Peter Sellars Connects War Veterans To Händel's "Hercules"

Performances run from March 4-21.
More ticket information. here

Director Peter Sellars is currently working on Händel's musical drama Hercules at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. On March 2 he will take part in a live webcast symposium, presented by The University of Chicago and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, to discuss how current veterans are affected by war and the troubles they bring home with them. "Webcast panelists include the renowned and always-provocative director Peter Sellars; University of Chicago trustee Jack Fuller, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former editor of the Chicago Tribune, who covered the Vietnam War and has written novels about that conflict; John Cacioppo, director of The University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and a veteran of the current conflicts in Afghanistan and/or Iraq. The moderator is Pulitzer Prize-

Sellars, Cacioppo, Fuller, Keller

winning journalist Julia Keller, cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune and author of Back Home, a novel narrated by a young girl whose father suffered a traumatic brain injury in Iraq as a National Guardsman."

 "Inspiration for Handel’s opera came from the great ancient Greek drama, The Women of Trachis, by Sophocles. The theme is civilization’s struggle to stifle the savagery that threatens it from both internal and external sources, but it is also the

intensely personal story of a family torn apart by the actions and effects of war. The music is in turn ferocious and heartbreakingly poignant, revealing Handel’s genius as a musical dramatist keenly attuned to the psychological state of his subjects." [Source]