Astarté (opera)

First there are serious rites, slow dances, then, little by little, an immense furious joy seizes the priests and priestesses, courtesans and guards and it is a mystical and frenetic orgy of passion and possession.

Omphale, to whom the marriage is proposed, does not want to consent to it and, in the face of the anger caused by her refusal, she asks Astarte to put an end to this embarrassing adventure.

She explains the mission she is in charge of and Omphale, who guesses her sex and calls her Eros' sweet sister, allows her to accomplish it, on the condition that she stays with her and never leaves her.

Their voices unite tenderly and Heracles, now dressed in the magical tunic and in the grip of the intolerable suffering of fire, screams and twists.

And the city also burns and hearts and bodies are set on fire and it is to Lesbos that Omphale now returns to worship Astarte and glorify all lust.

[2]Arthur Pougin is not kind and seemingly responding to Bruneau wrote in Le Ménestrel: This strange play has very few scenic or dramatic qualities.

There is even a terrible one, that of Hercules, which visibly haunted the composer's mind, and which makes one shudder when it returns periodically, attacked by the trumpets in their highest notes.

The following two acts are completely successful; the scene of seduction played by Omphale; the religious ceremony where everything else, the sets, the lighting and the staging, is admirably combined to reproduce the phallic and orgiastic cults of Asia; the awakening of the lovers; the prayer to the divine Astarte.

[4]Alex Ross of The New Yorker wrote Omphale is the priestess of Astarte's Saphic cult, and Hercules is shown in drag, observing what appears to be a lesbian orgy.

The opera ends with the priestess reconstituting her Sapphic circle on the island of Lesbos, as a chorus sings: "Glory to pleasure".

and Ross indicates that the German magazine Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen noted: "Astarté is probably the first opera to be performed, and generally the first theatre piece, in which lesbian love is represented.