Tag: Theodora

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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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‘But here comes Unulfo, oh God!’: Modern Stagings of Rodelinda

Lawrence Zazzo

The argument for historically-informed singing and playing of Handel’s operas, if not always on original instruments, has been almost universally accepted. However, opinions about how to stage Handel’s operas in the modern era still vary widely. Few directors advocate directorial intervention on the level of the musical ‘text’ to the degree of Oskar Hagen, whose revival of Rodelinda in 1920 in Göttingen was the first modern revival of any Handel opera. Hagen made Bertarido and Unulfo bass roles, cut every da capo and all of the arias for Unulfo and Eduige on the grounds that they were subsidiary to the main plot, and even sliced and diced ritornelli within arias, or inserted arias and ‘pantomime’ scenes from other Handel operas.

I have been involved in three productions of Rodelinda: the Karlsruhe Handel Festival in 1998, conducted by Trevor Pinnock and directed by Ulrich Peters; a revival of the Glyndebourne production in 2000 conducted by Harry Bicket and originally directed by Jean-Marie Villégier; and most recently a new production at the Teatro Real Madrid, conducted by Ivor Bolton and directed by Claus Guth. All are lovely productions, but all are influenced by Regietheater and take varying degrees of directorial licence. In all three I played Unulfo, a character who often bears the brunt of cuts, changes and extreme depictions, and a character of whom I have grown fond over the years. The following will, through the eyes of Unulfo, give my own personal perspective on these three productions, and in so doing highlight the challenges and rewards for the modern director in staging Rodelinda and Baroque opera in general.

A potential difficulty in presenting Unulfo is his somewhat ambiguous status, a result of Handel and Haym’s conflation of two unfortunately similarly-named characters from an earlier source libretto by Antonio Salvi. Is Unulfo a servant, a nobleman, a friend to Bertarido, or all three (with all the potential contradictions that implies, for both 18th-century and modern audiences)? Furthermore, he exhibits no ‘character arc’ – his traits of fidelity, optimism, and constancy are unwaveringly present from beginning to end. He is almost annoyingly practical, insistent on status but manhandling Bertarido when he is foolishly at risk of revealing himself, and almost comically more concerned in Act 3 about getting Bertarido out of his dungeon prison than staunching his own stab wound. Finally, a potential dramatic kiss of death (at least in modern terms): he is not paired romantically with any other character.

But does this all really make him uninteresting? Handel did not seem to think so, giving him three substantial arias, while the villain Garibaldo has only two. Unulfo’s final aria, ‘Un zeffiro spiro’, was originally assigned to Eduige by Salvi, whose third aria ‘Quanto piu fiera’ Handel sets in a rather perfunctory way. Ulrich Peters’s 1998 Karlsruhe production presented the most muscular, high-status Unulfo, taking the character’s dramatis personae designation as a ‘signor Lombardo’ (Lombard nobleman) seriously and depicting Unulfo as a sword-bearing, obviously proven fighting lieutenant, as he probably would have been in 7th-century Lombardy. In Peters’s staging of Unulfo’s first aria, ‘Sono i colpi’, Unulfo heroically and physically prevents Bertarido from killing himself. Peters’s romantic pairing of Unulfo with Eduige in Act 3 is not in the original plot and might be thought of as Hagenesque directorial licence, but it does solve the often unbelievable denouement of Grimoaldo’s reunion with Eduige in the lieto fine (often a true problem in Baroque opera). But is Unulfo’s confirmed bachelor status really a problem that needs a solution? Only if erotic relationships are privileged over friendships (more on this later).

Yet another solution to the ‘problem’ of Unulfo is that taken at Glyndebourne – comic relief. Villégier introduces comic elements in all three of Unulfo’s arias, in an otherwise well-thought-out, uncut and beautiful production, which aligns the Baroque aesthetic with that of silent film of the 20s. A gag involving drinking brandy in the first aria falls flat, and Unulfo’s second aria demotes the character to a mere valet, as he folds Bertarido’s evening wear into a briefcase and shines his shoes. This may make him cheerfully Chaplinesque (certainly another reference for Villégier), but the amount of comedy diminishes not just Unulfo but Bertarido – Unulfo is depicted as a Pollyanna or Pangloss, almost gleefully oblivious of the danger not only Bertarido and Rodelinda are in, but now himself, having revealed his thoughts to Garibaldo. The most successful staging of the three is his last, ‘Un zeffiro spirò’, which seems to take its cue from the music, the recorders and bubbling bassoons complementing the hushed secrecy of Unulfo and Eduige. and the tea-trolley wheels and the exits and entrances of most of the characters echoing the rolling triplets in the bass, which suggest the acceleration of the plot at this point.

Minor characters like Unulfo are especially important in the absence of supernumeraries, which were very much a part of 18th-century stagings of Baroque operas but are often completely absent in modern revivals (usually due to cost and time constraints). A contemporary prompt book for the 1720 Radamisto in the V&A Museum lists at least 26 supernumeraries – 10 women and 16 to 18 men. In their roles as attendants, servants or soldiers, they served to promote or demote the changing status of the principals onstage with them. Minor characters like Unulfo can, in the absence of such supernumeraries or a chorus, be even more effective in this role, not only in establishing status but in offering commentary and contrast, enriching the depiction of the ‘principal’ characters by serving as a kind of moral weather-gauge. In Rodelinda, Bertarido is not necessarily a very likeable character, too quickly doubting Rodelinda and too self-pitying. But his obvious affection for Unulfo, and Unulfo’s unflagging devotion, redeems him. In Act 2 scene VII, when Bertarido and Rodelinda are brought together for the very first time, Bertarido kneels before embracing her and asks for forgiveness – clearly an echo of Unulfo’s similar act of obeisance in Act 1 at meeting Bertarido, which seems overly formal at the time but pays dividends later here. Has Bertarido learned – or relearned – proper conduct, from Unulfo? Heavily cutting Unulfo’s role, as many directors do, diminishes not only him but also his ‘reflectee’, Bertarido.

Like Unulfo, Rodelida’s son Flavio is also a gauge of a director’s attention to detail – one could call this silent character the most unsuperfluous of supernumeraries. A key part of the plot, Flavio forms the backbone of Claus Guth’s 2016 Teatro Real Madrid production, which takes place in an Escherian nightmare of a Georgian house surrounded by a lunar landscape. With its staircases and hallways going nowhere or turning in upon themselves as the set revolves, the house is for Guth a synecdoche of our tiny planet on which we must all get along. It is also a simulacrum of Flavio’s psyche – its many rooms locations of trauma for this boy who has witnessed God-knows-what and whose house has been invaded by an evil stepfather. While Guth reduces Unulfo’s social status, as at Glyndebourne, to that of a servant or butler, his relationship with the tormented Flavio as a kind of substitute father or uncle is touching, and serves as a contrast to the somewhat blinkered romantic or dynastic preoccupations of all the characters, including at times even Rodelinda herself.

Male friendships like that of Bertarido and Unulfo are extremely rare in Handel’s operas and oratorios. Other than Bertarido and Unulfo in Rodelinda, I can find only Arasse and Siroe in Siroe, Micah and Samson in Samson, and Didymus and Septimius in Theodora. In fact, they are rare in opera in general (La Bohème being a notable exception), as opera plots tend to privilege the erotic, the familial, or the antagonistic over the amicable: if you are not a lover or father or baddy, you are just not interesting. But this relative rarity is all the more reason for such relationships to be celebrated and explored. Handel, as we know, never married, and the character or even existence of any romantic attachments are as hotly debated as the Regietheater stagings of his operas. In his will, as Ellen Harris has described in Handel: A Life with Friends (2016), Handel reveals a large network of friends, both male and female. As it was for Handel, characters like Unulfo could and should be an invitation, not an obstacle, to modern directors.

Lawrence Zazzo is an internationally renowned counter-tenor. He is also Head of Performance and Lecturer in Music at Newcastle University. This article is based on his presentation at a Study Afternoon held in April 2018, organised by the Handel Institute in association with the Cambridge Handel Opera production of Rodelinda.

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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.