Once upon a time in Vienna

Marc Moskovitz’s superbly readable biography, Alexander Zemlinsky: A Lyric Symphony, has already attracted some enthusiastic reviews. Zemlinsky’s Zelig-like progress through the fin-de-siècle Viennese musical world has obscured his own achievement. In this excerpt, we witness the composer working with another figure who had to wait for the fame he so richly deserved, Gustav Mahler:

At the start of the twentieth century Zemlinsky experienced one of the greatest triumphs he would ever receive at the hands of his fellow Viennese. When Gustav Mahler led the premiere of Zemlinsky’s newest opera, Es war einmal (Once Upon a Time) on January 22, 1900, Zemlinsky was forced to acknowledge the ovation — including the war-whoops from the younger members of the audience — at the conclusion of each act. Both thrilled and embarrassed, Zemlinsky bowed awkwardly from the Hofoper stage. Such accolades had been commonly accorded to composers like Johann Strauss jr. or Franz Lehár, darlings of Vienna’s operetta world, or even occasionally to Johannes Brahms, particularly toward the end of his life, but ovations of this nature were something Zemlinsky had only experienced once before, at the premiere of Sarema. Coming off that opera’s success, it appeared Zemlinsky had found his calling.

Brahms’s death three years earlier had left Zemlinsky without vital support in the musical establishment, but Mahler quickly moved to fill the vacuum. Following the successful Munich debut of Sarema, Mahler, who was looking at a Hofoper diet comprising Mozart and Wagner, along with occasional productions of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Thomas’s Mignon and Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, approached Zemlinsky about bringing Sarema back to Vienna. While doubtless flattered at the prospects of having a work premiered under such auspicious circumstances, it appears that Zemlinsky sought to convince Mahler that he was capable of much better. Keenly aware of the success Engelbert Humperdink, Karl Goldmark and Hans Pfitzner had had with fairy tale operas, Zemlinsky too wished to try his hand at the genre and indeed had already sketched out some ideas. Mahler gave his consent, and in August of 1897 Zemlinsky set to work in earnest.

Zemlinsky turned to Holger Drachmann’s Der var engang, a grand five-act national drama that had been played in Vienna in 1894. Drachmann’s fairy tale pivots around a Princess for whom no courtier is good enough and a Prince who is determined to win her love. Tricked into marrying a gypsy (the Prince in disguise), the once haughty Princess is reduced to living in a forest hut and selling pots in the marketplace. Though initially contemptuousness of her new life, she gradually re-evaluates her world and her desires and develops a genuine affection for her husband and their simple life together. The fidelity of the former Princess is soon put to the test, but her love for the gypsy remains steadfast, even in the most tempting of circumstances. By the story’s close, the Princess confesses to having found a love greater than even a Prince could provide. Her transformation complete, the gypsy-prince finally unveils his true, aristocratic identity.

At the end of June of 1898, Zemlinsky submitted an early draft of Es war einmal’s piano score to Mahler, but Mahler’s initial impression was far from encouraging. There was no question that the younger man possessed a formidable talent and technique. Zemlinsky’s characters possessed distinct musical profiles, and his language was efficient and refined, with rhythmic and melodic vitality that never overpowered the voice. It was the work’s overly derivative nature that troubled Mahler. Some degree of outside influence could be expected, since building on the ideas of others was a natural part of the learning process and Zemlinsky had not yet turned thirty. Nevertheless, the manuscript Zemlinsky presented to Mahler was “so full of resemblances and plagiarisms” that its composer “must have a very bad memory to have failed to avoid them”.

Mahler had put his finger on a critical issue : Zemlinsky had learned all that can be taught and had a complete grasp of the elements associated with orchestral and vocal writing. What he had yet to find was the one thing nobody could give him : a distinctive sound, a sonic fingerprint, the unexpected turn of a phrase that says “Schubert”, or the unique orchestration that renders Mendelssohn or Shostakovich or Copland immediately recognizable. Zemlinsky would, of course, find his personal idiom, a voice distinctly his own, but that ownership was still years away. In the meantime he continued to rely heavily — far too heavily, Mahler thought — on the music of others to help lead the way. The critics would concur.

To his credit, Mahler was willing to have his misgivings allayed. Zemlinsky took Mahler up on his offer and played the opera through for him at the piano. Whether because of the conviction of Zemlinsky’s own interpretation, the realization that the work did indeed have potential, or the reaffirmation of Zemlinsky’s undeniable talent, the music director agreed to accept Es war einmal for performance. But the offer came with a caveat : the score would have to undergo significant modifications. For Zemlinsky, Mahler’s proposal held two benefits : first, Mahler’s experience with the demands of the theater would help transform Zemlinsky’s efforts into an opera worthy of being offered up to Hofoper audiences and critics who had come to expect productions of the highest caliber ; second, the project would again place Zemlinsky directly under the wing of one of Vienna’s most influential and powerful musicians. Zemlinsky didn’t have to think twice about the offer.

Mahler’s own knowledge of the theater stemmed more from his dedication to the operas of others than to his own stage works. his only personal operatic attempts had occurred much earlier, and he had long since given up on the idea of composing opera. Years in the theater had taught him what was needed to bring a story — even a fairy tale — to life, and this was precisely the information and experience for which Zemlinsky thirsted. Under Mahler’s direction, the entire opera — music and text — was overhauled, resulting in significant cuts, modifications and rewrites. Mahler’s understanding of stagecraft — the complexities of which Zemlinsky was only beginning to learn — also resulted in a number of practical suggestions and revisions, such as lengthening the Interlude to Act I, which allowed greater time for a costume and scene change. In December of 1899, the full score was complete and the following month the curtain rose on Es war einmal for the first time.

Alexander Zemlinsky: A Lyric Symphony by Marc Moskovitz is available from your favourite bookseller or, in case of difficulty, direct from Boydell and Brewer in the US or the UK.

Janáček, the Old Avant-Gardist

Leos Janáček is increasingly recognised as one of the major operatic masters of the early twentieth century. In an intriguing new book, Derek Katz challenges prevailing views of the composer’s relationship to Slavic culture and demonstrates that the operas are deeply indebted to various existing traditions. The first chapter , ‘Finding a Context’, looks at Janáček’s work from a number of viewpoints, including the one in this short extract:

One of the final chapters of Miloš Štědroň’s 1998 study Leoš Janáček and Music of the 20th Century is entitled “Young Conservative—to Old Avant-Gardist?!?” Despite the intriguing punctuation, at the end of this chapter Štědroň did indeed conclude that Janáček grew into an avant-gardist and declared that Janáček’s music of the 1920s is one of the most radical manifestations of European music from the first three decades of the century. This view of Janáček’s career as culminating in an avant-garde, or modernist, period is a widespread formulation with a long history. In a 1983 essay, Milan Kundera wrote of Janáček, “A solitary conservative figure in his youth, he has become an innovator in his old age.” Kundera described Janáček’s late works as “audacious” and suggested that he must be heard in the company of composers thirty and forty years younger, like Bartók, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Krenek, and Schoenberg. Similarly, the opening narration of Jaromil Jireš’s 1986 documentary film about Janáček declared that “Leoš Janáček was born deep in the mid-nineteenth century. His music belongs wholly to the avant-garde of the twentieth century. Although he was thirty years older than Bartók or Stravinsky . . . Janáček’s works rank amongst the most progressive of modern European music.”

In particular, the idea that Janáček was somehow generationally displaced can be traced back to the composer’s lifetime. In an enthusiastic 1925 essay, Erwin Schulhoff, almost exactly forty years younger than Janáček, wrote that as “astounding as it may seem, the septuagenarian Janáček belongs to the latest generation of composers, whose struggle he has also fought.” Hanns Eisler also noted Janáček’s late fecundity, remarking after a 1927 performance of the Sinfonietta that Janáček was “entirely unique amongst current bourgeois composers” and “still astoundingly full of creative strength as an old man.” In September 1926, Janáček travelled to Venice to hear a performance of his first string quartet at the annual International Society for Contemporary Music festival. Other living composers whose works were performed at the festival included Roussel, Vaughan Williams, Schoenberg, Ravel, Malipiero, Szymanowski, Stravinsky, Ladislav Vycpálek, Louis Gruenberg, Ibert, Honegger, and Hindemith. These twelve composers, although a heterogeneous group in most ways, shared at least one trait: all were younger than Janáček. In fact, most were significantly younger, with only Roussel and Vaughan Williams within twenty years of his age. Put another way, their average age was forty-four in 1926, while Janáček had turned seventy-two in July of that year.

Another, rather more idiosyncratic, tribute came from Henry Cowell, who visited Brno and lectured at the Club of Moravian Composers in 1926. Apparently the meeting with Janáček was a success, for in August 1927 Cowell invited Janáček to be an honorary member of The New Music Society of California. The letter of invitation, although addressed to “Mr. Janarchek,” does describe him as “without doubt one of the very greatest of living composers, without reservations.” Cowell had already collected Bartók, Bliss, Malipiero, Hába, Krenek, Schnabel, Berg, Casella, and Milhaud as honorary members; all were at least a quarter-century Janáček’s juniors.

The image of Janáček as an aged modernist has become firmly entrenched in standard music history texts. John Tyrrell’s entry for Janácek in The New Grove Turn of the Century Masters, for instance, asserts that Janácek’s late works belong “in sound and spirit with the music of the younger generation around him.” Similar judgments can be found in many standard surveys. Jim Samson, in The Late Romantic Era, describes Janáček’s musical style as “a radical new language” and “strikingly original,” while Donald Jay Grout calls Janáček “individual” and “exceptional” in his A Short History of Opera. More recently, Richard Taruskin titled his section on Janáček in The Oxford History of Western Music “The Oldest Twentieth-Century Composer” and points out that “his music is more often (and more tellingly) compared with that of Debussy, Stravinsky, or Bartók” than with that of Mahler or Richard Strauss.

Janáček Beyond the Borders by Derek Katz is published by the University of Rochester Press and available from your local music specialist bookseller.

Whatever happened to Reggie?

‘Even if you lived to be 150 years old you would still not discover all the secrets of the Ring,’ said Reginald Goodall, and indeed he continued to study the scores of this and other Wagner operas until the end of his life. And what a colourful life it was, as anyone who knows John Lucas’s biography of the conductor, Reggie, will confirm. Next month we will be reissuing the book for the first time in paperback, updated with a new Foreword by Sir Peter Moores, under the new title The Genius of Valhalla. Here is a short extract from the Introduction:

I first heard Goodall conduct in the 1950s. He was on the staff of Covent Garden, though his appearances in the pit there were sporadic. He gave performances of Manon, Turandot and Bohème that were cogent and illuminating, and he breathed life into Britten’s Gloriana after its unfortunate premiere under John Pritchard. His Meistersinger – “Not my Meistersinger,” I can hear him saying crossly, “Wagner’s” – won him glowing notices in the press, as did the performances of Die Walküre he conducted on tour. Yet by the end of the decade he had all but disappeared from view. It was puzzling, but I knew nothing then of operatic politics.

At a party at the 1961 Edinburgh Festival I was introduced to a Covent Garden stalwart, the baritone Geraint Evans, who regaled his fellow guests with tales of the Opera House. What, I asked him, had happened to Goodall? He adopted a solemn expression. “Ah, Reginald,” he said, rolling the initial R theatrically. “Poor Reginald.” He then changed the subject. Clearly, as far as Covent Garden was concerned, Goodall was a spent force. Yet seven years later, at the age of sixty-six, he made an extraordinary comeback, with a production of The Mastersingers for Sadler’s Wells Opera that demonstrated beyond dispute that here was a great Wagner conductor in a tradition stretching back through Hans Knappertsbusch and Karl Muck to Hans Richter, conductor of the first Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1876.

Goodall had watched Knappertsbusch at work during his visits to Bayreuth throughout the 1950s, and from him had learned how to build the acts in great, seamless arches, how to relate one tempo to another, how to balance the sound so that each individual strand in the orchestral fabric could be heard, how to ensure, through close attention to the dynamic markings in the orchestral parts, that singers were never drowned. Goodall complained that most conductors failed to observe Wagner’s dynamics; as a result, he said, singers were encouraged to sing stridently in order to compete with the orchestral flood. Big steely voices were not for him – he liked voices that were even in quality and sonority from top to bottom of their range. “Too much metal, dear,” he grumbled at even his favourite sopranos when they sang high notes – and he would stick his fingers in his ears to underline the point. In low-lying passages he demanded the rich characteristic of the violin’s bottom string – “More G string, dear” was a constant plea.

Not all singers could cope with Goodall and the demands he made of them. But those who could revered him. A Goodall regular, the bass Gwynne Howell, has written, “He could be infuriating and cuttingly critical with, at peak moments, a quick stamping of the feet. With luck the next singer would arrive – preferably female, he liked female company – and calm would be restored. I would return home on some exhausted high, but just as I felt I wanted to give up it would all fall into place. All those shaky gestures of his conducting style would become clear and meaningful.”

Goodall attached the greatest importance to Wagner’s final injunction to his singers before the 1876 Ring at Bayreuth: “Die grossen Noten kommen von selbst; die kleinen Noten and ihr Text sind die Hauptsache” – “The big notes look after themselves; the little notes and their text are the main thing.” All the semi-quavers, said Goodall, were to be given their proper sonority; they were not to be “snatched at”. Words had to be sung with the utmost clarity and attention to meaning. Notes had to be “coloured”, either to mirror the harmonies in the orchestra or to reflect the emotional mood of the scene or phrase. “Angel of death,” he would say to his Brünnhildes in the Todesverkündigung in Act 2 of Die Walküre, urging them to adopt a dark, grave sound; during King Marke’s long solo in Act 2 of Tristan, he would ask the singer to match the timbre of the accompanying bass clarinet. Goodall was responsible for a remarkable flowering of Wagner singing that led to a generation of British and Commonwealth Wagner singers he had coached taking leading roles at Bayreuth, stretching from Jon Vickers in the late 1950s to John Tomlinson and Anne Evans thirty years later.

Goodall was sometimes mocked for his painstaking rehearsal methods, yet he worked in a way that would have been considered natural by Wagner’s earliest interpreters. He was shocked by the fact that international conductors in the latter part of the twentieth century rarely took the trouble to coach the singers for their own productions: “Imagine Klemperer behaving like that! That’s one of the things I like about Barenboim – he works with his singers. He’s one of the few who does, and it shows. Most of the others are flitting here and there, conducting this and that. It makes me tired.”

The Chandos recording of Goodall’s Mastersingers has been nominated for a Gramophone Award. The Genius of Valhalla: The Life of Reginald Goodall by John Lucas, author of the acclaimed Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music, will be available from all good booksellers from October.

Handel’s 'Orlando'

With the end of the Proms, BBC Radio 3’s cycle of Handel’s operas resumes on September 17th with Orlando. In this extract from Handel’s Operas 1726-1741, Winton Dean looks at the composer’s introduction of the figure of Zoroastro into the opera:

Handel’s choice of this subject marked a sharp change of direction from the heroic/epic/historical plots that had occupied him almost continuously since Amadigi in 1717 towards magic and romantic subjects. It may well have been the discovery of Ariosto that governed not only the follow-up with Ariodante and Alcina but a more relaxed attitude to classical stories in Arianna and Atalanta. He was to revert to the epic-historical type, less successfully, for four more operas before modifying his approach towards a lighter, ironical manner in his last three.

The libretto of Orlando poses a number of questions. Both the literary ancestor, Aariosto’s epic Orlando furioso, and the source libretto, Carlo Sigismondo Capeci’s L’Orlando, overo la gelosa pazzia, produced in the private roman theatre of the exiled Queen Maria Casimira of Poland in 1711 with music by Domenico Scarlatti, are known. But Handel’s libretto is no mere adjustment of the old text to suit local conditions in London, whether of taste or for a particular cast of singers. It takes a radically new direction. Although Ariosto’s poem is full of sorcery and sorcerers, the Angelica–Medoro–Orlando story is conducted on a purely human level, as it is in Capeci. Neither Zoroastro nor Dorinda appears in Ariosto, and Zoroastro is not in Capeci, or any other Ariosto libretto of the period. His commanding figure shifts the whole focus of the plot, introducing the element of magic and spectacle and controlling the destiny of the characters by acting as a benevolent deus ex machina. Where did he come from, and who brought him into Orlando?

Reinhard Strohm in a fascinating essay points out that Zoroastro figures in several contemporary operas on the Babylonian Semiramis story, generally as a rival monarch using his powers for his own ends; but in Johann Ulrich König’s Ninus und Semiramis, set conjecturally by G. C. Schürmann for Brunswick in 1730, he brings the plot to an end by acting as peacemaker. König was a friend of Mattheson and Brockes in Hamburg, a circle with which Handel may have been in touch. A contributory model could have been Ariosto’s Atlante, Ruggiero’s tutor, who casts plenty of spells in Orlando furioso, notably in the Alcina story. It may be more than a coincidence that Handel’s Orlando opens with a tableau showing atlas (Atlante) sustaining the heavens on his shoulders.

Capeci was an early member of the Arcadian Academy in Rome, the group dedicated to substituting a reasoned classicism for the extravagances of the seventeenth-century libretto. His Orlando eschews not only magic and spectacle but the mixture of comic and serious language so repugnant to the Arcadians. His Dorinda is very different from Handel’s; though a shepherdess, she uses the same elevated speech as the other characters, including Isabella and Zerbino, the chivalrous lovers suppressed in Handel’s opera. Orlando himself, it is true, was by tradition an ambivalent figure; Dent aptly likens him to Don Quixote. A hero who confuses the identity of the persons he meets, mistakes a shepherdess for Venus, rushes about invoking the ancient gods, and constantly expresses himself in the most extravagant language (though there is less of all this in Capeci’s libretto than in Handel’s) could be treated as a comic figure, and often was. A madman was fair game for laughs. It is possible to imagine a number of scenes in Handel’s libretto, especially the conclusion of Act II and Orlando’s confrontation with Dorinda in III.iii, as material for the eighteenth-century equivalent of an Offenbach farce. We do not know how Scarlatti coped with this, since his music is lost. It is only Handel’s music that converts these episodes into profound psychological drama.

We can surely credit Handel with the general plan of the opera and the introduction of Zoroastro. He presumably had a collaborator, and one of no little skill. Who was he? Strohm puts forward Nicola Haym, who adapted the librettos of Handel’s most successful royal academy operas. But Haym died on 31 July 1729, and Orlando was not composed till the autumn of 1732. Moreover if, as Strohm suggests, the inspiration for Orlando came from Handel’s visit to Italy in 1728–29, which ended with his return to England on 29 June, Haym would have had barely a month – the last month of his life – in which to confer with Handel and write the libretto. There is a stronger argument against Haym's authorship. The part of Zoroastro was clearly conceived for a powerful bass, such as Montagnana, who created it, and who did not reach London until autumn 1731, whereas in both the 1729/30 and 1730/1 seasons Handel had only mediocre singers for the bass parts, Riemschneider and Commano. Riemschneider was a failure in Lotario and allowed only one aria in Partenope, and in any case was a high baritone; Commano in Poro had no arias at all.

Handel’s collaborator remains a mystery.

More can be found in Handel’s Operas 1726-1741 by Winton Dean (Boydell Press 2006). The first volume of this monumental study – Handel’s Operas 1704-1726 – which Dean wrote with John Merill Knapp - will soon be available again in a matching edition and the two volumes as a set. An essential purchase for anyone who has rediscovered these marvellous works through the BBC season.

Painting Music

We are pleased to add to our growing list of client presses by taking over the distribution of Jane Mackay’s astonishing The Turn of the Screw: Visual responses to Britten’s opera, first published by Sounding Art Press in 2007. As James Bowman writes in his Preface to the book, it is ‘a very special tribute to the genius composer whom it seeks to honour’ and a remarkable manifestation of a very unusual artistic gift. Jane Mackay herself explains:

Seeing images as a response to sounds has always been as natural to me as experiencing the touch of silky fur when stroking a cat or smelling the scent of roses in high summer. As a child I saw each day of the week in colours and shapes, and so did my sister. Her colours were quite different from mine though, and many were the arguments we had about why my Wednesdays were lemon yellow when hers were a dusky green. Names, numbers, months of the year all had their hues, direction of flow, patterns and textures, as did voices, poems and music. As far back as I can remember, these visions were part of life and it never occurred to me that most people did not share my experiences. I was given a set of oil paints on my tenth birthday and from that time became seriously interested in art. My paintings were invariably ‘out of my head’ – for some reason I considered it cheating to paint what was already in front of me. Consequently, painting music was frequently part of the scheme of things.

During the 1960s I continued with my art and music whilst studying medicine in London. Then, after thirty years of medical practice I changed my career to that of a full-time artist, marking the moment by ceremoniously throwing my engraved stethoscope into the Thames on the morning of the new millennium. I discovered that my lifetime facility to see sound had a name, and that ‘synaesthesia’ was a well-recognised and vigorously researched area of neuro-physiology.

Approximately one person in 2,000 is a synaesthete. The condition appears to be inherited, many synaesthetes having a family member with the same thing. The commonest manifestation of this cross-sensory perception is seeing letters, numbers or words in colour. However, almost any sensory mix-up is possible. I have myself, on several occasions, experienced coloured temperature (e.g. a creamy whiteness on picking up a hot mug of coffee), coloured pain (deep purple sciatica) and coloured positional sense (a striking shift from banana-yellow to reddish-purple on altering position in bed).

My musical synaesthetic experiences are legion though I often find them hard to describe and explain. How do I convey what it is like to listen to a tenor on the car radio and to be absolutely certain that the voice is coloured green and red at the same time? The sound also looks like the skeletal remains of a decomposed autumn leaf. This image is not located either in the radio or in my head, but somewhere ‘out there’, totally integrated with the sound and yet separate from it and utterly recognisable and memorable. I once described this vision as looking a bit like shot silk but that isn’t right either. It is more like peering at orange fabric under a neon street light. You know that it is orange but it looks grey. It is orange and grey at the same time.

In working on my paintings of Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw I responded to the whole spectrum of synaesthetic visions that this masterpiece presented to me. Images were evoked by instrumental colours (Prologue; Variation XI); dynamic changes (Theme); cross-rhythms (Variation I); extremes of colour contrast between voice and orchestral sound (Act I, scene 4); chord colours (Act I, scene 5, Variation XI); fugal patterns (Variation V); word colours and shapes (Act II, scene 7) and overall soundworlds depicted as semi-abstract images (Act II, scene 3), to give a few specific examples.

I am sometimes asked whether I would miss my synaesthesia if it were taken away from me. I am sure I would though it can be a disadvantage of course. It is difficult to remember acquaintances whose names and voice colours clash. Loud music in restaurants and shops can lead to visual as well as auditory overload. On the other hand, synaesthesia is mostly unremarkable, constantly operating in the background, always part of things. At best it is a condition in which the music I love gives rise to images charged with a sort of creative energy – images that just have to be painted.

The Turn of the Screw: Visual responses to Britten’s opera by Jane Mackay with a commentary by Andrew Plant and a preface by James Bowman is now available from Boydell & Brewer Ltd.

Handel's Partenope

BBC Radio 3's Handel opera cycle continues with Partenope, which is available to hear again on BBC iPlayer. In this extract from Winton Dean's magisterial Handel's Operas 1726-1741, he looks at the early history of the opera:

Handel finished Act I on 14 January 1730, the whole opera on 6 February, and produced it at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket on 24 February, with ‘the scenes and dresses all entirely new.’ The cast was:

Partenope: Anna Strada del Pò (soprano)
Rosmira: Antonia Merighi (contralto)
Arsace: Antonio Bernacchi (alto castrato)
Armindo: Francesca Bertolli (contralto)
Emilio: Annibale pio Fabri (tenor)
Ormonte: Johann Gottfried Riemschneider (bass)

There were seven performances. Nothing is known of the reception, but it must have been fairly favourable, for Handel revived Partenope in his next season on 12 December the same year, again for seven performances. There were two changes of cast, Senesino replacing Bernacchi as Arsace and Giovanni Commano replacing Riemschneider as Ormonte. Handel cut the arias ‘T’appresta forse amore’ (Commano was thought capable only of recitative), ‘Fatto è amor’, ‘La gloria in nobil alma’ (these two with their introductory recitatives) and ‘Sì scherza sì’, but gave Senesino a new aria, ‘Seguaci di Cupido’ in the last scene

Handel’s second and last revival was at Covent Garden on 29 January 1737, when according to the London Post and General Advertiser of 1 February there was ‘a great disturbance’ in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales. There were four performances, with a new cast except for Strada and Bertolli, who was promoted from Armindo to Rosmira. Arsace was sung by the alto castrato Domenico Annibali, Armindo by the soprano castrato Gioacchino Conti, Emilio by the tenor John Beard, and Ormonte by the contralto Maria Caterina Negri. Apart from the need to cater for the altered pitch of Armindo and Ormonte, Handel had two objectives, to shorten the opera and to provide a substantial part for Conti. This involved reordering the balance of the work, promoting Armindo to equal prominence with Arsace, both parts being played by leading castratos. No fewer than forty-five further passages of recitative were cut, some of considerable length, necessitating many new transitions.

Four more arias disappeared and ‘T’appresta forse amore’ and ‘Sì, scherzo sì’ were restored, the latter now sung by Armindo in II.iv. Arsace’s ‘Furibondo’ was transferred to Ormonte in III.iv with a new B section text, and Emilio’s ‘La speme ti consoli’ to Armindo, likewise in III.iv, with changed pronouns and modified text (‘La speme mi consola’). Armindo received an extra aria, ‘Bramo restar’, in I.vii (where previously he had gone out without an aria), the music taken from Muzio Scevola (‘Come se ti vedrò’) with parodied words. He probably sang Emilio’s ‘Barbaro fato’ in A minor at the end of act II; the autograph contains a note to that effect, and the reassigned aria is in the performing score, but not in the libretto. Otherwise Act I ended with ‘Io ti levo’, Act II with ‘Qual farfalletta’. Armando’s two surviving 1730 arias were transposed up for Conti, ‘Voglio dire’ from E minor to B minor, ‘Non chiedo’ from d minor to F sharp minor, and higher alternatives added for him in the quartet. Whereas at the first performance Arsace had nine arias to Armindo’s three, now each had six. Emilio retained only one of his original four arias. Ormonte with two fared better as a contralto than as a bass.

Partenope enjoyed considerable if temporary success in Germany. First performed at Brunswick in February 1731, it was revived there and at neighbouring Salzthal and Wolfenbüttel a number of times in the two following years, and seems to have been considered particularly suitable for royal occasions. It graced the birthdays of the Dowager Duchess of Brunswick (Salzthal, 12 September 1731) and the Habsburg Emperor Charles VI (Wolfenbüttel, 1 October 1732), and the marriage of the future Frederick the Great of Prussia (the Crown prince) to a Brunswick princess (Hamburg, 15 June 1733). These performances were in Italian. a production at Hamburg, on 28 October 1733, the arias in Italian, the recitatives translated by Christian Gottlieb Wendt and set by Keiser, remained in the repertory for four seasons, reaching twenty two performances by 1736.

Partenope seems to have made no contribution to the current concert repertory. Handel incorporated three arias (‘Io ti levo’, ‘Non chiedo’ and ‘La gloria in nobil alma’) with parodied texts in his pasticcio Oreste (December 1734), and Conti sang the last-named in the December 1736 revival of Poro. ‘Io seguo sol fiero’, equipped with a second pair of horns, reappeared as the finale of the Concerto a due cori no. 3 in F (the ‘Concerto in Judas Maccabaeus’) in 1747. The overture featured in a Manchester subscription Concert on 28 May 1745.

Readers may be interested to know that, due to popular demand, the Boydell Press will be reissuing the first volume of Handel's Operas, covering the years 1704-1726, in September. Written by Winton Dean and the late John Merill Knapp, this volume will be published in a matching hardcover edition, and a set price will also be available for those yet to discover the wonders of these long-underrated operas.

The Handel Opera Revival

To commemorate the 250th anniversary of Handel’s death, BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting a complete cycle of the composer’s operas. These can be heard every Thursday at 2pm (UK time) as well as over the internet for a week after each broadcast. It is easy to take such a wealth of material for granted in these anniversary years, but as Winton Dean points out in one of the epilogues to his acclaimed Handel’s Operas 1726-1741, it is only relatively recently that these works have been performed at all:

The revival of Handel’s operas in the modern theatre, after not one of them had been performed anywhere between 1754, when Handel was still living, and 1920, has been among the most remarkable phenomena in the history of the art. But it is not a straightforward story, and not all its implications are fully understood. There were hurdles, both musical and dramatic, to be surmounted. The art had moved from opera seria to Gesamtkunstwerk, leaving a huge gap to be bridged by public taste. Looking back, one must conclude that the movement got off on the wrong foot, and has not always retained its balance since.

In 1920 a shaky start was inevitable. When in that year Oskar Hagen and his colleagues at Göttingen set the ball rolling with their production of Rodelinda, followed soon after by Ottone, Giulio Cesare and Serse, their achievement could be likened to Samuel Johnson’s comparison of a woman preaching to a dog walking on his hind legs: it was not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all. An idiom based on the solo singer, the da capo aria, secco recitatives, castrato heroes and an almost total absence of ensembles was the absolute antithesis of the current fashion for huge orchestras, rich post-romantic harmony and plots heavy with symbolism as exemplified by Wagner’s successors and the operas of Strauss, Pfitzner and Schreker.

It is hardly surprising that Hagen virtually rewrote Handel’s operas, rescoring them (recitatives included) for a massive orchestra, making devastating cuts, chopping up every aria by shortening ritornellos and abolishing da capos, rewriting stage directions wholesale, dragging in music from elsewhere, and transposing all high male parts down an octave, seemingly from a distaste for the unnatural and unmanly voice of the castrato. These versions were immensely popular in Germany and produced in dozens of cities over the next few years. a pattern was set, and arrangements of further operas by different companies soon followed. By the outbreak of the second World War nineteen of Handel’s operas had been revived in German theatres, nine of them at Göttingen. The more extreme distortions were dropped fairly soon, but Hagen’s arrangements (modified) could still be heard in Munich and elsewhere in the 1960s. The annual Handel Festival at Halle, founded in 1952, continued for some years to perform the operas with inflated scoring, slow ponderously accented recitatives, long pauses for scene changes during acts and automatic octave transposition. The results can be studied in a 1959 Halle recording of Poro, heavy with superimposed brass, which even renamed some of the characters, or in ten German recordings of Giulio Cesare up to 1970, where an opera composed for six high voices with two small bass parts is torpedoed and sunk by five basses and a tenor.

Germany did at least show interest in the operas, leaving the English-speaking countries far behind. There Handel remained fixed like Jehovah in his everlasting seat, revered as a great choral and religious composer, a pillar of the state and the Anglican Church, erected in the eighteenth century and reinforced ever since by the frequent repetition of three or four oratorios. Up to 1955, by which time Germany had seen twenty-five of the operas on the stage, precisely four had been presented in Britain, each in a single production by an amateur or ad hoc company, and three of the same four likewise in the United states – all between the wars and not one in a regular opera house. In Britain the oratorios, appreciated sooner for their dramatic qualities, had received far more stage performances than the operas.

The climate began to change with the foundation in 1955 of the Handel Opera Society in London, with Charles Farncombe as conductor, followed four years later by two further enterprises, the brave attempt by Frances and Alan Kitching at Abingdon to recreate the flavour of a Baroque performance, albeit on a diminutive scale, and the first of a series of productions at the Barber Institute of Birmingham University, conducted by Anthony Lewis and Ivor Keys. none of these offered much in the way of spectacle. The staging was elementary, though there was some first-rate singing, especially at Birmingham; their significance lay in their demonstration (despite occasional backsliding) of the crucial importance of restoring heroic male parts to the correct pitch.

About the same time a reaction against the ponderous blowzy treatment of the orchestra traditionally inflicted on Baroque music (that of Bach in particular) was giving place to a more historically orientated style based on smaller orchestras, lighter textures, springier rhythms and in due course idiomatic ornamentation, vocal and instrumental, led by practical scholars such as Thurston Dart, Arnold Goldsbrough’s English Chamber orchestra and Neville Marriner’s Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields (founded in 1959). among other things this allowed the countless felicities of Handel’s orchestration to shine through the murk. a few years later Christopher Hogwood went one step further, substituting period instruments (or facsimiles) for their modern equivalents. The movement was soon international, but its effect on Handel’s operas was unevenly distributed.

Handel’s Operas 1726-1741 is available from all good booksellers. Further extracts will appear on this blog throughout the year.

What Next?

Paul Griffiths is one of the University of Rochester Press’ favourite authors. His biography of Jean Barraqué, The Sea on Fire, is a scholarly and imaginative triumph, while his collection of occasional pieces and reviews, The Substance of Things Heard, was described as “illuminating, translucent, sagacious” by the TLS. Griffiths is also an accomplished librettist, and here he writes about recent performances of his collaboration with one of modern music’s greatest composers:

New York, December 12, 2007: Yesterday was Elliott Carter’s 99th birthday, celebrated with the fourth and last performance of a terrific production of his lone opera, What Next? A librettist’s point of view may not be unbiased, but for me this was the best presentation the piece has had. Jeffrey Milarsky, conducting the young AXIOM ensemble, led a musical performance that found so much rapture, wonder and wit in this extraordinary score, and Christopher Alden directed a staging that brought the drama of disconnection into tight focus. There was also an outstanding cast. Susan Narucki gave a driving intensity to Mama's pleadings, Katherine Rohrer was lustrous and warmly firm as Stella (a brilliant idea to make her star song so sexy), and Amanda Squitieri was dazzling in the coloratura role of Rose. Morgan Smith made sense of Harry or Larry as a young man whose anger bursts out as song, and Matthew Garrett let us hear the vocal magic Zen retains in his bewilderment. Ninety years younger than the composer, Jonathan Makepeace sang the part of Kid trimly in tune. That the production took place at all was due to the faith and campaigning energy of George Steel, who, as executive director, has remade Columbia University’s Miller Theatre as the prime venue in the city for exciting music and adventurous programming.

Having seen his opera staged in his native city, Carter now moves into his second century with undiminished creative energy. In the past year he has written, apart from several smaller pieces, a piano concerto that Daniel Barenboim will feature at the centenary concert in Carnegie Hall a year from now.

The New York Times agreed. Stay tuned, as they say, to this blog for something special on the Elliott Carter front in 2008.