Semele (Eccles)

Semele is an opera by John Eccles, written in about 1706 with a libretto by William Congreve drawing on the Semele myth from Ovid's Metamorphoses. It forms part of the English opera tradition of Blow's Venus and Adonis, but was never staged due to changes in popular taste at the time. Indeed, the opera remained unperformed until the mid twentieth century, eclipsed by George Frideric Handel's 1744 secular oratorio of the same name, based on the same libretto.