Platée

[Maclintick]

It's true that some operas show cruelty, but normally for reasons of love, hate, jealousy etc. I'm not saying those actions are justified in any way, but one can maybe understand the circumstances that lead to them. What sets Platee apart for me is that the cruelty is purely gratuitous bullying just because the character is ugly and thus made a figure of fun. I find that very uncomfortable.

I don't. In Platée the audience can clearly empathise with the deluded protagonist, & moreover the opera is significant as a precursor of opera buffo -- entertaining, light-hearted fare where the women don't all have to cry and die as they do in 19th cent Italian opera seria -- the little swamp-dweller escapes at the end, right ? Historically, the primary function of operatic heroines in the 19th.cent is to suffer and/or die at the hands of of alternately cruel or unthinkingly heartless & powerful men. Love, hate, jealousy all motor the melodrama -- Laca slashing Jenufa's cheek, Tosca jumping from the ramparts, Cio-cio-San committing seppuku, but their victim-shamed or slut-shamed fate, in contemporary-speak, is pre-ordained in order to shore up the patriarchy. Platée is mythic, fairy-tale -- decidedly non-verismo, & all the better for it, IMHO.