Mathan – The Handel Friends

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.

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.

Tag: Mathan

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

Kate Shaw

Staging Handel: a Response to Ruth Smith and Brian Robins

Sandra Bowdler