Tag: Author: Ruth Smith

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Handel’s Management of his PR

Ruth Smith

Robin Darwall-Smith’s interesting article about Handel’s performances in Oxford during the ‘Publick Act’ of 1733 (Handel News 74) mentions ‘debate about whether Handel intended to take a Doctorate in Music at Oxford; some sources claimed that he was even offered an honorary doctorate, which he declined’ – whetting the appetite for more information about these sources and this story. The first port of call now for scholars exploring Handel’s career is George Frideric Handel: Collected Documents [HCD], ed. Donald Burrows and others, of which Volume 2: 1725-1734 offers nearly 30 pages of contemporary reportage about Handel’s Oxford sojourn.

The possibility of Handel’s being awarded an Oxford degree was in the air for at least seven years before the Vice-Chancellor invited Handel and his ‘lowsy crew’ to provide entertainment. But according to the editors of HCD there is no record in any Oxford University or college archive of any plan to offer him a degree of any kind, and according to the historian of 18th-century Oxford’s musical life, Harry Diack-Johnstone, the degree of honorary doctorate in music did not then exist at Oxford (‘Handel at Oxford in 1733’, Early Music, 31, 2003, p.257).
The affair of the Oxford degree (not) affords a gleam of light on a subject we know too little about, Handel’s management of his own PR.

For more than three months before his trip to Oxford the London papers intermittently carried announcements of Handel’s supposedly intended degree. Not only did he not publicly deny this fake news, but he apparently adopted and repeated it, for it prefaces a big item in the Daily Advertiser of 20 June 1733 which is so well informed that it can only have originated with him or one of his close associates (perhaps his amanuensis J.C. Smith):
Great Preparations are making for Mr. Handel’s Journey to Oxford, in order to take his Degree of Doctor of Musick: a Favour that University intends to compliment him with, at the ensuing Publick Act. The Theatre there is fitting up for the Performance of his Musical Entertainments, the first of which begins on Friday Fortnight the 6th of July. We hear that the Oratorio’s of Esther and Deborah, and also a new one never perform’d before, called Athalia, are to be represented two nights each; and the Serenata of Acis and Galatea as often. That Gentleman’s Great Te Deum, Jubilate, and Anthems, are to be vocally and instrumentally perform’d by the celebrated Mr. Powell, and others, at a solemn Entertainment for the Sunday. The Musick from the Opera is to attend Mr. Handel; and we are inform’d that the principal Parts in his Oratorio’s, &c. are to be by Signora Strada, Mrs. Wright, Mr. Salway, Mr. Rochetti, and Mr. Wartzs. (HCD 2, p.641)

This accurately reports Handel’s intended Oxford programme, and, apart from ‘Wartzs’ (a misprint for Waltz), it accurately reports on the company Handel had formed for Oxford. Its only slight lapse is its failure to mention the extent of the celebrated Oxford counter-tenor Walter Powell’s involvement. It rightly lists him as organising and singing in Handel’s sacred music, but Powell also took the male alto oratorio roles. In all other respects, the detail and accuracy of this press report suggest that it must have come from Handel himself, and prompt the question: was Handel, far from denying, encouraging belief in the notion, which it starts with, that he had been offered an Oxford degree? If so, he must have been pleased by the way the fake news spread.
Shortly after the Oxford Act, the French author Antoine-François Prévost reported in the first issue of his Le Pour et contre, a journal of the British arts scene and history for French readers, on:
the quite extraordinary ceremony which has just taken place in the University of Oxford, for the installation of the famous musician Handel as Doctor of Music. His is the first instance of this kind. The English are convinced that the best way of encouraging the arts is to award to those who excel the most honourable distinctions. In whatever field, whoever rises above his equals passes for a great man. (HCD 2, pp.670-1)

He amended his report the following week; after a glowing account of Handel’s achievements, he continued:
The University of Oxford, conscious of such merit, offered its highest honours to Mr Handel, with the glorious title of Doctor of Music. The day of the ceremony was to be the 9 July, for which date they had arranged the reception of a large number of other Doctors and Masters of Arts. Mr Handel arrived in Oxford, but they were surprised to see him refuse the mark of distinction which they intended for him. Only such modesty could equal his talents. He did not fail to express his great gratitude to the University, and to contribute to making the ceremony devoted to the others more brilliant [a more accurate account of some of the ceremonial follows]. (HCD 2, pp.672-4)

Handel may have been pleased too with even faker news circulating in his native Germany, the Hamburg Relations Courier reporting in October that:
At the recent great Public Act at the University of Oxford… the University honoured the famous Musician, Herr Handel, a German by birth, who has resided for a considerable time in England, with the Doctorate in Music, and this is the first time that anyone has had this Doctorate conferred. His test-piece consisted of an oratorio, called Athalia, which more than 3700 people, many of them gentlemen and ladies of the highest rank, attended as spectators. (HCD 2, pp.682-3)

Whether or not there is any truth in the idea that Handel wrote Athalia not only to be premiered in Oxford but to gain him a degree there, his whole programme, so carefully specified in a London paper despite being performed in Oxford, suggests a larger purpose: that he was using the Oxford opportunity to give his compositional profile a new definition, and that he was using the London press to publicise it. He was facing competition from the new so-called Opera of the Nobility, which had just poached nearly all his principal singers. He could not know if he would be able to mount another London opera season. Oxford offered scope to programme an intensive week of his other most popular genres to date, oratorio and anthem, and to project himself as the unmatched composer of oratorio.

He succeeded immediately in having his profile as an oratorio composer promulgated. Prévost’s report of the Act in Le Pour et contre mentions that Handel:
has recently introduced to London a new kind of composition, which is performed under the name of ‘oratorio’, a kind of religious cantata divided into scenes, but with no plot or action. Although the subject is religious, the audience is as numerous as at the opera. He brings together all aspects: the sublime, the tender, the lively, the graceful. (HCD 2, pp.672-4)

Handel would surely have been pleased to have his music so described.

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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’s Oratorios: Gain and Loss

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.