I’ve tried. Really hard. I survived the ENO Agrippina, but only just. I
really wanted to abandon it at the interval, but was persuaded not to
(I couldn’t help noticing that Anna Ford was coping, so I stayed). It’s
been said that Handel’s plots suffer from being complicated, but I
disagree - if you want complicated go and see The Makropoulos Case or Die Frau ohne Schatten. The plots of Handel’s operas are not complicated, they are convoluted. Agrippina wants power, so as a start she orders her husband to dismiss his loyal companion, the countertenor. He enters, and sings an aria of Rejection. We haven’t seen him before, and we don’t know anything about him, but he sings it anyway, because Rejection is what countertenors sing about best. In Handel’s time singing was all that opera was about; the plot merely served to create an appropriate sequence of moods to allow for the right arias as vehicles for the performers. I don’t have any problem with that, but directors do because now opera is not just about singing.
At the Coliseum it was if the director was saying “OK folks, this is a
Handel opera and it’s very long and quite dull in places, so when the
good guys sing tedious music I’ll keep you entertained by having
handsome sailors doing Morecambe and Wise style dancing, or someone
picking their nose or playing an I-pod. And when people get upset or
angry there’ll be a karaoke bar, or someone cutting a line of coke -
you know, in the orchestra there are all these really fast notes and it
sounds just like...”
Not that I’ve got anything against comic portrayals in Baroque opera -
the sight (and sound) of Linda Ormiston in a rubber nurse’s outfit in
the marvellous WNO Poppea, serialised on TV one Christmas, was a
total joy to behold, but it didn’t interfere with the impact of the
drama -it helped heighten it. Emphasising the comedy of the supporting
roles puts into relief what the main characters are up to.
Even when the director leaves the drama alone, Handel comes to grief. I
saw Ariodante (a tale of intrigue and betrayal amongst Scottish vicars)
in Buxton, sung by English Touring Opera with the marvellous Louise Mott in the title
role. Towards the end of Act 1 a daughter is rejected by her father
because he’s been told she’s a bad girl. By the countertenor, who we
know is lying. But the father unquestioningly believes him, and so it
is she who sings the aria of Rejection, which again she does very well.
Later on someone reveals the truth and shoots the countertenor. That
was the best thing that happened all evening - if he’d only been shot
sooner there wouldn’t have been a problem, and it all took most of three hours.
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The problem isn’t with the da capo arias either, though putting 30 end
to end is never going to make anyone happy. Even in Messiah, where the
arias are equalled in number by choruses, several da capos are
routinely cut, including the best music in the whole piece to my mind
(the middle bit of “The Trumpet Shall Sound”). In a staged opera
production there are lots of clever things you can do to vary the
dramatic effect of the predictable musical form. But even so you always
long for something else.
Not necessarily Mozart’s ensembles, or
Monteverdi’s no-arias, but I always end up craving for Bach. He wrote
hundreds of da capo arias, mostly tucked away safely in cantatas far
from directors’ harmful hands, in an enormous variety of moods, styles
and emotional levels. His vocal music is still often derided as
over-intellectual or instrumentally conceived, but there is an endless
variety of colour: he combines voices with instruments in such an
extraordinary number of ways that hardly any two arias sound alike.
Handel’s idea of varying the instrumentation consists of either
doubling the violins with the oboes or not.
But Handel’s orchestration isn’t the problem. I fully accept there is
loads of wonderful music in his operas, and always enjoy hearing it
sung well no matter what the director has done. When I took a friend to
see The Marriage of Figaro for the first time (the wonderful ENO
“Gosford Park” production) she asked me why only the women had the
emotional music to sing. A bit harsh, I thought at the time, but later
I realised there’s more than a grain of truth in that question - Mozart
definitely engages with his female characters on a different level from
the male ones (and here Cherubino counts as female!). It may well be as
simple as that Mozart’s love of female singers produced the goods more
easily for him: the most successful male arias are the comic or the
angry, and apart from Marcellina’s pretty much every aria that ever
gets cut from a Mozart production is for a man. The same lack of
emotional empathy my friend felt between Mozart and his male characters
is what I feel with Handel all the time: my conclusion is that Handel
doesn’t engage with any of his characters, only the situations they are
manipulated into.
Andrew Sparling
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