La Stellidaura vendicante
Francesco Provenzale (1624–1704)
Stage Director Gilbert Blin staged Provenzale’s La Stellidaura vendicante for the 2025 Boston Early Music Festival ‘Chamber Opera Series’. The mutable interplay between passion and decorum, concealment and disclosure, finds its visual analogue in the dynamic stage typical of late seventeenth-century Naples, where rapid transformations of poetic spaces mirrored the volatility of human affects and social order. In this sense, the stage itself participates in the moral and psychological drama: the fluid boundaries between court and street, interior and exterior, public and private, female and male, visually reflect the permeability of social and emotional identities in Neapolitan culture. The theater of passions becomes both a literal and metaphorical site of revelation, where artifice gives form to truth, and is rendered legible through spectacle.
Photo’s Kathy Wittman
Dramaturgy
The libretto of Andrea Perrucci (1651–1704) has a double title, and this frontally expressed two-fold quality seems to be of great relevance to establish the fundamentals for a stage approach of the work: “Defending the Offender or Stellidaura Avenger”. This approach seems already evident when looking at the types of events incorporated by Perrucci’s “cloak and dagger” plot. Inspired by the Spanish theater masters of the “Siglo de oro” such as Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and of course Calderón, the Neapolitan writer, then at the beginning of his fertile career, created a breathless movement in his detailed libretto that only a live performance can offer. Perrucci’s melodrama—its play of revelation, repentance, and moral restitution—extends beyond its narrative to embody the broader aesthetics of Neapolitan theatricality.
Neapolitan conception of theatricality
The play’s resolution depends on the recognition of error, “agnizione,” a device central to both the tragic and comic traditions of the Baroque stage. Such an ending resonates with the Neapolitan conception of theatricality as a mirror of social and emotional reality: in this world of volatile passions and precarious honor, truth emerges only through its distortions. The vocalization by the characters of both titles of the opera during the finale emphasizes the moral restoration that concludes the drama. The scene is thus less a triumph of reason than a carefully staged reconciliation, preserving the tensions between virtue and desire that seem to define the cultural poetics of late seventeenth-century Naples. The spectacle of revelation of identities affirms not the stability of order, but its perpetual negotiation.
Boston Early Music Festival
NEC's Jordan Hall, Boston
Premiere November 29, 2025
Press
The Boston Globe
‘Dynamic Stage Direction’
Artists
Paul O’ Dette & Stephen Stubbs, Musical Directors
Gilbert Blin, Stage Director
Robert Mealy, Concert Master
Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière, Movement Director
Seth Bodie, Costume Designer
Zachary Connell, Light Designer
Jason McStoots, Assistant Stage Director
Reed Demangone, Fight Choreographer