Librettist: Maria José Falcão Trigoso and Joly Braga Santos
Libretto based on Almeida Garrett’s Mérope
Opera in three acts
Date: 1959
Language: Portuguese
Duration: 85 minutes
Large-scale
Mérope: soprano
Aegisthus: tenor
Poliphontes: baritone
Polydorus: baritone
Adrastus: baritone
High Priest: bass
Chorus
The single setting for all three acts has at the back a temple peristyle, to the left a royal palace and to the right a mausoleum.
A chorus of priests and priestesses give thanks to heaven that the misfortunes in Messenia have ended and implore the divine powers to protect them. Mérope enters, the former queen, widow of Cresphontes, the king who was assassinated by his brother Polyphontes. Polyphontes now reigns over Messenia as a hated tyrant. Mérope expresses her anguish, and her refuge is that temple, where her husband’s tomb lies, her only hope being her son Aegisthus, the sole survivor of the tragedy. The High Priest approaches and addresses Mérope, who fears that he might betray her. She sees that he knows her secret: the existence of that son, whom a faithful servant led to a place of safety. The priest reassures her, and the former queen tells how her son escaped death and set out for Elis. Fifteen years have passed since then.
Polyphontes appears. He addresses Mérope: “You have lost your husband and the Kingdom, I offer you a consort and a sceptre.” Mérope, indignant, repudiates the proposal of the murderer of her husband and children. The tyrant leaves, leaving the unhappy Mérope alone with her profound grief.
Mérope, the High Priest, the tyrant Polyphontes, his retinue and soldiers.
Polyphontes orders the Priest to be arrested and killed; Mérope intercedes on his behalf, without being able to sway the tyrant; he again alludes to Mérope’s son and again proposes marriage, saying: “I have long suspected it, I know it now: you have a son and a way to save him. But that way is marriage,” and Mérope exclaims: “Never!” Meanwhile, Polyphontes reconsiders and concludes that the High Priest may be useful to him.
Mérope and the High Priest converse, interrupted by the unexpected presence of a man. It is Polydorus, the faithful subject who had saved the life of Mérope’s son and left with him for Elis. When he tells Mérope that he lost sight of him and that he found Cresphontes’s belt at the place where an unknown man killed a youth in Elis, Mérope sings: “By the river, ah, my son is dead. I shall live to avenge him…”
Polydorus, the elderly tutor and the stranger whom the tyrant cunningly set free, under the priest’s responsibility, happen to meet by Cresphontes’s tomb. The stranger is Aegisthus.
Mérope approaches with the soldiers. Everything is prepared to sacrifice the one she believes to be her son’s killer. Aegisthus advances towards her fearlessly and shows himself ready to accept death; Mérope feels her strength failing. Polyphontes arrives, and it is in his presence that the tutor Polydorus reveals the prisoner’s identity. Mérope, overcome, begs the tyrant to let her depart in peace with her son. Polyphontes speaks secretly to his guards, and Aegisthus is taken away. Through the tutor Polydorus and the Priest, it is learned that the tyrant’s marriage to Mérope is being prepared, the only price by which the mother will be able to save her son from death.
At the altar, during the solemn oaths, Polyphontes is stabbed by Aegisthus and dies. Some soldiers still try to arrest Aegisthus, but they are overwhelmed by the crowd that acclaims the new and legitimate king.
3 Fl | 3 Ob | 3 Cl | 3 Bsn | 4 Hn | 3 Tpt | 3 Tbn | Tb | 4 Perc | 2 Hp | Cel | Vln | Vla | Vc | Cb
“Mérope is not a perfect work, but it is, if we are not mistaken, the best Portuguese opera of the last hundred years, or more”¹ — wrote the critic and musicologist João de Freitas Branco about the premiere of Joly Braga Santos’s opera, which closed the lyric season of the Teatro Nacional São Carlos on May 15 and 17, 1959. According to Freitas Branco, close to Braga Santos, it was a “historic date, in the chapter of operatic art” in Portugal. Perhaps only surpassed by Braga Santos himself, about ten years later, with A Trilogia das Barcas.
It was in Italy, in 1957, that the composer revived the idea of writing an operatic version of the mythological story of Mérope, the Queen of Messenia, based on the play written by a young Almeida Garrett, only eighteen years old, more than a century earlier. That year, he had received a second scholarship from the Instituto de Alta Cultura, which allowed him, together with his wife, the soprano Maria José Falcão Trigoso, to study in Rome (where he became friends with Jorge Peixinho, also a scholarship holder from 1960). Inspired by readings of the Méropes of Alfieri and Maffei and of Scritti e pensieri sulla musica (1906) by the composer Ferruccio Busoni — as he would say in a letter — he focused on the Portuguese playwright’s play.
According to musicologist Edward Ayres d’Abreu, the choice of this text allowed the dual objective of exploring a classical theme and paying homage to a major figure of Portuguese culture, such as Garrett. Furthermore, it was a new step in the attempt to create a musical‑theatrical genre inspired by classical ideals. Braga Santos himself, in an interview anticipating the opera’s premiere, identifies Mérope as a turning point in his compositional style, which would be harmonically more contrasting, with greater use of dissonance and polytonality.
Nevertheless, both Alexandre Delgado and Edward Ayres de Abreu consider that, broadly speaking, the “musical grammar” is the same as that of Joly Braga Santos’s early symphonies or of Viver ou Morrer, “only noticing a renewed (but occasional) desire to explore dissonances, here in the strict exercise of programmatically underlining moments of tension, thus colouring the modal whole with some touches that can be associated with the idea of polytonality.” For this reason, Mérope “can even be heard as eloquent testimony of how, despite his studies abroad (with Hermann Scherchen, 1948, again with Scherchen and also with Giulio Mortari and Goffredo Petrassi between 1957 and 1961), Braga Santos remained, still in 1959, deeply sceptical and conservative regarding the international technical novelties of recent decades and resolutely close to the aesthetic ideals with which he had trained and of which he considered himself an heir.”²
Maria José Falcão Trigoso adapted the libretto, reducing the five acts of Garrett’s play to just three. After its premiere, the opera was never staged again.
Date: 1959
Venue: Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, Lisbon
Stage Direction: Eurico Lisboa Filho
Music Direction: Joly Braga Santos
Cast: Natália Viana, Armando Guerreiro, Hugo Casaes, Luís França, Manuel Leitão, Álvaro Malta, Chorus of the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos and the Emissora Nacional Symphony Orchestra
