiere of John Adams' Antony and Cleopatra starting September 10, 2022.