After the Premiere: Christopher Alden on Revival, Surrealism, and Why Handel Keeps Catching Up to Us

After the Premiere: “Three Visions of Opera Now” (1/3)

In this short series — “Three Visions of Opera Now” — I draw on recent conversations with three major figures working across very different corners of today’s operatic landscape: stage director Christopher Alden, theatre director Cal McCrystal, and conductor André de Ridder. Rather than presenting these as conventional interviews, each post reflects on how their artistic choices reveal broader questions about opera’s future: how productions change meaning over time, how audiences are cultivated rather than assumed, and how musical leadership intersects with institutional survival. Together, these perspectives form a triptych of how opera is being reimagined from the stage, the rehearsal room, and the podium.

By Justin Vickers

Late last autumn, Christopher Alden spoke to me about returning to his own staging of Handel’s Partenope at the English National Opera nearly two decades after its premiere. What emerged was less a retrospective on directorial choices than a compact philosophy of revival itself.

Revival as Interpretation: Why Opera Changes When We Do

Opera, Alden observed, is one of the few art forms in which the repertoire is, by necessity, “somewhat circumscribed.” Yet for him that limitation becomes a gift. It allows an artist to return to the same work at intervals and discover how it has changed without changing at all. “It’s always interesting how different a piece feels some years later,” he told me, because the meaning of a score is never sealed off from the conditions of the present. What shifts is not only the world around it, but the artists within it. “What’s happening in my own life and what’s happening in the world,” Alden said, inevitably “colors one’s response” to these works “from the past” that have survived precisely because they “transcend any particular era.”

That premise is an unusually useful starting-point for Partenope, an opera that is simultaneously an “evening’s entertainment” and a sly act of self-commentary by Handel. Alden is drawn to it because it is one of those comparatively rare Handel operas in which a different sensibility comes to the surface: “a real sense of humor and irony,” a kind of elegant sharpness that punctures the grandiosity of operatic narratives about war, heroes, and power. Alden described the composer in characteristically vivid terms as an “urbane, witty, [and] cool” figure, and he emphasized that Partenope allows Handel to satirize the supposedly serious world of “warriors” and “people in power” by showing their battles as, in effect, games. The opera’s central metaphor may well be martial, but the damage is cerebral and social; it is love and desire that behave like an invading army.

Alden’s production places this brittle, game-like world in the interwar period, shifting the setting from the opera’s nominal antiquity to the 1920s and 1930s. One might expect such a move to require a heavy interpretive justification. Yet Alden’s reasoning is more pragmatic than doctrinaire, rooted in what he sees as Handel’s peculiar portability. There is “something about” Handel operas, he suggested, that makes them unusually “open ended” in terms of setting. Their characters and situations readily “transcend” specific time and place, so that directors can “pick them up and put them into different settings” without doing violence to “what these pieces are about,” or to Handel’s extraordinary capacity to psychologize.

The cast of ENO’s 2025 Partenope © Lloyd Winters

Staging Handel in the Interwar Years: Surrealism, Power, and Desire

The pathway to Alden’s interwar world was, by his own account, exploratory and collaborative. He spoke warmly of the “spiral” of possibilities he pursued with designers Andrew Lieberman and Jon Morrell, and dramaturg Peter Littlefield. What anchored their search was the figure of Partenope herself: a heroine who is “very empowered,” not merely glamorous and witty, but in a position of real authority. Alden’s team toyed with modern templates of female power before settling into a milieu that could hold glamour, agency, and performance all at once. “Margaret Thatcher came up—and was rejected fairly fast!” Then, Coco Chanel hovered as a near-miss, as did the idea of the society hostess: a “queen bee” surrounded by men “buzzing around her.” The interwar period offered not just style, but a social grammar, a world in which power is mediated through image, salons, art, and intimacy.

It also opened the door to surrealism, which Alden treats not as decorative atmosphere but as dramaturgical logic. Partenope is, at heart, an opera about what desire does to rational life. “Love and desire,” Alden said, “upend” the “rational side” of existence and draw us into “crazier, dreamier places.” Surrealism becomes, in his view, a vocabulary for that destabilization. The aftermath of the First World War matters here, too, not as historical scenery but as a rupture in confidence: a moment when “old rationality” had been “exploded open,” and artists sought “less rational perspectives on the world.” In that sense the interwar world becomes a double metaphor in Alden’s staging: for a society attempting to recompose itself after devastation, and for individuals discovering that love is a force that will not respect their scripts.

Gender, Disguise, and the Politics of Performance in Partenope

This is also where the revival acquires its most pointed contemporary resonance. Alden noted that when he first staged Partenope in 2008, questions around gender fluidity were already “in the air,” with growing energy around efforts to “explode the whole binary thing.” Since then, those issues have moved from subtext to vernacular (and regrettably from vernacular to political flashpoint). By 2025, he said, such matters are “such a big part of our lives,” not least because the “culture wars” have made it newly contentious. What is striking in Alden’s account is his refusal to treat this as a simple narrative of progress.

“Now we’re in… a backlash era,” he observed, a moment that is “revealing” and “disturbing,” but also clarifying in the sense that it demonstrates how a Handel libretto itself can provide a proscenium for contemporary conflict. The point is not that Partenope has been updated. The point is that it has been caught up; the opera’s own play with disguise and gender becomes newly audible when the world around it has made those themes newly contested.

Crisis Arias and Comic Vulnerability: Dramaturgy Beneath the Wit

Alden’s description of the opera’s dramaturgy is equally helpful for readers who may feel intimidated by Baroque form. What keeps Partenope theatrically alive, he argued, is that every principal character undergoes a crisis: a moment when the comic surface cracks and a deeper emotional susceptibility is exposed. “Six characters in search of an opera,” he quipped, a phrase that captures both the work’s ensemble symmetry and its existential undercurrent. He spoke movingly about Partenope’s Act II aria in which she compares herself not to a butterfly but to a moth: “‘farfaletta’ can also be translated as a moth,” he insisted, a “moth to the flame,” an image of desire as compulsion and self-risk. It is Partenope “at her most vulnerable,” wondering why her relationships have not fulfilled her, and whether she is trapped in a “never-ending cycle” of longing and disappointment.

This pattern repeats across the opera. Arsace, caught between competing claims of love and loyalty, experiences his own breakdown through the metaphor of the storm: “the howling wind” of an inner life suddenly made unmanageable. Rosmira, the woman in disguise, cannot endure the costs of her concealment; Alden described an extraordinary moment in which she “rips off her false moustache” and strips away the masculine presentation she has been forced to inhabit, needing to reassert the self that the plot requires her to suppress. Even the opera’s comic figures are not spared: Armindo confronts his own timidity and “exposes” himself, momentarily, to overcome what has held him back. Likewise, Ormonte struggles with his sexuality, we learn. One further concept Alden offered seems almost uncannily designed for the present moment: his use of the photographer Man Ray as a conceptual lens within the production’s interwar world. In Alden’s telling, Man Ray — as the character Emilio — becomes a figure who “documents” Partenope’s circle, “revealing” secrets and exposing them “to the world.”

Alden’s larger point is that Handel’s formalism is not an obstacle to theatre; it is a way of staging repeated confrontations with the self.

Voyeurism, Exposure, and Why Partenope Feels Contemporary

When Alden first staged the production, he noted, social media was still “in its nascent phase.”

In 2025, however, the production reads differently.

The act of documentation has become ordinary, almost compulsory; “everything is so exposed” and “so documented,” with fewer and fewer “secrets” remaining. Alden’s Man Ray becomes a kind of theatrical premonition: a reminder that the pleasures of visibility and the violence of exposure are increasingly entangled. One does not need to stretch very far to see why that might resonate with audiences who experience their own lives through the chronic pressure of public performance and lives that are now frequently moderated by social platforms.

In the end, Alden returns to the paradox that keeps opera alive for him: its double nature as both elite institution and subversive art. Opera is born, historically, amid aristocratic wealth and social display; it is also, at its best, an art that questions “societal assumptions” and cuts “so deep” into the lives people actually live. That paradox is not resolved by a revival. It is sharpened by it. A production returns, the score remains, and yet the surrounding world renders the same gestures newly legible, newly fraught, newly alive.

If Partenope can still feel “cutting edge,” as Alden put it, the reason may be less that we have made it modern than that it continues to show us what we are.

This is the premise behind After the Premiere: that opera does not stop unfolding when the curtain falls, and that artists, institutions, and audiences all continue to renegotiate meaning long after opening night. In the posts that follow, I will turn to other conversations — with directors, conductors, and creative teams — who are shaping how opera lives in the present tense, and what it might yet become.

© Justin Vickers, 2026

This is the first, official “After the Premiere” blog post. Future posts will appear weekly — I have Monday mornings blocked out — and in those posts I will address opera, vocal music, archives, pedagogy, and the contemporary musical economy, with particular attention to how works and institutions continue to shape meaning long after their first performances. The next few weeks of posts are already taking shape in my mind, and this is really starting to feel like a very exciting project. So, please feel free to share these among your own social networks, and thank you for joining me along the way!

—JMV