‘It’s about the value of the journey, not the destination’

Love and power cannot coexist in the same person, according to psychologist Carl Jung. Quoting from a silent 1920s film, his words light up in the overture to Handel’s opera Giulio Cesare, which will have its premiere on Thursday evening at the Reisopera in Enschede. Conductor and director George Petrou (52) sets the eventful love story between the Egyptian queen Cleopatra and the Roman general Julius Caesar in the era when archaeologist Howard Carter found the intact tomb of the young pharaoh Tutankhamun. A discovery that plunged the world into Egypt mania at the time.

“This opera always evoked in me images of the archaeologist-adventurers from film series like Indiana Jones and The Mummy,” says Petrou. “You often find that interplay between reality and the supernatural in Handel’s operas. Giulio Cesare is a sample of his abilities as a composer. In addition to adventure, humor and voice acrobatics – so characteristic of the eccentric Baroque – Handel also expresses the long musical lines of a profound psychological drama.”

As far as Petrou is concerned, all dimensions of artistry flow together in this opera. “Unlike other great 18th-century opera composers, Handel stands up to the test of time in my view. He was already working with archetypes before Jung coined the concept. That is why his operas still have a contemporary feel to the oratorios. In the world of the past, the composer also describes that of today. We recognize ourselves in his ‘mythological’ figures.”

Ithaca experience

As a Greek, Petrou comes from the land of myths. All the children there grew up with the blind poet Homer’s two nearly three-thousand-year-old epics, the Iliad and Odyssey, about the Trojan War and the hero Odysseus’ ten-year retreat to his island of Ithaca.

“That last epic embodies our history. Greece is always somehow about coming home after much wandering. The poet Cavafy also expressed this in his poem Ithaka. “If you take the journey to Ithaca, wish that the road may be long,” he writes. ‘If it didn’t exist, you would never have left. But it has nothing more to offer you. And if you think it’s poor, Ithaka did not deceive you. Having become so wise, with so much experience you already understand what Ithakas stand for.’ It is not about arriving, but about the knowledge and insights gathered along the way. Do not keep your eyes constantly on the destination, argues Kaváfis, because in that case you will miss the essential value of the journey that is life.”

Petrou’s career is a textbook example of an Odyssey, with its winding paths and unexpected turns. “My parents were not artistic or musical, but everything that breathed beauty and meaning drew to me from early childhood. I do not know why. Art appeared before my eyes everywhere: on television, in magazines, behind shop windows. When I was ten, I underlined Greek National Opera performances in the newspaper and asked my parents to take me there. And they did. Better to ask for opera, they thought, than for toys.”

From the age of nine, Petrou received piano lessons, not from a strict master, but from an old and friendly musicologist, who especially instilled in him a love for the sounds and colors of his instrument. “I sat at my piano for hours, like some sort of explorer. I graduated from the conservatory when I was eighteen, but I also studied law. I decided to audition at The Royal College of Music in London. He hired me. It terrified my parents that I wanted to go there, because the path of a musician is simply more misty than that of a lawyer.”

Petrou built up a decent life as a concert pianist, but something kept pinching. Deep down, that wasn’t what I wanted. It fascinated me and made me happy. But everything around it breathed loneliness, the same routine: studying and performing, airplanes and hotels. I longed for something that would fulfill me more.”

Around his thirties Petrou therefore dived into the world of early music unknown to him, which led him to the opera. “Theatre, I discovered, was in my blood. As in that of any Greek. Athens has about three hundred theaters, bizarre but true. We feel at home there. And I started conducting my first Handels, including Giulio Cesare. A new horizon loomed. And later there was also directing. I wanted to translate the musical drama to the stage.”

What drives him to do so, Petrou says, is self-doubt. “Nowadays the emphasis is on self-love. And of course you have to believe in yourself, but art arises in the heart of the person who questions himself. Creative power means wanting to transcend your natural abilities. That’s why artists so often struggle with their talent. We all stay on the road.”

Reisopera with Giulio Cesare by Georg Friedrich Händel will premiere on Thursday at 6 pm in the Wilmink Theater in Enschede. The starting time has been brought forward as a result of the new corona rules in order to be able to play the 3 hours and 45 minutes long opera (with a break). The performance ends at 9:45 PM. Then tour until February 20. www.reisopera.nl.