Tag: Tamerlano

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Italian Poets of the Renaissance as inspiration for Baroque Opera Composers

By Mark Windisch

Handel composed about 40 operas covering a very wide range of topics, using librettists for the text from a variety of backgrounds to help him. Some operas like Il Pastor Fido and Atalanta are pastoral subjects, some deal with historical characters with which we are familiar, like Riccardo Primo, Giulio Cesare, Xerxes, Tamerlano and Alexander. In this article I should like to take a closer look at the “magic” operas which usually rely on exceptional poets who lived in Italy during the Renaissance. In particular we owe a debt to Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso.


Handel, newly arrived in London in late 1710 was offered an opportunity to stage an opera by Aaron Hill, a dramatist who had recently been appointed to run the King’s Theatre Haymarket. Hill saw opera as the means to further his ambition to make a success of the theatre. He came up with the idea of using the story of Rinaldo and Armida and chose Giacomo Rossi (fl 1710-31) to compose the libretto. The plot laid out by Hill took Torquato Tasso’s famous poem Gerusalemme Liberata but added the love interest between Argante and Armida and inserted the additional character of Almirena. The ending in which the Muslims converted to Christianity was not part of the original.


For Handel it was a wonderful opportunity. He had brought with him to England a collection of pieces already composed for other occasions. Sometimes they were not in any way apt to the plot, but their spectacular impact, delivered mostly by the famous castrato Nicolini (Nicola Grimaldi) and other top singers accompanied by some interesting orchestral effects, ensured that Rinaldo was an instant success. It ran for 33 performances and was revived several times. The novelty of Italian opera presented in London no doubt contributed to the opera’s appeal, but its success was ensured by Hill’s intervention as producer. His choice of Handel to choose the music around which Hill and Rossi then fitted the plot was one masterstroke, but also the extraordinary stage effects which included fire-breathing dragons, live birds, moving mountains and waterfalls, must have been a revelation to London audiences.


Although the music might not always have been appropriate to the subject it illustrated, Handel produced some stunning pieces. The character of Armida has the best arias with “Furie Terribile” and “Vo far Guerra”. Rinaldo has eight arias including “Cara sposa” and the spectacular “Venti turbini”.


Tasso’s poem was very successful in its own right and went on to be the inspiration to many people besides Handel. Operas and cantatas were written by others such as Albinoni, Jommelli, Salieri, Gluck, Myslivecek, Sacchini, Haydn, Sarti, Rossini, Donizetti, Brahms, Dvorak and even Judith Weir (2005). Plays and paintings were also inspired by this poem.
Handel clearly used this opportunity as a learning experience. It not only brought his talents to a wide audience but also put his music in print for the first time. (Walsh is said to have cleared £1500 by printing songs from Rinaldo.) He also got to meet J J Heidegger who introduced him to several influential people which greatly helped his career in London.
Moving forward more than 20 years, Handel’s next venture into a magic opera came in January 1733 with Orlando. Once again, there might have been some link with Aaron Hill and Heidegger for the choice of subject.


Ludovico Ariosto published his vast narrative poem Orlando Furioso (Raging Orlando) in 1532 although a partially complete version appeared 1516. Ariosto followed an earlier poet, Matteo Maria Boiardo who published a romance Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in love), and that in turn was inspired by Chanson de Roland, published in France in the 11th century.
Ariosto’s book is published in translation in two large paperbacks by Penguin, which gives an idea of its scale. The background is the war between Charlemagne’s Christian paladins against Saracen armies under Agramante, which are threatening to overthrow the Christian Empire. In the story, Orlando, a Christian knight is obsessed with the pagan princess, Angelica. A sub plot is the love between Bradamante, a Christian warrior and the Saracen, Ruggiero. Medoro, a wounded Saracen knight is healed and saved by Angelica and elopes with her.


The unhinged Orlando is assisted by another knight and they fly up to the moon (where all things lost are supposed to be stored) on a flying horse where they find Orlando’s lost wits which are then restored to him.


Handelians will recognise some of the characters and situations in Handel’s Orlando. The knight is central to the story, but we also have Angelica and Medoro. Handel introduced two more characters, Zoroastro and Dorinda. He uses the characters to build a story of power, love, and jealousy. He concentrates on the mania from which Orlando suffers, rendering him unable to reconcile his instincts as a warrior with his obsession with Angelica. The character of Zoroastro is a sort of primitive psychiatrist-cum-magician which offers an opportunity for introducing spectacular stage effects. Dorinda is the only solidly grounded character, offering an interesting contrast.


In the opera Handel breathes life into the characters by giving them music appropriate to their thoughts as opposed to their actions. He produces some astonishing arias for Zoroastro, far more convincing in my opinion than that written by Mozart for a similar character in The Magic Flute. Orlando is a deeply damaged character. He first is portrayed as a staunchly heroic character; at the sight of Angelica he is overcome by passion. By Act II overwhelming jealousy is invoked when he realises that Angelica is in love with Medoro. His is aria reflects the resultant disintegration of his mental state. In Act III the confused state of his mind comes through clearly in the music Handel has written for him to sing, especially in his duet with Angelica. Dorinda the shepherdess has several remarkable arias including her reflective soliloquy after the quite frightening encounter with Orlando at his most deranged.


This extended poem by Ariosto became very influential and had many followers including Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queen, Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, Lope de Vega, Cervantes in Don Quixote, Borges and even Salman Rushdie in The Enchantress of Florence.


As to musical compositions, besides forming the storyline of Handel’s Orlando, Ariosto was mined by Caccini, Agostino Steffani, Vivaldi, Lully, Rameau, Hasse and many others. Many artists including Delacroix also drew inspiration from Ariosto with his painting, Marphise.
In 1735 Handel was moved to use Ariosto’s poem again for Alcina. This was another instance of Handel and his producer needing a magic opera to display special effects. The libretto came to Handel via Riccardo Broschi, brother of the singer Farinelli and a composer himself. The characters are from the Ariosto but Broschi changed a few things. He added Oronte, retained Melissa but changed her into Melisso (a bass) and developed Bradamante and Morgana from their relatively minor roles in the poem.


Handel’s genius again was to imbue the characters with human feelings and reactions as opposed to Ariosto’s concentration on just producing a narrative. Alcina, for all her magic powers, is a mature woman needing to love and be loved. Finally, when she cannot find this love, her character disintegrates and her powers are lost. The child, Oberto shows considerable feeling for his father who has been transformed into a lion by Alcina. Ruggiero starts as a puppet figure controlled by his passion for Alcina, but as he realises that Ricciardo is really his beloved Bradamante in disguise, he rejects Alcina. His status as a warrior and hero is then reflected in his music.


I wonder what the famous authors of the poems which inspired Handel and his librettists would have thought of the way their creations came to life in the Baroque opera form. Even the earliest operas, which were little more that recitals with music, did not take place until 1597. Monteverdi, who can be said perhaps to be the first composer to produce an opera approximating to a modern format, only produced his first opera Orfeo in 1607.
Handel was very versatile and flexible in his approach and magic operas form only a very small part of his huge output of Italian opera. All were well received and allowed him to produce some of his most memorable music.

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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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Tragic Voices in Tamerlano

David Kimbell

Discussions of the music of Tamerlano commonly mention three features: (i) the ‘claustrophobic’ restraint of the orchestration, which is felt somehow to match the oppressive stage-sets, all prison-like interiors in the tyrant’s palace; (ii) the gloomy final chorus, in which neither Bajazet (who is dead) nor Asteria (who has gone out to mourn him) play any part; and (iii) the various ways in which Handel shows a more than common seriousness about the recitatives (some simple recitatives are extraordinarily long; there are unusually many accompanied recitatives; in Act III finally the opera comes to its dramatic climax in Bajazet’s great death-scene, it too chiefly composed in varieties of recitative). A sombre piece, then; and these oddities clearly have something to do with the fact that Tamerlano is, of all Handel’s Royal Academy operas, the only one for which the librettist, Nicola Haym, used the term ‘tragedy’.1

In what follows I essay a preliminary investigation of my hunch that this Tamerlano bleakness is inherent in many of the arias too. For all their expressive intensity and the poignancy of the human dilemmas they explore so vividly, one cannot but wonder, comparing them with those in the contemporary Giulio Cesare or Rodelinda, whether they have the same sheer overflowing of generous musical inventiveness that we can so commonly depend on in Handel, ‘the “plein air” composer with the most open of horizons, the inexhaustible and generous melodist’, as Alfred Brendel calls him.2 Has Handel, in Tamerlano, found a ‘tragic’ way of directing this musical inventiveness, beyond the relatively external matters of orchestral austerity and the strategic balancing of recitative and aria?

My starting-point is Handel’s use of coloratura which, far from being one of the frills, is actually one of the principal sources of his power as a composer. When Handel sets an aria text to music (let us envisage one of six lines, of which the first three (a b c) are used in the principal A section of the aria), he commonly begins by setting it in such a way that every syllable of the text of a b c is clearly audible. There may be a few ornamenting notes, there may be a limited amount of coloratura on some important word, one or two words may be repeated; but none of this is enough to break the close link between poetic metre and musical rhythm. Once that phase has been completed, the music’s continuation is likely to become freer and more florid, usually in connection with the modulation to the dominant key and the intermediate ritornello, and often that modulation is clinched with a cadence phrase in which at least part of the text is uttered clearly and emphatically. It is that free ‘continuation’ between the (quasi-)syllabic opening phrase and the vigorous cadence (also often quasi-syllabic) where Handel’s energy, his command of musical architecture and the sheer variousness of his musical imagination, as he heads for the ‘plein air’ and open horizons of Brendel’s metaphor, are best to be enjoyed.

Much of the music of Tamerlano shows exactly this pattern. To cite one example, Irene’s aria No.10, ‘Dal crudel che m’ha tradito’, shows it again and again: after the syllabic presentation of the text in bars 6-10, the complete standard pattern of syllabic opening, florid continuation, and vigorous cadence can be heard in 11-18, 19-26 and 27-32. The more substantial of Andronico’s arias show the same feature, and something of the variety of its possibilities: in Aria No.12, ‘Benché mi sprezzi’, for example, as in so many arias in triple time, broad hemiola cadence phrases – magnificently broad at 61-64 – replace merely emphatic ones. But when we turn to the characters who contribute most vitally to the opera’s tragic vein – Bajazet, Asteria, Tamerlano – the situation is rather different.

One cannot expect a tenor to sing coloratura with the same scintillating verve that a high voice, soprano or castrato, brings to it. Nevertheless, if one compares the coloratura in Bajazet’s role with that sung by Grimoaldo in Rodelinda, a part written for the same singer a few months later, it is clear that the slowness and weightiness of the coloratura in Tamerlano is a deliberately chosen element of style. Much of it might be loosely described as instrumental in character: in No.3, ‘Forte e lieto’, it is poignantly stretched out as he agonises over the dilemma his love for Asteria causes him; in No.8, ‘Ciel e terra armi di sdegno’, it punches the air with the force of a trumpet call; in No.19, ‘A suoi piedi’, after long stretches of syllabically-set music, a few phrases are drawn out with slow-moving, widely spaced coloratura in which every note can be given expressive weight, screwing home the sense of anguish. Rather different, because more rhetorical (by which I mean ‘speech-derived’ rather than ‘instrumental’), is the coloratura in No.35, ‘Empio, per farti guerra’. The idioms of accompanied recitative are much in evidence here: reiterated chords in the orchestra; broken declamatory phrases in the voice, punctuated by orchestral unisoni flourishes; and the style of the coloratura arises from that. It is slow-moving, like all Bajazet’s coloratura 3, but angular too, making extravagant gestures with the voice so-to-speak, as if he were conjuring up the ombra of which he sings.

In Asteria’s music one observes exceptional restraint in the coloratura. In her first aria, No.7, ‘S’ei non mi vuol amar’, there is none. And to give the music the expressive breadth it demands, the undecorated melody is borne on an unusually wide range of modulation. In the principal section of No.9, ‘Deh, lasciatemi’, any ornamental exuberance in the ‘continuation’ is largely due to a florid instrumental descant, which breaks in where we might expect the singer to break out (especially at 54-59). In No.27, ‘Cor di padre’, too, it is the relationship between voice and violins that is critical. During bars 7-12 the whole text of A is sung syllabically, in detached phrases punctuated by jagged instrumental figures, a dialogue of contrasting voices. When it comes to the broadening climax of this phase of the aria, the two voices (Asteria and the violins) entwine, their gently florid lines intensified in expression by the dissonant suspensions (12-14). As in aria No.9, at one point where climactic coloratura might be anticipated (27-28), it is the orchestra that supplies the animating detail while the voice sustains a long note.

As one might anticipate, several of these arias have concordances with other Handel works. The most thought-provoking of them is the first: the concordance between Bajazet’s aria No.3, ‘Forte e lieto’ and the German aria ‘Die ihr aus dunklen Grüften’. 4 In the texts there is an oblique poetic echo: Brockes’s poem contrasts the blindness of those who dig treasure out of dark mines and lock it up in boxes, with the good sense of those who step out into God’s fresh air and rejoice in the treasures he has scattered so generously in Nature. In the darker mood of Tamerlano, the man stepping into the light is only prepared to accept liberty at all – let alone take pleasure in it – because of the love of his daughter. Without that he would rather stride fearlessly to his death, and it is that fearless stride that transforms the incipit of the ritornello, launching into it with a determined, accented falling octave extra to the melodic idea in ‘Die ihr’, and going on to give a teeth-setting grittiness to the rest of the phrase by virtue of the dotted rhythm and tight trills. In the continuation of the ritornello, over a reiterated pedal note, the two arias diverge strikingly again: ‘Die ihr’ rocks easily between dominant and tonic harmonies; ‘Forte e lieto’ at the same juncture quivers with syncopations before plunging into sustained chromatic dissonance.

We see that coloratura in these arias is rarely employed as an expression of ‘purely musical’ energy. It is sometimes avoided altogether, sometimes delegated to the accompanying instruments, often slowed down, broadened out, twisted into unfamiliar shapes to become the principal vehicle of the arias’ expressiveness. Is that an aspect of Handel’s tragic vein?

Notes
1 ‘To the reader’, in the printed libretto (London, 1724). See Hallische Händel-Ausgabe, II, 15, Tamerlano (ed. Terence Best), p. XXXV. All references are to that edition.
2 Brendel, A. (2017). Music, Sense and Nonsense: Collected Essays and Lectures, p.418. London.
3 The exception is No.23, ‘No, no, il tuo sdegno’, where the unexpected turn of events momentarily enables Bajazet to escape from his tragic obsession.
4 We do not know which preceded which. I have written this paragraph as if the Tamerlano aria ‘borrowed’ from the German aria, but the point of the comparision will not be lost if at some time the German aria should prove to be the later composition.

David Kimbell is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh.

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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.