Médée et Jason (Medea and Jason) is a French opera by composer Joseph François Salomon and librettist Simon-Joseph Pellegrin, written in the tradition of lyric tragedy ( or ). The Académie Royale de Musique (Royal Academy of Music) premiered it on 24 April 1713.
Background In Médée et Jason, composer Joseph-François Salomon and librettist Simon-Joseph Pellegrin drew on a long literary and musical history. The myth of the tragic heroine Medea had inspired writers from Euripides and Seneca the Younger to Pierre Corneille and Hilaire-Bernard de Longepierre, as well as composers Jean-Baptiste Lully and Marc-Antoine Charpentier.
The opera follows the French tradition founded by Lully, with a prologue, five acts, clear declamation, choruses, dances, and music shaped by the drama. But it also reflects early 18th-century stylistic shifts, including a taste for Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon's theater, with its intense, almost expressionist drama. Crébillon aimed to evoke the terror and horror of Greek tragedy, wrote Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, by showing human corruption and cruelty on stage. In Médée et Jason, Salomon and Pellegrin stressed the Medea myth's dark, violent elements, adapting it to this aesthetic.
Reception The Académie Royale de Musique premiered it on 24 April 1713, and Christophe Ballard published it that year. It became one of the most successful works in their 18th-century repertoire, receiving five revivals within four decades, and was the first in a string of blending heightened emotional expression and voyeuristic horror, including Hypermnestre (Gervais, 1716), Sémiramis (Destouches, 1718), and Polydore (Stuck, 1720).
Its initial run of two months was followed by a revised revival later that year, as well as performances in provincial centers such as Lyon and even abroad at Brussels's La Monnaie in 1726. The 1727 Paris revival ran for thirty-one performances, brought exceptional acclaim, and prompted the publication of a supplement documenting revisions to the score.
Further performances in 1736 incorporated elements of contemporary Italian opera, including an inserted Italian aria sung by Marie Fel. A commentator named Dubuisson wrote that Lully "never wrote four operas better than this one". A manuscript from this time shows others' revisions of the opera.
References Citations
Bibliography
Libretto at "Livrets baroques" Félix Clément and Pierre Larousse Dictionnaire des Opéras, Paris, 1881, page 447.
Further reading