Lawrence Zazzo
The argument for historically-informed singing and playing of Handel’s operas, if not always on original instruments, has been almost universally accepted. However, opinions about how to stage Handel’s operas in the modern era still vary widely. Few directors advocate directorial intervention on the level of the musical ‘text’ to the degree of Oskar Hagen, whose revival of Rodelinda in 1920 in Göttingen was the first modern revival of any Handel opera. Hagen made Bertarido and Unulfo bass roles, cut every da capo and all of the arias for Unulfo and Eduige on the grounds that they were subsidiary to the main plot, and even sliced and diced ritornelli within arias, or inserted arias and ‘pantomime’ scenes from other Handel operas.
I have been involved in three productions of Rodelinda: the Karlsruhe Handel Festival in 1998, conducted by Trevor Pinnock and directed by Ulrich Peters; a revival of the Glyndebourne production in 2000 conducted by Harry Bicket and originally directed by Jean-Marie Villégier; and most recently a new production at the Teatro Real Madrid, conducted by Ivor Bolton and directed by Claus Guth. All are lovely productions, but all are influenced by Regietheater and take varying degrees of directorial licence. In all three I played Unulfo, a character who often bears the brunt of cuts, changes and extreme depictions, and a character of whom I have grown fond over the years. The following will, through the eyes of Unulfo, give my own personal perspective on these three productions, and in so doing highlight the challenges and rewards for the modern director in staging Rodelinda and Baroque opera in general.
A potential difficulty in presenting Unulfo is his somewhat ambiguous status, a result of Handel and Haym’s conflation of two unfortunately similarly-named characters from an earlier source libretto by Antonio Salvi. Is Unulfo a servant, a nobleman, a friend to Bertarido, or all three (with all the potential contradictions that implies, for both 18th-century and modern audiences)? Furthermore, he exhibits no ‘character arc’ – his traits of fidelity, optimism, and constancy are unwaveringly present from beginning to end. He is almost annoyingly practical, insistent on status but manhandling Bertarido when he is foolishly at risk of revealing himself, and almost comically more concerned in Act 3 about getting Bertarido out of his dungeon prison than staunching his own stab wound. Finally, a potential dramatic kiss of death (at least in modern terms): he is not paired romantically with any other character.
But does this all really make him uninteresting? Handel did not seem to think so, giving him three substantial arias, while the villain Garibaldo has only two. Unulfo’s final aria, ‘Un zeffiro spiro’, was originally assigned to Eduige by Salvi, whose third aria ‘Quanto piu fiera’ Handel sets in a rather perfunctory way. Ulrich Peters’s 1998 Karlsruhe production presented the most muscular, high-status Unulfo, taking the character’s dramatis personae designation as a ‘signor Lombardo’ (Lombard nobleman) seriously and depicting Unulfo as a sword-bearing, obviously proven fighting lieutenant, as he probably would have been in 7th-century Lombardy. In Peters’s staging of Unulfo’s first aria, ‘Sono i colpi’, Unulfo heroically and physically prevents Bertarido from killing himself. Peters’s romantic pairing of Unulfo with Eduige in Act 3 is not in the original plot and might be thought of as Hagenesque directorial licence, but it does solve the often unbelievable denouement of Grimoaldo’s reunion with Eduige in the lieto fine (often a true problem in Baroque opera). But is Unulfo’s confirmed bachelor status really a problem that needs a solution? Only if erotic relationships are privileged over friendships (more on this later).
Yet another solution to the ‘problem’ of Unulfo is that taken at Glyndebourne – comic relief. Villégier introduces comic elements in all three of Unulfo’s arias, in an otherwise well-thought-out, uncut and beautiful production, which aligns the Baroque aesthetic with that of silent film of the 20s. A gag involving drinking brandy in the first aria falls flat, and Unulfo’s second aria demotes the character to a mere valet, as he folds Bertarido’s evening wear into a briefcase and shines his shoes. This may make him cheerfully Chaplinesque (certainly another reference for Villégier), but the amount of comedy diminishes not just Unulfo but Bertarido – Unulfo is depicted as a Pollyanna or Pangloss, almost gleefully oblivious of the danger not only Bertarido and Rodelinda are in, but now himself, having revealed his thoughts to Garibaldo. The most successful staging of the three is his last, ‘Un zeffiro spirò’, which seems to take its cue from the music, the recorders and bubbling bassoons complementing the hushed secrecy of Unulfo and Eduige. and the tea-trolley wheels and the exits and entrances of most of the characters echoing the rolling triplets in the bass, which suggest the acceleration of the plot at this point.
Minor characters like Unulfo are especially important in the absence of supernumeraries, which were very much a part of 18th-century stagings of Baroque operas but are often completely absent in modern revivals (usually due to cost and time constraints). A contemporary prompt book for the 1720 Radamisto in the V&A Museum lists at least 26 supernumeraries – 10 women and 16 to 18 men. In their roles as attendants, servants or soldiers, they served to promote or demote the changing status of the principals onstage with them. Minor characters like Unulfo can, in the absence of such supernumeraries or a chorus, be even more effective in this role, not only in establishing status but in offering commentary and contrast, enriching the depiction of the ‘principal’ characters by serving as a kind of moral weather-gauge. In Rodelinda, Bertarido is not necessarily a very likeable character, too quickly doubting Rodelinda and too self-pitying. But his obvious affection for Unulfo, and Unulfo’s unflagging devotion, redeems him. In Act 2 scene VII, when Bertarido and Rodelinda are brought together for the very first time, Bertarido kneels before embracing her and asks for forgiveness – clearly an echo of Unulfo’s similar act of obeisance in Act 1 at meeting Bertarido, which seems overly formal at the time but pays dividends later here. Has Bertarido learned – or relearned – proper conduct, from Unulfo? Heavily cutting Unulfo’s role, as many directors do, diminishes not only him but also his ‘reflectee’, Bertarido.
Like Unulfo, Rodelida’s son Flavio is also a gauge of a director’s attention to detail – one could call this silent character the most unsuperfluous of supernumeraries. A key part of the plot, Flavio forms the backbone of Claus Guth’s 2016 Teatro Real Madrid production, which takes place in an Escherian nightmare of a Georgian house surrounded by a lunar landscape. With its staircases and hallways going nowhere or turning in upon themselves as the set revolves, the house is for Guth a synecdoche of our tiny planet on which we must all get along. It is also a simulacrum of Flavio’s psyche – its many rooms locations of trauma for this boy who has witnessed God-knows-what and whose house has been invaded by an evil stepfather. While Guth reduces Unulfo’s social status, as at Glyndebourne, to that of a servant or butler, his relationship with the tormented Flavio as a kind of substitute father or uncle is touching, and serves as a contrast to the somewhat blinkered romantic or dynastic preoccupations of all the characters, including at times even Rodelinda herself.
Male friendships like that of Bertarido and Unulfo are extremely rare in Handel’s operas and oratorios. Other than Bertarido and Unulfo in Rodelinda, I can find only Arasse and Siroe in Siroe, Micah and Samson in Samson, and Didymus and Septimius in Theodora. In fact, they are rare in opera in general (La Bohème being a notable exception), as opera plots tend to privilege the erotic, the familial, or the antagonistic over the amicable: if you are not a lover or father or baddy, you are just not interesting. But this relative rarity is all the more reason for such relationships to be celebrated and explored. Handel, as we know, never married, and the character or even existence of any romantic attachments are as hotly debated as the Regietheater stagings of his operas. In his will, as Ellen Harris has described in Handel: A Life with Friends (2016), Handel reveals a large network of friends, both male and female. As it was for Handel, characters like Unulfo could and should be an invitation, not an obstacle, to modern directors.
Lawrence Zazzo is an internationally renowned counter-tenor. He is also Head of Performance and Lecturer in Music at Newcastle University. This article is based on his presentation at a Study Afternoon held in April 2018, organised by the Handel Institute in association with the Cambridge Handel Opera production of Rodelinda.