The Sopranist

A while ago I was listening to a radio broadcast of a recording from last year’s Wexford Festival Opera. The Opera in question was Handel’s Deidamia. In fact you can see a video of the whole performance here. Like most baroque operas, the plot of Deidamia is rather complex but it is drawn directly from familiar Greek legend, and features Achilles and Ulysses. The former spends much of the opera dressed in women’s clothing because his father Peleus doesn’t want him dragged off to fight in the Trojan War and has hidden him on the island of Skyros among the daughters of his friend Lycomedes. Eventually Ulysses lands on Skyros to try to persuade Achilles to lead his army, but the disguise is so good that he fails to identify him. He does however develop a bit of a crush on the hot young girl Pyrrha, who is actually Achilles in drag… I won’t give any more spoilers because the Opera Deidamia is not really the point of this post, which is that the part of Pyrrha is written for a soprano.…