Over the past dozen years, the Deutsche Oper Berlin has offered an admirable mixture of heavy hitters, popular favourites, world premières, unjustly-neglected rarities, and even the occasional foray into grand opéra. Conspicuously absent from that list is anything from the era before Mozart. Baroque opera, for all its variety and interest, is still perhaps seen as something of a risk for any modern company: not only does it require specialist musicians – both on stage and in the pit – but it also demands an audience willing to readjust themselves to a pace of drama dictated by the da capo aria.
For their first new venture into baroque opera in over a decade, the Deutsche Oper nonetheless added yet another success to what has already been an extraordinary season. Admittedly Händel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto is, both musically and dramatically, one of the more accessible entry points into the genre, and David McVicar’s staging – which originated at Glyndebourne more than twenty years ago – has already enjoyed successful runs at various houses around the world. The evening, however, might have been little more than a diverting novelty had it not been for the charismatic performances of Elena Tsallagova and Christophe Dumaux, and the confident musical direction of Alessandro Quarta; the three of them, supported by a uniformly strong cast and a handful of engaging solo instrumentalists, provided the evening with enough musical sparkle to equal – and occasionally surpass – the obvious delights of the staging.
The plot of Giulio Cesare, such as it is, is highly schematic. Although the action is nominally focussed on the titular general’s growing infatuation with Cleopatra as he tries to bring Egypt under Roman control, the opera’s political (and amatory) struggles are wholly secondary to its succession of vocal showpieces. While such an approach to narrative was fairly standard in Händel’s time, for a twenty-first century audience it may seem light on dramatic momentum and, in order to sustain the attention of anyone not fully invested in baroque performance traditions, the modern director must either intensify the drama or ignore it entirely. David McVicar opted for the latter: although there were undercurrents of violence and cruelty that prevented it from settling into straight comedy, his staging emerged as a vivacious spectacle full of singing, dancing, fabulous costumes and exotic sets; it seemed to have been conceived solely for the purpose of entertainment … and more often than not it succeeded.
Händel: Giulio Cesare in Egitto. Alessandro Quarta, conductor. David McVicar, director. Deutsche Oper Berlin, April 2026. © 2026 by Nancy Jesse / Deutsche Oper Berlin.
Instead of using the most advanced technologies to dazzle the audience, however, the staging seemed intent on recreating the kind of theatrical magic that might have awed the opera-goer of the early eighteenth century. The action took place within a perspective set framed by a receding series of columns and joists that belonged more to the enlightenment than to ancient Egypt or Rome; at the very back of the stage were a group of four revolving cylinders that created the illusion of a constantly rolling sea. The cylinders were no less effective for belonging to a style of stagecraft that hasn’t been in fashion for over two centuries; one could imagine that, instead of being driven by a motor they were being hand-cranked by street urchins hoping to make an easy tuppence.
Indeed, nearly all of the staging had a charmingly human-powered quality to it: the curtains that opened and fell on each act were drawn up in an awkward arcing diagonal, and set changes – which consisted primarily of the raising and lowering of exotic fabrics and painted backdrops – could just as easily have been the work of stage-hands and pulleys as motorised cables. Apart from one moment, in which video projection was used to darken the sky behind the sea with menacing clouds, the entire staging seemed wilfully ignorant of the last several hundred years of advances in theatrical technology.
Händel: Giulio Cesare in Egitto. Alessandro Quarta, conductor. David McVicar, director. Deutsche Oper Berlin, April 2026. © 2026 by Nancy Jesse / Deutsche Oper Berlin.
If the evening was notable for its retro quality – there were even footlights at the front of the stage – it was by no means a period reconstruction. Just as eighteenth-century productions played fast and loose with the specifics of an opera’s intended time and place, so the staging seemed content to throw in whatever might create the best visual effect. The appearance of men-o’-war on the distant sea heralded the arrival of British colonial troops with red coats, high boots and (anachronistic) tropical pith helmets. Yet any suggestion that the story might be transposed to, say, the battle of the Nile, was immediately upended by the appearance of a film camera taking newsreel footage of Caesar’s arrival. Nor did the Egypt of the story bear much relation to any specific time or place: the befezzed palace servants and the fabulous flowing costumes worn by Cleopatra and Tolomeo conspired to create little more than a generic near-eastern exoticism. Rather than attempt to reframe the libretto in concrete political terms, the staging was more concerned with having fun: its subject was nothing more – but also nothing less – than the very notion of theatrical artifice.
The freewheeling, highly artificial approach to the visual world extended also to the treatment of the characters. The opera, in any event, is populated entirely by recognisable types: Caesar is the noble ruler and just statesman, while Tolomeo, his opposite, is power-hungry and vain; Cornelia is heroic in her suffering of an unjust fate; Sesto is the son out to avenge his father; and Cleopatra lives in absolute certainty that all it takes to bring down an empire is the right outfit and a raised eyebrow. Instead of bothering with psychological nuance, the staging needed only to accentuate the essential qualities of each character in order to give the drama its inevitability.
While the staging went out of its way to entertain, its efforts might not have been sufficient to sustain several hours of lacklustre or indifferent singing. Fortunately, the production featured two performances that, taken together, were more than enough to carry the evening. Christophe Dumaux, singing Cesare at the role’s original pitch, was the evening’s most consistent source of the elaborate coloratura that is such a fixture of the baroque repertoire. He may not have had the largest voice, but whatever he lacked in projective power he more than made up for both in the technical precision he brought to the character’s most demanding passages, and in the lyrical warmth of his phrasing. While the excellent ‘Va tacito e nascosto’ supported Mr Dumaux’s noble delivery with gentle solo-horn, and ‘Se in fiorito ameno prato’ saw him trading increasingly complex volleys of ornamentation with an onstage violinist, his finest moments flourished on the strength of his voice alone: his ‘Empio, diró’ in the first act yielded nothing to the orchestra in terms of virtuosity, while his greatest aria, ‘Al lampo dell’armi’, achieved an heroic splendour that transcended the comic treatment of the scene.
If Mr Dumaux’s Cesare provided the evening with the thrills of baroque vocal writing, it was Elena Tsallagova, as Cleopatra, who almost single-handedly transformed the performance into the larger-than-life spectacle promised by the staging. With a commanding voice and a willingness to embrace the character’s ostentatious persona, every one of her early arias was a show-stopper: the coquettish ‘Tutto può donna vezzoza’ – complete with spotlight and twirling umbrella – was a master-class in charm, while the hypnotic ‘V’adoro, pupille’ succeeded as much on the strength of her elegance of line and purity of tone as the nocturnal intoxications of its setting. But while Ms Tsallagova clearly relished Cleopatra’s vampish side, her ‘Se pietà di me non senti’ was all the more arresting for its sudden outburst of sincerity; it was, indeed, her ability to reconcile the extremes of the character into a plausible whole that made her realisation of the role so rewarding. Nor was the unstoppable energy of her performance limited merely to singing and acting: several of Cleopatra’s arias were presented as elaborately choreographed routines, in which Ms Tsallagova was supported by two professional dancers, but out-danced by neither of them.
Cornelia is perhaps the opera’s most thankless role: deprived of her husband in the opening scene, then imprisoned by Tolomeo, her arias tend mostly towards misery and self-pity; she was given a suitably austere performance by Stephanie Wake-Edwards, whose elegant lamentations were the counterbalance to Cleopatra’s amorous scheming. In addition to several fine arias – the best of which was ‘Cessa omai di sospirare’ – she also joined voices with the Sesto of Martina Baroni for the especially moving duet that brought the first act to its conclusion. If Sesto never emerged as anything more than a son bent on revenge, Ms Baroni nonetheless gave the character’s arias – notably the animated ‘L’angue offeso mai riposa’ – a spirited vehemence.
Although the opera’s bad guys get comparably less stage time, Cameron Shahbazi approached Tolomeo as an essentially comic role, albeit one underpinned by a genuine cruel streak; although his first act aria seemed overly emphatic, as though the character was slightly too drunk on power, ‘Domerò la tua fierezza’ was delightfully malevolent. And Michael Sumuel was a compelling Achilla, suave and persuasive in his blunt approaches to Cornelia, and equally convincing in his switch of allegiance.
While the Deutsche Oper orchestra is far from a period ensemble, Alessandro Quarta presided over a performance that kept the action moving at an invigorating pace while paying close attention to Händel’s seemingly endless variety of textures and moods. Indeed, it was his ability to highlight the precise character of each aria that allowed a genuine drama to emerge from beneath the artifice of the staging: Mr Quarta coaxed playing of tempestuous immediacy for Sesto’s arias – although it was the more moderate ‘Cara speme’ that stood as one of the evening’s orchestral highlights – while the tragic tone of the duet at the end of the first act was intensified beyond measure by the concentrated expression of the ensemble. Yet Mr Quarta was equally at home with the presiding lightness of the production and had little trouble evoking an unforced heroism to accompany Cesare’s appearances, or giving each of Cleopatra’s set-pieces an infectious rhythmic verve.
Baroque opera may never form a major part of the twenty-first century core repertoire but, with Giulio Cesare, the Deutsche Oper provided a hugely entertaining introduction to a genre that can seem somewhat foreign even to seasoned opera fans. Between the retro delights of the staging, the elegance of the orchestra, and the captivating performances from the singers, the production demonstrated that the ingredients for operatic success may not, in fact, be all that different now than they were three hundred years ago.
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