Tag: Semele

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An interview with Dame Sarah Connolly

By Faye Courtney

Indisputedly one of the finest mezzo-sopranos Britain has ever produced, Dame Sarah Connolly has everything you could wish for in an opera singer: a vocal timbre of richest velvet combined with sensitive, intelligent musicality, a dazzling technique and a commanding stage presence that never ceases to impress, no matter what acting challenges are thrown her way. Though equally at home with Wagner and contemporary opera, Handel has always been very close to her heart, as well as an integral part of her career and she was happy to talk to Handel News about her experiences performing the music of the man she describes as “the ultimate dramatist”.

Do you have a favourite Handel role? “Whichever one I’m singing at the time, I cannot be disloyal to the others” – although she has particularly fond memories of the John Copley production of Semele in San Francisco (2000) where she unusually sang the roles of both Juno and Ino, requiring a somewhat frantic 50 second costume change at one point. Although Dame Sarah has sung in three different productions of Semele, she felt Copley’s 1982 Royal Opera House production was absolutely superb, particularly in the handling of the comic scenes and loved the acting challenges of playing two such contrasting parts. “One minute she comes off stage as a sort of frightening Mrs Thatcher person and then 50 seconds later she goes back on as the meek little sister, and I found that ‘schizophrenic’ side of the character very funny.” She felt somewhat “cheated” that she only got to sing one role (Ino) in the Robert Carsen production for ENO but admits it wouldn’t have been practical to do both, due to the complicated nature of the costumes involved.

The title role of Ariodante is also very special, although naturally does not provide her with the same opportunities for comedy. Though there are usually no laughs in that opera, she notes that the character of Polinesso does have the possibility to get the audience on side (particularly when played by a natural stage animal like Christophe Dumaux), and Sir David McVicar’s 2018 Vienna production absolutely understood the comedy potential of Polinesso trapping somebody as gullible and easy prey as Ariodante. Yet the Richard Jones production she performed (in Aix-en-Provence and Amsterdam) had no comic elements whatsoever and was a “deeply nasty” affair, with Polinesso depicted as a violent sexual predator. It is this ability of different directors to portray Handel’s characters in such different ways that she finds so fascinating. In terms of technical challenges, she finds the role of Ariodante the hardest, followed by Xerxes – particularly as you need a very ‘gymnastic’ voice with a big, flexible range to sing arias like “Se bramate” and “Crude furie”. In comparison, the role of Giulio Cesare is not about range but does require coloratura, whereas Semele’s Juno is more about the character than vocal challenges.

Concerning da capo ornamentation, Dame Sarah always makes a point of starting fresh and usually writes her own, and in the past she has collaborated with her singing teacher Gerald Martin Moore, who is also an expert harpsichordist. While rehearsing Xerxes and Alcina at ENO, she found herself at odds with Sir Charles Mackerras, who expected the entire cast to use the same decorations he had written for completely different singers in past productions. Although he eventually, grudgingly allowed her to use her own ornaments at ENO, the two artists later came to a complete impasse in a San Francisco Semele, when he asked her to sing ornaments he had written for Felicity Palmer, including a “comedy bottom G sharp” which Dame Sarah barely had in her voice back in 2000. She politely pointed out that her voice was totally different to Felicity’s and requested to sing a top G sharp instead but Sir Charles took umbrage at this and literally stopped speaking to her for an entire week! On opening night she baked home-made biscuits as presents for her castmates and left some for Sir Charles with a note saying “I’m sorry if you think I’ve been difficult, it’s nothing personal. It’s just that I have to tailor make my decorations to suit my voice. Being given something that isn’t suitable for my voice just won’t work and I’m very sorry if you’ve found this a problem – blame the Irish in me!”. Just before curtain up, he popped his head around her door and said “Thanks for the biccies – I’m half Scottish, you know….Mackerras!” and grinned at her. From that point onwards he couldn’t have been nicer and actually went out of his way to publicly praise her musicianship at a Handel convention in San Francisco, where she was replacing a pregnant Patricia Bardon. Very interestingly, after this incident Sir Charles Mackerras stopped insisting that singers used his decorations.

Dame Sarah has sung Handel with both modern and period instruments but has a definite preference for the latter. She notes the enormous difference it makes, particularly for a high-lying role like Agrippina, where the tessitura feels much more comfortable at the lower baroque pitch. “Because the violins play largely without vibrato, you find yourself as a singer automatically trying to pair the vocal line, expression and phrasing with that of the obbligato solo instrument or just general string sound”. She credits the ten years she spent working with Philippe Herreweghe with influencing the way she sings baroque music; eschewing anything remotely resembling a 19th century sound.

Renowned for her trouser roles, Dame Sarah’s incarnations of male characters are so convincing that one frequently sees confused audience members flicking through their programmes for clarification. While aware of the conceit that she’s a woman playing a man, her approach always starts with the psychology of a character; who he was in history and who Handel intended him to be, and she reads as much as she can about any real-life characters she portrays. Though she feels Julius Caesar definitely had ‘sex appeal’, the main ingredient which makes him attractive is a combination of fear and power, as is still the case today with other men in high office. On the first day of Giulio Cesare rehearsals at Glyndebourne, director David McVicar asked her to improvise the opening scene, which prompted her to naturally sit down on a chair in the centre of the stage – an idea McVicar loved. “That’s something I’ve noticed about all heads of state, including Donald Trump” she remarks, “Trump has learned many things about power, and he’s learned that the person who is seated is the most powerful person in the room”. For that reason (but not because of Donald Trump!) she sings most of the aria “Empio, dirò, tu sei” in a seated position, even though it wasn’t easy and she had to contend with the discomfort of the breast plate on her costume constantly riding up towards her neck.

Why does she think the major international houses programme Handel so infrequently? She feels this lies squarely on the shoulders of the programme planners but also mentions the practical difficulties of either getting in a specialist period orchestra (at considerable extra expense) or using a house orchestra whose musicians are usually not experts in performing baroque music – with the noted exception of the ENO orchestra, who Mackerras trained brilliantly for so many years. “One could easily sell Handel if it’s well directed and well sung. It’s a crime to make Tamerlano boring, an absolute crime. I just think some directors have no business going anywhere near Handel, to be honest, or any opera for that matter. By all means do Handel, but make sure you hire a director who loves it – and who gets it. If you don’t get it, go away!”. She firmly believes that Handel operas don’t need enormous budgets or lavish 18th century brocade costumes to be successful and that with the right singers and a director who really understands what’s going on, a piece like Tamerlano could still be great if set in a simple black box.

On her Handelian wish list, she’d love to sing Dejanira in Hercules and feels she’s the right age to sing it. She would also love to do staged versions of Jephtha, Solomon and Theodora, noting how successfully staged oratorios can work if handled sensitively, such as Peter Sellars did at Glyndebourne. Although recordings are currently off the table in this present Covid world, she does hope to record some more Handel oratorios in the future.

Dame Sarah was widely praised for being so open and honest about her breast cancer diagnosis last summer, an attitude which many found inspiring. She recalled how she Googled ‘opera singers with cancer’ but could only find information about those who had sadly died of the disease, such as Lorraine Hunt and Tatiana Troyanos. She thought “What about the ones who survived it? Where are they?” and had to ask her colleagues who else had experienced cancer, so they could help with her questions about the effects chemotherapy has on the voice. Thankfully she has now finished both chemotherapy and radiotherapy but found the treatments horrendously gruelling; “My vocal cords dried up, my whole throat got swollen and my body was in such pain I couldn’t use the support muscles in my ribcage or my abdominals – everything hurt”. She found herself thinking “Why sing right now? Why bother?” and instead chose to use the time to listen to plays and audio books, as listening to music was too upsetting.

Another result of going public was the enormous outpouring of support she received from friends, colleagues and fans alike, something for which she feels incredibly grateful. Her visibility also meant that she was able to provide vital moral support and be “like a sister” to several other musicians with cancer, who didn’t know who else to talk to during their treatment because nobody in the music profession in general discusses this subject. As well as this desire to break down the ‘taboo’ of cancer not being spoken about in the music world, she didn’t want to become the subject of rumour and speculation that perhaps she was cancelling because she couldn’t sing any more. “These ghastly, gossipy people in the opera world, they’re going to start creating fantasy stories. And anyway, I couldn’t find anything online about women singers with cancer who’d survived and I thought ‘I’m going to flipping well do it, I’m going to say I’ve got breast cancer, there’s no shame’. And if people don’t want to give me work as a result of that then shame on them!”

For the future, Dame Sarah particularly looks forward to singing new music specifically written for her voice, including eight songs Mark-Anthony Turnage has recently composed for her. She would also love to sing in operas about contemporary issues which are relevant to everyone today. An opera about Brexit, perhaps? “Why not? It’s the biggest upheaval in our times and Handel certainly wrote about issues of the day via his music”. Perhaps one day someone will compose that Brexit opera and cast Dame Sarah as Angela Merkel……

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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.

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Handel’s Adaptation of Congreve’s Libretto for Semele

John Andrews

Tracing the revision to the libretto for Semele from first draft to conducting score offers a fascinating insight into the way that Handel revised text during composition. Comparison of Handel’s compositional drafts with the copy of Semele submitted to the Lord Chamberlain shows the chronology of the development of Handel’s libretto, and shows him doing so not only for music and practical reasons, but also to adapt the erotically-charged text to the moral and political atmosphere of the 1740s.

Facing rivalry from both Thomas Arne and Lord Middlesex, Semele offered Handel an opportunity to find a new niche, setting a text by a great English literary figure. But William Congreve’s libretto had been controversial in its aesthetic, moral and political outlook even in 1707 when it had been set by John Eccles. While Congreve remained an imposing figure, in 1737 the Daily Gazetteer said of The Way of the World that ‘All the characters in that play are immoral, immodest, and shocking in sobriety of Thinking…Tickling a man’s ear is no excuse for corrupting his mind.’ Aaron Hill criticised the portrayal of genuinely evil characters in The Double Dealer, and cited The Way of the World as an illustration of the libertine degeneration of British theatre. Handel’s revisions demonstrate his sensitivity to these changing social attitudes, and also illuminate his approach in adapting the work’s tone away from opera towards oratorio.

Handel’s adapter/librettist – probably Newburgh Hamilton – made three types of changes. First, a series of cuts reduce the length of the text to accommodate da capo arias and the more melismatic vocal writing of Italian opera. But there are also cuts of individual lines, couplets, and even single words, which seem to accommodate the piece to a more censorious age. Second, there are interpolations from Congreve’s poetry, from Pope’s Pastorals and from untraced sources. These provide additional arias for his principals but more importantly create and shape the role of the chorus. Handel also created two choruses by reassigning lines from minor characters. Finally, one aria was re-written to fit better with Handel’s music.

Handel was free to leave omitted dialogue in the printed word-books: he did precisely this in the oratorios he produced on either side of Semele – Samson and Joseph and his Brethren. However, in Semele, cut lines were suppressed completely, suggesting that changes were made for moral and political reasons.

The chronology of adaptations

The libretto that Handel used when composing his autograph score (A) does not survive, but can be reconstructed through a comparison between the existing sources. It will be referred to hereafter as U. Handel made changes to the libretto during the initial composition and filling-up stage. After that, the Larpent Manuscript libretto (L) was copied by J.C. Smith for submission to the Lord Chamberlain’s office. The evidence suggests that Smith created this from both U and A, since stage directions appear in L which are not in A. There are also variant readings of the text which reflect the Congreve version rather than what Handel set. L includes Handel’s re-written final chorus so was made after the filling-up stage. L in addition shows a set of corrections to the text on the face of the manuscript which were also made on the face of A.

Then the conducting score (C) was then made, and a set of parts (P) copied. P contains additions to the score not found in L (e.g. the insertion of ‘Despair no more shall wound me’) suggesting that they were made later. Finally, the word-book (W) was prepared for the first performance, which included several further minor changes. From this evidence, the following sequence can be established.

Changes made during the draft composition process, and therefore reflected in L

  1. ‘See, she blushing turns her eyes’ was given to Ino as an aria with the words of the final line altered:

See, she blushing turns her eyes
See with sighs her bosom panting
If from love those sighs arise
My rest ever will be wanting.

2. The other sources all give ‘Endless pleasure’ to an unnamed commentator. In the autograph, Handel assigns it to Semele herself. The evidence of the printed scores suggests that Avoglio (singing Iris) had her part increased with lines from Ino and even Cadmus, so could easily have sung it. The decision to give it to Semele was Handel’s own and increases its erotic charge.

3. The text of ‘With fond desiring’ is already in its final form in the autograph, so the changes must have been made by the adapter for the U libretto.

4. In Part Two, Handel inverted the first two lines of ‘I must with speed amuse her’ in the autograph, but the lines appear in Congreve’s form in L which suggests that the copyist was working from both U and A, and failed to spot this change.

5. Handel added an extra syllable to ‘Where e’er you walk’ which was not spotted by the copyist of L or W. Perhaps this was to avoid drawing attention to Handel’s rewriting of Pope.

6. In Act Three, the libretto had given Semele the sexually explicit culmination of her demands to Jupiter:

When next you desire I shou’d charm ye,
As when Juno you bless,
So you me must caress,
And with all your omnipotence arm ye.

Handel wrote these lines into the autograph, but never set them to music. The motivation for the cut may have been musical, but is more likely to have been their overt sexuality.

7. The autograph shows Handel’s dissatisfaction with the underlay of ‘I’ll be pleased with no less’. The corrections show clearly that Handel changed the last four lines of Congreve’s text during the composition itself:

Congreve (WC)

I’ll be pleas’d with no less,
Than my Wish in excess:
Let the Oath you have taken alarm ye:
Haste, haste and prepare
For I’ll know what you are;
So with all your Omnipotence arm ye.


Autograph (A)

I’ll be pleased with no less
Than my wish in excess
Your oath it may alarm you
Yet haste and prepare,
For I’ll know what you are
With all your powers arm you.

Changes made during the filling-up

  1. Between the first draft and the filling-up stage, Athamas was recast from a tenor to an alto, resulting in new keys for several of the arias. Mostly Handel wrote the new part over the old one. For the arias and most of ‘You’ve undone me’ he inserted fresh sheets. Handel improved and extended his first recitative with Cadmus, adding a final ritornello which leads into Semele’s ‘Ah me!’
  2. A recitative version of ‘Turn hopeless lover’ was inserted for Ino, and the second half of ‘Hail, Cadmus hail’ was revised with the new sheets stuck over the old ones. At some point, Handel wrote ‘Un mezzo tono piu basso ex D sharp’ over ‘O sleep’ – i.e. that it should be in E flat. This would have made a more expressive key change from the G major of ‘Come zephyrs, come’. The excision of ‘Come zephyrs’ later rendered it pointless,
  3. Handel inserted a new version of ‘Bless the glad earth’ to conclude Part Two.
  4. Handel re-composed the entrance of Juno and Iris in the Cave of Sleep and this was inserted into A.
  5. The first draft of the autograph concluded with Congreve’s bacchanalian ‘Now mortals be merry.’ This was replaced at the filling-up stage by ‘Happy, happy!’ This chronology is clear because L has the new ending, but not the re-writing of Athamas. It fundamentally changes the character of the work, replacing a drinking song with high baroque religious ceremonial. The oratorio character of the conclusion is thereby reinforced.

Changes made after composition was completed (shown as corrections on L and A)

  1. After Handel had completed the filling-up, he changed Congreve’s lines ‘by this conjunction / With entire divinity / You shall partake of heavenly essence’, to ‘partake of immortality.’ The handwriting looks like that of the copyist, but it is much less tidy than elsewhere. This suggests that the change was made at the last minute, and that the seminal image was offensive to the Chamberlain.

2. ‘Leave me, loathsome light’ still had its da capo in P and L. Its crossing out in A is therefore later, improving dramatic flow and creating a great comic effect in Somnus’s return to sleep.

3. ‘Behold in this mirror’ remains an aria in L, but by C and P it has been changed to a recitative.

4. Handel continued to make changes to the opening of ‘No no I’ll take no less’. In P, it has the same words as were originally in A. However, after this, A, C and L were corrected to give the final version. Again the writing is less neat than the rest of L. It looks as though the correction was made by Handel himself, confirming that he took a direct part in managing the libretto’s submission and alterations.

No no! I’ll take no less
I’ll be pleas’d with no less,
Than all in full Excess
Than my Wish in excess:
Your oath It may alarm you
Yet haste and prepare,
For I’ll know what you are;
With all your powers arm you.

5. In L, ‘See, she blushing turns her eyes’ has been neatly corrected on the face of the manuscript, giving it as a recitative for Athamas, with Congreve’s original words. This was made on the basis of C.

6. Handel changed ‘comets’ to ‘meteors’ in the penultimate chorus, presumably for greater poetic beauty.

Changes made after the correction of A

  1. ‘See, she blushing turns her eyes’ was changed to a recitative for Ino by the time P was copied and was retrospectively changed in L.
  2. ‘Curs’t adulteress’ stands in A but was scratched out of L and replaced by ‘Curséd Semele.’ The correction appears to have been made by Smith (the writing is cramped between two lines, but his characteristic d and S are the same), and again suggests that the language was too direct for the Chamberlain.

Changes made after the correction of A and L

  1. ‘Despair no more shall wound me’ was inserted into A after the copying out of L, which suggests that L was prepared during Handel’s revisions to A, or shortly after.
  2. Before C was prepared, ‘Come zephyrs come’ was removed completely.

The role of the chorus

It is the role of the chorus and the grand ceremonial tone of most of their music that fundamentally transmutes the character of the piece from the opera envisaged by Congreve to the oratorio of Handel. In his Chapel Royal anthems Handel had demonstrated his assimilation of English style and through these he could out-English Arne. Simultaneously, by preserving the fully Italianate arias, he could out-opera Middlesex. Semele contains ten choruses and they bring both gravity and explicit moral commentary foreign to Congreve’s original: in fact, precisely what the playwright’s critics had demanded.

In perhaps a deliberate nod to Purcell and the masque tradition, all of the Part One choruses are linked to religious ceremonial, with the chorus identified as ‘priests and augurs.’ In Part Two the chorus appear as immortal ‘loves and zephyrs’ and in ‘Bless the glad earth’ evoke the music of the spheres in an entirely ecclesiastical anthem-chorus. Handel’s treatment, beginning with a weighty homophonic passage and followed by a double fugue, aims at the religious sublime.

In Part Three, the chorus begin as a Greek chorus, again offering an explicit moral commentary. The shocked reaction to Semele’s destruction, ‘O terror and astonishment’ (given to Cadmus and Athamas), was in Congreve; but the moral lesson, ‘Nature to each allots his proper sphere’, is an addition. This leads on to the final chorus in the work: the singers become again citizens of Thebes. But instead of Congreve’s bacchanal, we in stead return to a royal, religious ceremonial complete with music straight from the Coronation Anthems. That the deity in question was the god of wine and theatre was possible a joke of Handel’s. Reactions to Semele suggest that he did not entirely get away with it.

This addition of the chorus has created confusion over Semele’s genre. Mainwaring’s ‘an English opera, but called an oratorio and acted as such’, and Jennens’s scathing ‘no oratorio but a baudy opera’, emphasised its operatic qualities (1). Burrows called it ‘virtually an opera’, while Dean says it is ‘clearly an opera’. Lang went further and called it ‘the first full-length English Opera’ and Mellers a ‘full-scale heroic opera’ (2). The arias are clearly operatic in style but Newburgh Hamilton, in his preface to Samson (1743), defined oratorio as a drama ‘…in which the Solemnity of Church-Musick is agreeably united with the most pleasing Airs of the Stage’.

Handel’s revisions show that he was fully aware of what the moral reaction might be, and in the suppression of the most explicit text and introduction of a moralising chorus, he sought to mitigate these concerns. The strength of Semele surely comes from its seamless fusion of the two contrasting elements. To the opera audience he offered florid, Italianate, da capo arias of rich and varied drama (3). To his oratorio audience he offered the religious sublime of ‘Bless the glad earth’ and the coronation splendour of ‘Happy, happy!’

This brief survey of how the libretto was transformed to his new purpose shows Handel searching for a new theatrical approach in the early 1740s, ready to use all the resources at his disposal, but at the same time acutely conscious of the gap between the world of his libretto and the more censorious ambience of his own audience. Ultimately the failure of Semele led him to look elsewhere, but we can see from his efforts described here that it was not for want of caution.

Notes
(1) Mainwaring, J. (1760). Memoirs of the Life of the late George Frederic Handel, p.152. Dean, W. (1972). Charles Jennens’ marginalia to Mainwaring’s Life of Handel. ML, liii, pp.160-164.
(2) Burrows, D. (1994). Handel, p.274. Dean, W. (1959). Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques, p.365. Lang, P.H. (1966). George Frideric Handel, p.417. Mellers, W. (1965). Harmonious Meeting: a Study of the Relationship between English Music, Poetry and Theatre, p.243. Dent, E.J. (1928). Foundations of English Opera, p.231. Smither omitted it from his history of oratorio on the same grounds. Smither, H.E. (1977). History of the Oratorio, Vol.2, p.280.
(3) Semele has a far lower percentage of da capo arias than the original versions of Acis (85%, 11 out of 13), and Esther (75%) and all of the Royal Academy operas. Of Semele’s successors, Alexander Balus has 40%, Hercules and Theodora both 52%, and Susanna 62%. However, all of these have many more than the immediate predecessors L’Allegro (8%), Samson (11%) and Saul (17%); Judas, Joshua and Belshazzar all have 23-24%. This supports the theory that with Semele Handel tried to fuse the choral and da capo elements out of which came a distinct genre in the later dramatic oratorios.

Dr John Andrews is Principal Guest Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra. This article is based on his PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge.