Tag: Athalia

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Bringing Athalia Home: Handel and the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford

Robin Darwall-Smith

In 2019 Oxford will celebrate the 350th anniversary of the inauguration of Christopher Wren’s early masterpiece, the Sheldonian Theatre. Although it was built primarily as a venue for university ceremonies, from the first it led a parallel life as a concert hall, and eminent musicians visiting Oxford, such as Joseph Haydn or Jenny Lind, have performed there – as did Handel.

Handel’s visit to Oxford on 5-12 July 1733 coincided with the University’s ‘Publick Act’. This was a grand festival in which benefactors to the university were commemorated, honorary degrees conferred, and grand Latin orations delivered. The Act had been in abeyance for some years, and special efforts were made to ensure that this would be a special occasion: Handel was invited to Oxford by the Vice-Chancellor of the University.

Handel offered Oxford a rich bill of fare. The ‘Utrecht’ Te Deum and Jubilate were heard in the University Church on 8 July, and Acis and Galatea in Christ Church Hall on the morning of 11 July; while in the Sheldonian Theatre, Handel performed two older oratorios, Esther (on 5 and 7 July), and Deborah (on 12 July), but also offered there on 10 and 11 July the first two performances of a new work, Athalia.

There is debate about whether Handel intended to take a Doctorate in Music at Oxford: some sources claimed that he was even an offered an honorary doctorate, which he declined. Even if that story is mere gossip, Handel never did take a doctorate from Oxford (or, indeed, Cambridge), although he would have had every opportunity to do so in 1733. It has even been suggested that Handel might have preferred to remain ‘Mr. Handel’, to stand apart from such musical doctors as Maurice Greene, whose works he considered inferior.

Handel’s visit to Oxford was rather a daring venture. Even in the 1730s the University of Oxford had a reputation as a haven of Jacobites, and Handel was not only a German, but also a German with close links to George II. The splendidly splenetic Oxford diarist Thomas Hearne, whose support for ‘James III’ had led to his dismissal from his university offices, certainly had no time for Handel. In his diary on 6 July he muttered about ‘Handel and (his lowsy Crew) a great number of forreign fidlers’. Others grumbled at the prices of tickets for Handel’s concerts: a satirical play from later in 1733, The Oxford Act, includes among its characters music-obsessed Fellows and undergraduates bankrupted by attending Handel’s concerts.

Nevertheless, Handel did choose a nicely ambiguous subject for his Oxford oratorio, for the plot of Athalia, about an apostate usurper being overthrown by the rightful (and orthodox) heir, could be read in two very different ways. Loyal Hanoverians could recall the overthrow of the Catholic James II, and the protection of the Protestant religion under the first two Georges; while Jacobites might yearn for the time when George II would be sent back to Germany, and James II’s son re-installed as Britain’s rightful monarch. But Handel had his own ambiguities: for all his close links to the House of Hanover, perhaps his greatest English librettist, Charles Jennens, was a non-juror, opposed to the Hanoverian succession.

Whatever controversies may have been aroused by Handel’s visit to Oxford, he left behind many admirers there. The most notable was the Professor of Music, William Hayes, who established a strong performing tradition of Handel. In 1749, to mark the opening of the Radcliffe Camera, Hayes arranged a Handel festival, giving performances of Esther and Samson, and also Messiah, which until then had never been heard outside Dublin or London.

The tale of Handel’s 1733 Oxford trip might seem now more than an interesting interlude in his life as a whole, were it not for an important accident of history. The Sheldonian Theatre is now arguably the only building standing – and standing in substantially the same condition – in which Handel premiered one of his oratorios.

On 8 June 2019 the Oxford Bach Choir will therefore make its own contribution to the 350th anniversary of the opening of the Sheldonian Theatre by performing Athalia there with its Principal Conductor Benjamin Nicholas, thus offering lovers of Handel’s music the very rare opportunity to hear one of his works performed in the very space in which it was first heard, under the composer’s direction, over 280 years ago.

Note
Further information on Handel’s visit to Oxford may be found in, among other places, Susan Wollenberg’s Music at Oxford in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Oxford, 2001), pp. 23-29.

Robin Darwall-Smith is Archivist of University and Jesus Colleges, Oxford

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‘The first great English oratorio’: Handel’s Athalia

Kate Shaw

‘Athalia is the first great English oratorio’: thus begins Winton Dean’s chapter on Athalia in his seminal work on Handel’s oratorios (1). Dean makes little attempt to define the generic label ‘oratorio’ in the context of Handel’s Athalia (1733), instead making the work conform to the theme that runs through his book: that Handel’s oratorios have roots in Classical drama. He, for example, claims that the character of Athalia is ‘a Jewish Clytemnestra’, thereby bypassing the work’s Biblical source and instead anchoring it in the tradition of Greek tragedy.

Philip Brett & George Haggerty (2), the only other scholars hitherto to discuss the work at length, conversely identify Athalia as part of the contemporary British phenomenon of Sentimental drama, which they see as evidenced by ‘the musical enlargement of Josabeth’s role’. The roles of the two leading female characters, Josabeth and Athalia, are defined as Sentimental and Tragic respectively. But Handel’s Josabeth and Athalia are complex characters, for whom such labels swiftly become limiting.

By analysing both Josabeth and Athalia in scenes critical for their character, I seek to demonstrate that they display neither tragedy nor sentimental drama, but instead that the combination of the two genres in Athalia illuminates the complexity and distinctiveness of Handel’s dramatic concept expressed in this work.

Athalia
To understand Athalia as a tragic heroine is to limit her: the vulnerability, inaction and stasis through which Handel and his librettist Samuel Humphreys characterise her might be read as granting her more complexity. Whilst it is true that Humphreys has taken much of Athalia’s text verbatim (via translation) from the true tragic heroine that Jean Racine portrays in his play Athalie (well-known in Handel’s London), Humphreys and Handel together create a character with far more agency.

Humphreys imitates yet diminishes Racine’s technique of delaying Athalia’s entry, a key point that Dean overlooks. The audience has to wait around half an hour to meet the eponymous queen. This marks a departure from both Esther and Deborah, where the titular women are the first characters on stage.

The audience meets Athalia having awoken from a nightmare where she has been stabbed by a boy dressed as a Jewish priest, allowing Humphreys and Handel to create a more exposed character. Her first number, ‘What scenes of horrors round me rise’, is an accompanied recitative and not an aria, indicating her weakened mental state. Her unease is reflected in Handel’s choice of key, F minor, a common key of despair which he had previously used in the crises of both Esther and Acis and Galatea. She is accompanied by a plangent oboe melody and sinister strings, which highlight her anxiety, and undermine any sense of authority the audience might have expected.

Throughout the scene, her interaction with those around her shows a lack of leadership. Not only is she having an extreme nervous episode in front of Mathan, her adviser, but also present is a ‘Chorus of Sidonian Priests’: Athalia totally ignores their interjections (the chorus ‘The Gods who chosen blessings shed’) and Mathan ‘achieves’ an aria before she does (‘Gentle airs, melodious strains’). Indeed, at the end of the scene, the Sidonian Priests disappear to the Temple on Mathan’s, not Athalia’s, orders.

Athalia’s first and only aria in this scene, ‘Softest sounds’, betrays her pervading melancholia and distances her from the image of a tragic heroine. The sarabande metre is sombre and the sighing paired quaver figuration in the strings completes the image of wretchedness. She is shown to be still unsteady, as this aria is not in da capo form, but sounds more like the A section of a da capo aria that she is insufficiently gathered to complete.

Athalia’s first scene is a personal and intimate depiction of a disturbed woman, with agency that removes her from the Tragic archetype. She is distant from Dean’s analysis of her as a ‘Jewish Clytemnestra’, as she fails to retain the sureness of that truly tragic heroine.

Josabeth
Josabeth’s sentimentality is only one aspect of her characterisation, as she is shown by Humphreys and Handel to be an active force in the oratorio while fiercely protecting her family and the Temple community. Her part is much expanded, both in volume and dramatic depth, from Racine’s depiction. Humphreys is, for this reason, unable to involve Josabeth actively in the plot of the oratorio, as it has been designed without her significant input. However, this gives the librettist licence in fleshing out her character.

Josabeth spends much of the oratorio responding to surrounding events, but this does not make her ‘passive’, to use Brett & Haggerty’s term. Instead, it allows her to establish her role as the most human character in the work, through whom the audience become emotionally involved in the action. By enlarging Josabeth’s part, Humphreys and Handel ensure that the human drama in the oratorio is always more prevalent than questions of politics. Brett & Haggerty write: ‘It was not experience itself that was important to this audience but the way one responded to it. Response, of course, was an eighteenth-century obsession.’ This could explain the expansion of Josabeth’s role: with four arias and four ensemble numbers, she is the most musically active role in the work.

Josbeth’s characterisation is concluded in the duet ‘Joys in gentle trains appearing’, sung after the demise of Athalia. In this duet Josabeth and Joad affirm their love for each other and the sureness of their faith in God. As in their previous duet, ‘Cease thy anguish’, Joad presents the theme, befitting his role as High Priest and husband. Josabeth then mirrors his melody, but not in a way that suggests she is subordinate. The duet is in A major, which the listener fails to realise as Joad exposes the theme on the dominant, E. When Josabeth copies him in A major at bar 17, it then becomes clear that she is resolving the duet to its tonic. Dean’s assertion that this is merely practical, and that it fits the ‘natural compass of the voices’, seems to accord Handel insufficient dramatic awareness. It is as if, throughout the oratorio, Josabeth has been increasing in self-confidence and assuredness, relinquishing the passivity that Brett & Haggerty have assigned to her.

Conclusion
This musico-dramatic analysis of Handel’s characterisation of Josabeth and Athalia is enlightening when considering the complexities of genre in this early oratorio.

Josabeth is a deeply human character, frequently used by Handel and Humphreys to provide insight into emotional situations as they arise and evolve. But Handel and Humphreys have granted her more agency than would be possible were she entirely stooped in sentimental drama. Therefore any reference to this genre must remain only a reference, not a straight-jacket.

Athalia is likewise more complex than previous scholarship has recognised. Her portrayal by Humphreys and Handel is considerably weakened from the truly tragic heroine as depicted by Racine, and in the oratorio she fails to establish the dominance and awe required by tragedy. Indeed, Brett & Haggerty’s statement about Josabeth, that ‘she is an entirely passive creature, dominated either by events or by her husband’s will’, could be said of Athalia if ‘her husband’s will’ was replaced with ‘Mathan’s will’.

The subtleties of characterisation used by Handel and Humphreys create in Athalia two women that refuse to be limited as belonging to one particular musical or literary school or another. This indicates that the generic influences that, in combination, create the early English oratorio are drawn upon more subtly than previously recognised. Handel and Humphreys adopt characteristics of several theatrical and musical genres to form the first truly three-dimensional characters in Handel’s English theatre works. Dean’s designation of the work as ‘the first great English oratorio’ is even more deserved than critical commentary has hitherto suggested.

Notes
(1) Dean, W. (1959). Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques, p.247. London: Oxford University Press.
(2) Brett, P. & Haggerty, G. (1987). Handel and the Sentimental: the case of ‘Athalia’. Music and Letters, 68(2), 112-127.

This article is based on an undergraduate dissertation prepared for examination at the University of Cambridge. Kate Shaw wishes to express her gratitude to her supervisor Dr Ruth Smith.

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Handel’s Brockes Passion: a Unique Composition

Ruth Smith

Handel wrote three compositions about salvation through Christ, all for performance at Easter: La Resurrezione, for a Catholic audience, in Italian; the Brockes Passion, for a Lutheran audience, in German; and Messiah, intended by its librettist for his London audience. Of these, the Brockes Passion (1716?), named for the author of its libretto, is the least familiar to British audiences. On Good Friday (19 April) 2019, in its (presumed) tercentenary year, Handel’s Brockes Passion will be performed at the Barbican by the Academy of Ancient Music under Richard Egarr, affording a rare opportunity to experience a work that is unlike anything else Handel ever wrote.

The first performance of Handel’s Brockes Passion that we know of was given on 3 April 1719 in a hall (the former refectory) attached to Hamburg Cathedral, during a fortnight which enabled audiences to compare and contrast settings of the same libretto by four composers who all had Hamburg connections and were all acquainted. Reinhard Keiser had been the director of Hamburg opera when Handel played in its orchestra; Johann Mattheson, organiser of the event, had been Handel’s colleague at the opera (and almost his killer), and in 1715 had become the Cathedral’s Director of Music; and Telemann, who was to become music director at the city’s five main churches two years later, had been known to Handel since 1702.

Barthold Heinrich Brockes (1680-1747), himself a Hamburger, was at school with Mattheson, and at Halle University he was a fellow student of Handel, like him studying law. Like Handel, Brockes soon dedicated himself to the liberal arts, and after travels in Italy, France and the Netherlands he settled in Hamburg, pursuing a literary life on several fronts – poetry, translation, journalism – and becoming a respected senator and holder of several important civic positions. By the time of Keiser’s setting (1712) he was sufficiently established to host its first performances in his own house to an audience (so he reported) of all the upper echelons of Hamburg society and ‘the entire foreign nobility, all the ministers and residents with their ladies’, numbering over five hundred.

Handel set more of Brockes’ texts in his lovely Nine German Arias (1724-5), celebrations of divine creation manifest in the natural world, with words from Brockes’ Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott (‘Earthly Contentment in God’). The verses are perfectly consistent with Brockes’ translations into German of the most deistical poems in the English language, Pope’s Essay on Man and Thomson’s Seasons; but they make the fervent Pietism of his Passion text seem all the more remarkable. Clearly he was a man of many parts, and persuasions.

Der für die Sünden der Welt gemarterte und sterbende Jesus aus den vier Evangelisten in gedunde Rede vorgestellt (‘Jesus suffering and dying for the sins of the world, presented in verse out of the four Evangelists’): the title of Brockes’ libretto declares that it belongs to the genre known as Passion oratorio, a freely paraphrased, versified and amplified dramatisation of the Passion story based on chosen elements of all four gospels. If the number of printings and settings is a guide, this was the most celebrated libretto Handel ever set apart from the texts of Messiah. According to one 18th-century contemporary, it had had over thirty editions by 1727; by 1750 it had been given over fifty performances that we know of, in settings by nine composers and as a pasticcio by Bach.

Mattheson recorded in his Grundlage einer Ehrenpforte that Handel wrote the Passion setting in England and sent it to him in Hamburg by post ‘in an unusually closely written score’. That manuscript is lost, and while Handel was normally a careful curator of his own performing scores, it would not be surprising if he never asked for the return of this one, since he could not have intended to perform his Brockes Passion for his British audience; and he never did. In Baroque Germany the Kapellmeister of a city or court was expected to produce Passion music every year for Holy Week services and extra-liturgical performances. In Britain no such performance tradition existed; Handel’s normal performance space, a theatre, was too secular (see objections to Messiah in 1743); all the many religious, literary and musical influences that Brockes drew on and fused would have made it problematically alien to Handel’s Londoners; and it was in the language of the ruling family, who were widely disliked for being German.

Why, then, did Handel write it? The presumed date of c. 1716 is doubly suggestive. Handel wrote no new operas that year; and the British Hanoverian regime had just survived a Jacobite rebellion. What if there were to be another such rebellion, this time successful? Handel, Hanoverian pensioner, would probably have to return to Germany with his employers. So a work with a secure place in the repertory – a good likelihood, given Mattheson’s admiration for Handel’s music and directorship, from 1715, of Hamburg Cathedral’s music – would keep his reputation bright till such time as it might be useful to appear as an established German composer as well as a composer of Italian opera (his Rinaldo was performed in Hamburg in November 1715). Hamburgers were accustomed to musical Passion dramas both staged and unacted; they had flocked to Keiser’s setting of Brockes’ text; and that text had had a forerunner in the Passion oratorio by the celebrated ‘Menantes’, Christian Friedrich Hunold (1681-1721), which Keiser set for Holy Week 1704 and in which Handel very likely played, as he was then a member of Keiser’s opera orchestra.

The evidence of Handel’s score suggests that a further attraction of an undertaking on such a scale – nearly three hours of music – was its two-way benefit to Handel the master recycler. For the Hamburg audience, which knew few of his Italian and English compositions, Handel could and did draw on the Birthday Ode for Queen Anne, the Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate, Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, Apollo e Dafne and several other cantatas. Equally safely assuming that he would never perform the Passion in Britain, he drew on it for his subsequent English works, especially Esther, Deborah and Athalia, but also for some operas and later works – as late as The Triumph of Time and Truth. Elements of nearly half the arias, duets and choruses come from or go into other works, and, since many of those contexts are better known to audiences in the English-speaking world, hearing Handel’s Brockes Passion can be a slightly distracting experience for us – as when, for instance, a pre-echo of ‘Mourn all ye muses’ (Acis and Galatea) is closely followed by a forerunner of ‘Cara speme’ (Giulio Cesare), or the duet of Jesus and his mother as he hangs on the cross is recognised as a source of the duet of Esther and Ahasuerus. We need to try to listen with the unaccustomed ears of the Hamburg citizenry of 1719.

We also need to clear our minds of Bach’s Passions, which not only came later but are in a different tradition from Handel’s. Theirs is a genre known as oratorio Passion, with biblical text of one gospel (recitative) interspersed with contemporary poetic responses (arias, choruses, chorales). Bach knew and had a copy (partly copied out by himself) of Handel’s Brockes Passion, and performed it in Leipzig on Good Friday 1746; and as well as setting versions of some of Brockes’ verses in his St John Passion he absorbed Handel’s ‘Eilt, ihr angefochten Seelen’ into it.

Despite Bach’s admiration, the response of 19th and 20th century commentators was almost universally to damn Handel’s work with the faintest praise. I suspect their distaste had two main sources in the verbal text, which is a treasury of sophisticated rhetoric. The first is its cerebral elaboration of the Christian paradox of salvation (such as the opening ‘To free me from the bonds of my sins Christ himself must be bound’, or, as the Believing Soul protests to Christ’s interrogators, ‘You are denying life to life itself, through you the death of death will die’). The second is the close-focus, graphic, unsparing representation of physical suffering and mental anguish. This begins as early as the agony in the garden, when a terrified Christ feels engulfed by a muddy morass and eviscerated by burning coals; he gasps for breath, his mouth is dry, his heart pounds and his sweat is not (as in Luke’s gospel) like drops of blood, but is drops of blood forced from every vein. During his scourging, his tormentors score his back with nailed whips; the thorns of the crown pierce his brain. Brockes also, with truly baroque ingenuity, fuses these abstract and pictorial styles in astonishing metaphysical conceits (Christ’s flogged back appears like a rainbow and likewise brings us hope; Christ sweats bloody drops which for us are rubies to bejewel our souls). The brutality and rawness in this Passion may be a legacy of the Thirty Years War, in which four times as many died in Europe as in World War I; perhaps in this respect the Brockes Passion’s hour has come, now that our daily news graphically shows us barbaric cruelty and human suffering on an unprecedented scale.

A third problem for some commentators is that this Passion is so near to being an opera. There is hardly any narrative, and all the main biblical characters (Christ, Peter, Judas, Mary) and the two allegorical characters, the Daughter of Zion and the Believing Soul – who are allegorical only in name, not, as some state, merely providing comment and reflection, but actively present at and engaging in the action and reacting to it in the moment – have extended solo and dialoguing scenas, with invented utterances voicing a huge range of emotions: fear, anger, grief, remorse, despair, outrage, joy, defiance, love, compassion, resolve and more.

Handel responds with all his power of dramatising immediacy and human sympathy. The text that he set was Brockes’ preferred version, his 1713 revision of his original of 1712. This is not always recognised by commentators who state that Handel omitted parts of Brockes’ text. In this and other respects Handel, so often noticed in his English oratorios overriding his librettists’ texts or intentions, almost wholly obeyed Brockes’ very specific demarcations of recitative, accompagnato, arioso, strophic song, da capo aria, chorus and chorale. In following Brockes’ directions for da capo (fewer than a third of the arias) and chorales (only four) and keeping the choruses short (all but one last less than a minute) Handel sets a far swifter and more gripping pace than in his English oratorios. And he deploys not only vivid pictorialism but heartstopping melody, balancing the horror with tenderness, the anguish with assurance, and matching Brockes’ fervour. His music here is not academic, not extensively worked, not demanding to follow, and above all it serves the text. Brockes, as Handel must have known, had been impressed by oratorio when in Italy, and Handel’s composition is a pattern-book illustration of Orazio Griffi’s precept for oratorio: ‘to draw sinners to holy exercises by a sweet deception’.

To renew the faith of lapsed Christians was likewise one of Jennens’ intentions in compiling the text of Messiah, and it is intriguing that Jennens had a copy made for him of Handel’s score of the Brockes Passion without its verbal text (now in Manchester Public Library). He meant to give it English words, as is shown by his having done so for about a sixth of the score, after which the task evidently defeated him: he broke off mid-sentence in Christ’s agony in the garden. He had a score of La Resurrezione copied for him in 1738. It is tempting to suppose that these two earlier works by Handel about salvation through Christ contributed to stimulating Jennens to compile a libretto on the same theme for a British audience.

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Staging Handel: a Response to Ruth Smith and Brian Robins

Sandra Bowdler

In a recent issue of the Handel News, I was much stimulated and entertained by the articles by Ruth Smith (1) and Brian Robins (2) on staging Handel, the former concentrating on the oratorios, the latter on the original staging of the operas. Smith concludes that Handel’s oratorios are better in non-staged performances; Robbins argues that, with respect to the operas, ‘only by seeing them as a totality unifying sets, costumes, gesture and expressiveness that we can truly understand the nobility of this great corpus of works on its own terms’. While finding myself sympathetic to both arguments, I have reservations about realising these ideals in the context of modern opera, and oratorio, performance. My views have been influenced by a long-term interest in the wider field of opera performance and recent experiences of Handel productions at home (Australia) and abroad.

Why do opera companies or other organisations even want to stage oratorios, when Handel has left us some 40 actual operas for the purpose? This is a puzzle, and can perhaps only be answered on a case-by-case basis by directors and intendants. I can hazard a guess with respect to the Sydney opera company Pinchgut Opera. From its inception – Semele in 2002 – the company has been associated with the (excellent) choir Cantillation, and it seems that it has specifically sought works with a large choral component. I think this also applies to the more recently established ‘Handel in the Theatre’ group in Canberra, which arose out of the Canberra Choral Society with Alexander Balus in 2014; though its current name seems odd as it has only performed oratorios, including the forthcoming Susanna. This argument about work for the chorus might also I daresay be applied to Glyndebourne. But why on earth would Halle Opera choose to stage Jephtha, albeit during the annual Handel festival there? Quite apart from its turning out to be a monumental train wreck, why not stick with actual operas? Perhaps modern directors feel that Handel’s oratorios provide more familiar storylines than the very obscure personages that feature in the operas? Although these days the likes of Jephtha, Susanna, Alexander Balus etc. are hardly household names.

The other issue highlighted by Smith is the way the oratorios are staged, with the literal specificity of stage action reigning in the inherent ambiguity of the oratorios’ text and music and thus restricting the imaginative reception by the audience. There is also the fact that modern directors are trying to do things with the oratorios that not only did Handel not intend, but which also do not work in a modern operatic context. It is interesting to consider what might be called the converse.

Smith mentions Wagner. I have attended quite a few successful concert performances of Wagner operas over the years (Tristan und Isolde, Tannhäuser, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung come to mind). In Tristan in particular, staging is practically otiose: some 90% of the whole work comprises long ecstatic passages of singing during which a park and bark performance is practically obligatory. Those who love Wagner, and (like me) are drawn in by his excessively passionate, verging on decadent, music with its long unresolved passages culminating in orgiastic resolutions, see no need for stage encumbrences. The recent New York Metropolitan Opera production (available online and on DVD) has the sketchiest of sets. Regular opera-goers do not actually need elaborate settings. When it comes to Handel, however, directors and producers seem to feel the need to over-embellish.

Returning to oratorio, the recent Pinchgut production of Athalia, despite being musically outstanding, illustrated much that is wrong in staging oratorios, including some new terrible ideas. Who, outside this production, could possibly imagine that an 18th-century English oratorio needed surtitles translated into English (i.e. modern-day English)? This was almost enough to kill the whole production, with the distraction of having two sets of English words being thrown at you at once. I will not go into what might be described as directorial infelicities – I know my mentioning that there is a pretty explicit sex scene between Athalia and Mathan will be enough to have this readership running screaming from the room – but the director Lindy Hume is known for her desire to seek modern ‘relevance’. But every review I read blamed the work for its lack of dramatic cohesion, development and so on. In one case, the reviewer found that ‘Until the last 20 minutes or so of the performance, there was very little action in the story of the opera; this often made Hume’s job difficult, as she designed the protagonists’ movements on stage’ (3). Bloody Handel, making the director’s job difficult. While this might seem to justify Smith’s view, I can imagine another director taking Athalia and producing something both more like a regular modern opera production on the one hand, while on the other also preserving the underlying 18th-century sensibility. It can be done with Mozart and Wagner: why not with Handel?

In this vein, the way Robins describes modern Handel productions in his first paragraph is essentially correct, but not, to me, a bad thing. Those pared-down austere sets do exactly what Smith suggests in allowing the audience’s imagination to fill in the dark spaces; the ones that do not work so well are those forced into a more particularistic setting (e.g. Rodelinda always now seems to happen in a 20th-century police state) or one of fluffy over-embellishment without any particular regard for ‘authenticity’. I also loved his description of an historical performance, reinforced by a recent visit to the Baroque theatre in Cesky Krumlov (not alas for a performance, although the thought of sitting through four hours of opera on one of the benches is a matter of some trepidation). Someone once said to me however that were I (or any Handel fan) to sit through a full historically performed Baroque opera replete with 18th-century conventions, Gest, costume and so on, I/we would be bored stupid. Actually, I love the productions of Sigrid T’Hooft: her recent Parnasso in Festa at Bad Lauchstädt was utterly blissful, as were her Göttingen performances of Amadigi and Imeneo in recent years, all deploying the full authentic range of Baroque opera performance. But would we want all operas to be performed like that today?

The reality is that there are very few appropriate venues for such productions. Cesky Krumlov and Drottningholm are the only two surviving Baroque theatres in Europe, and presumably the world. Early 19th-century buildings like the Goethestheater at Bad Lauchstädt and the Deutschestheater in Göttingen serve well, but this is not the kind of venue in which Baroque operas can be solely performed if we have some hope of their gaining and maintaining an ongoing place in regular opera-going. Perhaps we do not want that, but if they are not performed in regular theatres they are not going to have much survival potential.

Another recent experience of mine was a performance of Tamerlano at La Scala in Milan, a heartland of the opera experience. The stage there is vast, and an ‘authentic’ performance would be lost in the shadows. What I saw was a huge modern production which relocated the scene to the Russian revolution. The mise en scène comprised an enormous train, occasionally in motion (clever back-projection of trees being rushed past) and more often stationary in the snowy wilderness, with doors opening to reveal interactions inside. Maybe Franco Fagioli as Trotsky was a bridge too far, but it was definitely a popular hit and did not, to my mind, get in the way of the story or the meanings inherent in the text and music. If we want Handel opera to survive and flourish, it needs to be performed in these 19th-century barns alongside the core operatic repertoire, together with the more privileged locations of specialised theatres in the context of festivals and informed audiences.

Notes
(1) Smith, R. (2018). Staging Handel’s oratorios: gain and loss. Handel News, 71, January, 5-10.
(2) Robbins, B. (2018). Staging Handel – now … and then. Handel News, 71, January, 10-13.
(3) Szabo, Z. (2018). Pinchgut brings yet more exciting surprises to opera with Handel’s Athalia. The Conversation, 26 June.