Ruth Smith
An advertisement in Gramophone (June 2017) for a box of Handel DVDs from Glyndebourne states: ‘This set brings together three of Handel’s most compelling works for the stage’. It does not, as the three works are Rinaldo, Giulio Cesare, and Saul. Handel News 70 (September 2017) announced that at the Australian 2017 Helpmann Awards the Glyndebourne production of Saul gained six awards, including Best Direction of an Opera and Best Opera. When WNO’s Jephtha (directed Katie Mitchell) was staged at ENO (2005) it was billed as one of ‘four classic operas with love and passion’.
But Handel did not call Saul or Jephtha operas, and he did not stage them.
Like (some) film versions of great novels, (some) stagings of Handel’s English-language compositions for the theatre attract new audiences and appreciation. Many in the Glyndebourne audience who would never have gone to hear Theodora in a concert hall were deeply affected by Peter Sellars’s production (1996) and subsequently bought a recording. It inaugurated modern admiration for Theodora. At Milton Keynes the theatre seats 1,400 and was full for every night of Barrie Kosky’s Saul (2015). Having the largest orchestra and greatest number of soloists of any of Handel’s dramas, Saul is seldom performed, so we should be pleased if Glyndebourne’s success prompts more groups to attempt it, three trombones, a harp and a glockenspiel notwithstanding.
But I think that in staging the English music dramas we lose more than we gain, and, worse, we diminish Handel’s music and travesty his ability as a dramatist.
‘Stage directions’
The rationale of some modern performers and critics has been: Handel was an opera composer at heart. He gave up opera only because it had become a loss-maker. He had to ‘put up with’ unstaged oratorio because the Bishop of London prohibited the involvement of Chapel Royal choristers in a staged Esther. He wrote ‘stage directions’ into the scores of his English music dramas because he would have preferred them to be staged. By staging them we will reveal their ‘true nature’: what Handel really meant.
This was the influential view of Winton Dean (Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques), formed when he was an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge. He was a chorus member in a staged production of Saul, an experience he found so moving that at one point he was unable to sing.
But there is no evidence that Handel hankered for stagings of his English music dramas. Had he wanted them staged or hoped they would be staged in future, he would have written them differently. He knew how to write for the stage, and that is not how he wrote in the oratorios.
The ‘stage directions’ are in the score because Handel, with what may seem uncharacteristically punctilious subservience to his librettist, copied out what he found in the libretto. Some think he transcribed the ‘stage directions’ and scene descriptions to stimulate his own imagination. They were certainly intended to stimulate the audience’s imagination, like the Chorus in Henry V: ‘Think, when we speak of horses, that you see them.’ Handel’s audience, with no dimming of house lights, following the wordbook, could and can augment the sung text with prompts for their mental landscape.
The wordbook was an essential ingredient of the audience experience, and we lose meaning from some of the dramas if we do not have it in front of us. For example, in Belshazzar (Act 1 Scene 3) Daniel is teaching his pupils the scriptures. We read:
Daniel’s house. Daniel, with the Prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah open before him. Other Jews.
Daniel: O sacred oracles of truth, O living spring of purest joy!
Daniel does not specify whose oracles he is quoting, but the wordbook does. A marginal note gives exact sources: Jeremiah 29: 13-14, Isaiah 45: 1-6; 44: 28
That information is vital to our appreciation of the drama. At the climax of the action Daniel shows the Bible to the conquering Cyrus, to prove to him that his conquest is part of the divine plan, and to persuade him to implement what is foretold of him in the Bible; and again we have marginal notes directing us to the precise passage of scripture that the librettist is encapsulating, so that we see, hear and believe too. The librettist, Charles Jennens, meant to strengthen belief in Jesus as redeemer. Cyrus, an attested historical figure, fulfilling Old Testament prophecy, reinforces the credibility of Old Testament prophecy of the Messiah. But without the wordbook in front of us, we do not know whose ‘oracles’ they are and will not make the connection.
Musical action
Handel is well known (as in his own day) for delighting in musical mimesis, and especially for imitating action in music. Unstaged oratorio gave him scope to substitute music for action.
For example, at Belshazzar’s feast, Belshazzar challenges the Jewish God to show his hand. The wordbook states: ‘As he is going to drink, a hand appears writing upon the wall over against him: he sees it, turns pale with fear, drops the bowl of wine, falls back in his seat, trembling from head to foot, and his knees knocking against each other.’ Belshazzar exclaims in horror: ‘Pointing to the hand upon the wall, which, while they gaze at it with astonishment, finishes the writing, and vanishes.’
With a single violin line, Handel depicts the hand writing, gradually forming the letters. We hear the line being traced. The combination of the wordbook and the music makes action redundant. Back-projection in time to the music would not just lessen the tension and the mystery: it would be tautologous.
Examples of musical mimesis are legion: for example, the sun stands still for Joshua; the giant Goliath strides past the frightened Israelites in Saul; Saul’s javelin whizzes through the air at David. All are startling moments musically, stretching musical convention and stimulating our imagination, and all are diminished by being shown. You know from the thud in the bass lines that you have to crane your neck to see Goliath’s head. He is more terrifying in music than he could be on stage. Did Wagner mean Fafner and Fasolt to seem merely silly? They often do. Goliath does not.
Oratorio gave Handel scope for new levels of musico-dramatic realism and complexity, precisely in not being staged. It freed him from a basic realism, the need for physical bodies to be given time and space to move.
This freedom allowed one of the glories of oratorio, the chorus. A physically acting chorus presents all sorts of problems: getting them to learn their parts by heart; getting them on and off stage; choreographing them; getting them changed out of their Israelite costumes in time to appear again as Philistines or, still more difficult unless one’s budget is limitless, organising them to be both at once, as is demanded in Deborah and Samson.
None of this needed to bother Handel, who therefore can write for a chorus that is both the army of the chosen people and a group of philosophers questioning the meaning of life, as in Jephtha; for a chorus of citizens that celebrates its monarch one moment and sits in judgement on him the next, as in Saul; for Philistines in Samson singing ‘at a distance’ while the Israelites (‘on stage’) sing in reaction to them; for a chorus that disperses in half a dozen hectic bars, as in Semele – without the inevitable log-jam at the side of the stage that distracted from the music and, worse, belied Handel’s stagecraft in Robert Carson’s 1999 production for ENO.
Multiple perspectives
Instead, Handel exploited oratorio to transcend physical space, even imagined physical space, and, moving between the exterior and interior worlds of his characters, gave us new dimensions of drama.
In Saul the women of Jerusalem come out to celebrate Saul’s and David’s victory. We first hear the women’s instruments, a long way off. The music gives us listeners a specific location amidst the imagined action: we are among Saul’s entourage, hearing the procession of women getting closer. When we and Saul can hear what they are singing, and Saul hears them giving more praise to David than to himself, he has an outburst of jealous rage, which we can hear, placed (as it were) near him, but which the approaching women, still distant, cannot, and so, disastrously, they go on with their tactless song. As they get nearer the men join in: they add volume, making the crowd sound even nearer. Saul rages again.
Saul’s son Jonathan upbraids the chorus: ‘Imprudent women’. But we heard the men’s voices joining in. Apparently Jonathan did not. Saul’s reaction to the chorus’ acclamation of David was: ‘what can they give him more, except the kingdom?’ – a fear which a crowd of silly women would not engender. Saul heard the men. So did we. But in the biblical account, which the libretto is following closely here, only women sing, as Jonathan’s words confirm. So Saul heard the whole nation acclaiming David only in his mind, on which we eavesdropped. To create the same impression in 18th-century opera, a composer had to resort to the convention of the ‘aside’. With oratorio, Handel enabled us to do what the bewildered people around Saul could not do, shift our standpoint, enter Saul’s mind and share his morbid fantasy. (I am grateful to David Vickers for discussion of this point.)
Multifarious meaning
Dramatic oratorio is often called ‘opera of the mind’. The mind can comprehend several states of being simultaneously. But it is impossible for a singer to manifest several conflicting emotions simultaneously. Yet Handel’s music often invites us to hear in it more than one possible emotional state. Staging unavoidably simplifies the effect of such music, negating Handel’s perhaps unparalleled ability to suggest complexity and ambiguity in music.
For instance, Theodora’s ‘O that I on wings could rise’ could be heard as aspirational and hopeful, or caged and desperate, and in concert performance you could feel that either is possible while it is being sung. But if we see someone doing something, that determines what we think the music is representing. Sellars took the decision for us. Theodora was desperate, pacing round and round: no aspiration, no hope.
Handel often suggests psychological and emotional complexity in the introduction to an aria. Staging usually gives us action to watch during aria introductions, action that is likely to overlay the subtlety of the music. At Glyndebourne, Theodora acted out her first aria from the start of its introduction, expressing a convinced renunciation of the world, according to the aria’s text: ‘Fond flatt’ring world, adieu’. But the introduction to the aria suggests a far more complex state, having the form of three answering phrases, so definitely demarcated as to suggest debate. Is that debate in Theodora’s soul? Among the congregation of the faithful that she is addressing? Between her present state and the outside world? A foreshadowing of the conflicts to come? All these can be suggested to us during the twenty bars of the introduction. But Sellars made her aria a sermon, not a soliloquy, and her action during the introduction overrode its music and suppressed its potential meanings.
In ENO’s staging of the Passion sequence of Messiah (Deborah Warner, 2009), during ‘And with his stripes we are healed’ we watched a defenceless man being beaten by two others. We saw the stripes, but not the healing; we saw the man of grief, but not the saviour by whose Passion mankind is redeemed. The mystery of the Passion (‘Behold, I tell you a mystery’) was nowhere.
Italian oratorio was born from the Counter-Reformation. Powerfully emotional, it was intended as edifying entertainment which would engage hearers in spiritual devotion, and prompt spiritual exercises; it was intended to make you reflect, meditate, think. However fine singers’ acting, staging inhibits our thinking. It turns what could be a meditation into a performance. And by occluding Handel’s music and musico-dramatic craftsmanship, it does him a disservice.
Soon after he started writing oratorios for his English public, Handel composed an ode on the power of music, setting Dryden’s greatest poem, Alexander’s Feast. It is a paradigm of the power of dramatic oratorio, of opera imagined. With his music Timotheus not only puts the conqueror through a series of contrasting emotions: he makes Alexander believe he is literally seeing things. In oratorio Handel shows that he has similar power, that the modern musician is equal to the artistic giants of antiquity, and that he needs no help from the arts of the stage. We diminish his achievement by staging it.