Boring old Handel

There was a

href="http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2050684,00.html">British

newspaper piece linked on Musical America this week, something about Handel

operas being boring. And then we had the opening of Handel’s

class=SpellE>Giulio

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Cesare at the

Met, with a

href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/arts/music/09giul.html?_r=1&ref=music&oref=slogin">worshipful

review in the New York Times.

class=GramE>(“[T]he richness and endless variety of the music… the piercing

psychological insights of this staggering masterpiece.”)

There’s one thing I know for sure — performances of Handel’s

operas today are nothing like the performances in Handel’s own time. Back then,

these operas (and in fact all operas, by all composers, all over Europe) were

sheer entertainment. Spectacle — lavish

sets and costumes, and special effects like storms at sea and flying,

fire-breathing dragons — were a big part of the attraction.

And there was musical spectacle, too. The singers sang lavish,

extravagant, often improvised ornamentation. The operas, as any music history

book will tell you, consist mainly of arias, almost all of them in the same

musical form, with an opening section, a shorter, contrasting span of music,

and then a repeat of the opening. To musicologists, this has long seemed like a

very severe and static way to construct an opera, and stage directors in our

time labor mightily to construct some kind of action on stage, so that

something happens while the arias are being sung.

Nothing like that happened in Handel’s time! Nobody needed

to be distracted by stage action. For one thing, very few people in the audience

were paying full attention. People talked to each other, ate, walked around,

and sometimes shouted at the stage. And for those who were listening, the

repeat of the opening section was something to wait for, maybe with great

excitement. What was the singer going to do? Singers would stride down to the

front of the stage, wearing wildly overdone costumes, sometimes even striding

into the middle of the audience on specially constructed ramps. Then they’d

vary the repeated section so that the original melody completely disappeared.

They did this (to judge from some surviving examples) with a virtuosity few

singers have today.

Besides, our current classical music aesthetic goes against

this practice. We’re supposed to respect the composer’s text, and one result is

that vocal ornaments, in current Handel productions, are careful and discreet,

class=GramE>the exact opposite of what they were in Handel’s time. I don’t

claim to be a Handel expert, but for whatever it’s worth, I’ve only once heard

ornaments in a Handel performance that approached what Handel’s singers would

have done. This is in Ewa Podles’s

recording of “Or la tromba,” an aria from Handel’s opera

Rinaldo

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, found on a

href="http://www.amazon.com/Ewa-Podles-c%C3%A9l%C3%A8bres-Famous-Arias/dp/B0000038C2/ref=pd_sim_m_6/002-4403189-2183203?ie=UTF8&qid=1176174202&sr=1-2">recital

disk on the Forlane label, called

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Famous Arias. Podles

attacks the music like someone out to beat the world record for wild ornaments,

and (if you ask me) gets a gold medal.

And this was only the beginning. The orchestra improvised,

too. Recitative accompaniments were surprising and inventive. Forget the blank

chords on a harpsichord, and the discreet bass notes played on a cello, which

you see in the written scores, and hear played in most performances. The

players went half crazy, with the cellist improvising scales, arpeggios, and

complex chords. Other members of the orchestra would improvise. The written

score was only a guide to what might be done, subject to delightful, unexpected

changes in performance. When Handel produced his operas in London, his own

harpsichord playing was a great attraction. He wasn’t at all content simply to

reinforce the orchestra, and calmly accompany the singers. He improvised

virtuoso counterpoints to everything that was going on, and deliberately drew attention

to himself. (Just as Vivaldi, when he produced his own

operas, improvised crazy stuff on the violin, playing as high and fast as

possible, and always providing one of the highlights of the show.) (You can

hear one reconstruction of what the instrumental playing in Handel’s operas

might have been like, on

href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_m/002-4403189-2183203?url=search-alias%3Dpopular&field-keywords=rene+jacobs+rinaldo&Go.x=10&Go.y=14">René

Jacobs’ recording of Rinaldo

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>. The vocal ornaments, unfortunately,

are far too discreet, though I do love it when some of the singers mockingly add

their voices to an orchestral passage, something not even remotely indicated in

the written score, but which Jacobs thinks might well have happened.)

And then there were the costumes. In London, everyone wanted

to know what the female singers wore. Often their dresses became fashionable.

Sometimes they were shocking. In effect, the singers would go from directly

from the opera stage into the 18^th century equivalent of gossip

columns, and the cover of

style='mso-spacerun:yes'> Vanity

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Fair. The singers – largely Italian –

were exotic creatures in London, much whispered about. Sometimes they’d get

into fights on stage. Sometimes the press would derisively comment on their

supposed sexual habits, in explicit language that would never be seen in a

newspaper today.

And the castrati! Castrated men sang many of the leading

roles. Obviously they were exotic creatures, far removed from the ordinary run

of human life. They were gigantic international celebrities, and also walking

sexual scandals. For one thing, castration of boys for musical purposes was

illegal in Italy. But it was widely practiced, and here were the castrati to

prove it, each one representing a flagrant violation of the law. They were

almost like liquor during prohibition — legally forbidden, but (with a wink and

a grin) widely known to be available.

And on top of that, they were sexually potent. Their

castration robbed them of any chance to have children, but they could (and did)

have erections from morning till night. Some were gay, some were straight. The

straight ones were much in demand as sexual indulgences, for women in the

nobility. They were celebrities, after all — and they couldn’t get you

pregnant.

All of this jumped from the stage in any Baroque opera

performance. Sometimes the gossip came front and

center, as it did whenever Vivaldi premiered an opera. Vivaldi, as everybody

knew, was a priest who hadn’t said mass for decades. How sinful was that? And

he went around Europe, flagrantly living with two younger women, one of whom

was his prima donna. People drew the obvious conclusions, just as we’d do now. Starved

of all this gossip and spectacle, Baroque opera as it’s performed today is – to

speak bluntly — a 21^st century fabrication, in which we contort

these pieces into something there’s no sign that they were ever meant to be.