Jephtha's Rash Vow (1807) by James Gundee & M. Jones London. |
There was a convention with Handel’s opera and oratorio
performances whereby dialogue not set by the composer could still be printed in
the word books, thus giving the audience a more detailed picture of the action.
And with the failure of his opera Ezio
in 1732, Handel seems to have lost confidence in the London audience’s appetite
for vast acres of Italian recitative, his following opera Sosarme had its dialogue cut to the point of incomprehensibility
and he would never again set a long Italian text, in fact for the remaining 9
years of writing Italian opera, he would experiment with what the form exactly
was.
The libretto of Jephtha was written for Handel by Thomas
Morrell. Morrell was a scholar of Greek drama, a quite worker and willing to be
flexible and write words to suit Handel’s requirements. So though his libretto’s
are not the finest, they allow space of Handel’s music. Jeptha and Theodora are
great music dramas because of Handel’s contribution, without the music the
drama would be threadbare.
This is one of the big problems with staging the oratorios,
much of the narrative is not there, instead you have a series of linked set
pieces with the music detailing the characters developments. In effect, musical
tableaux and of course the tableaux would make sense to Handel’s audience as
such things were used for entertainment in people’s houses.
Having seen two very different productions of Jephtha this year (at the Buxton
Festival and WNO in Cardiff), this set me thinking about the problems staging
Handel’s dramatic oratorios.
When Buxton staged Handel’s Saul a few years ago, it was set in the contemporary Middle East,
projecting the biblical story onto modern event. This is very tempting,
especially as many of Handel’s works can be seen to have resonances with the
political events of his day. But this sort of staging gives the director a
ready-made context and story which will help fill in the narrative gaps and
provide a helpful backdrop for the audience.
Katie Mitchell did something similar in her production of Jephtha which WNO recently revived with
Robert Murray in the title role. Here Mitchell set the piece in the 1940’s in a
familiar war torn environment. Jephtha and the other characters were familiar
types, and Mitchell let the narrative unfold via constant action which happened
during the music. Illustrating it but also going against it and providing an
interesting interplay. She gave us a very clear context for Jephtha’s actions,
a particular social milieu.
For Buxton, Frederic Wake Walker did something completely
different, choosing to base his staging on the music and follow that. This
meant that the opening had very little action, was almost a concert
performance, because that is what happens in Handel’s oratorio. The initial
scenes are simply there to introduce the characters and their inter-relations,
only then does drama develop. James Gilchrist’s Jephtha was not placed in a
social milieu, but was developed with remarkable intensity by Gilchrist as a
sort of religious inspired zealot. The production did rather divide opinion but
made you think. It showed that there was an expressive way of staging an
oratorio with adding a welter of extra narrative detail.
Wake Walker’s expressionist, semi-abstract production meant
that during the choruses he was free to introduce whatever movement he felt suitable,
not having to stick to a realistic narrative. Mitchell at WNO on the other
hand, had her chorus in constant, realistic motion with much dramatic coming
and going.
Both of these were solutions to the problem presented by the
choruses in Handel’s oratorios. These choruses are large-scale dramatic
creatures, but Handel wrote them with no thought of what might be happening on
stage. Handel was a naturally dramatic composer and though his oratorios were
not written to be staged, he could not help but give them a dramatic structure
and make the works seductive to the stage director. But the sheer size of some
of the choruses causes a problem, with the suggestion that the singers are
moving about simply to have something to do.
Peter Sellers in his famous staging of Theodora at Glyndebourne solved it by giving the singers a
repertoire of expressive but stylised hand movements, which frankly you either
loved or hated. Robert Carsen in his production of Semele at the London Coliseum resorted to the choreographed look,
with the singers moving around the stage, at times seeming to mark time.
Mitchell’s approach, though at times distracting, has the virtue that stage
action has a coherent dramatic flow which exists almost independent of the
music; the singers have a reason for their movement. And Wake Walker gave us
almost pure choreography, a direct expression of the music.
In some oratorios the chorus changes its role (eg from
Israelites to Persians in Belshazzar)
and these changes can occur without thought to logistics. Oratorios were essentially
dramas of the mind, the action played out in the ideal theatre in Handel’s
head. It would be interesting to learn what the composer really thought, but we
shall probably never know.
In an oratorio like Susanna,
the chorus moves from participation in the action to comment on it from outside
and back again; sometimes, as with the envy chorus in Saul this can be easily incorporated into the staged drama. But the
framing of Susanna with huge Greek
style choruses is a problem and I have seen stagings which solved the problem
simply by cutting the more inconvenient choruses!
This leads us back again to thoughts about what is actually
happening. In Saul, Handel and Jennens dispatch some moments of
the drama with great brevity, Saul himself expresses himself mainly in
recitative rather than aria. But Saul
also includes quite a few instrumental movements depicting events. Did Handel
imagine stage action in his head, was he thinking in terms of ballet movements.
Handel did write ballets and famously used Marie Salle’s company to great
effect in Alcina and in Ariodante.
Though there is a suggestion that the most effective moment in Ariodante, at the end of act 2 when
Ginevra’s dark dreams are given form, was never actually staged.
Perhaps this is one of the attractions of staging Handel’s
oratorios, the way the essential drama of Handel’s music rather than
prescribing detailed action, gives space for the director’s own creativity. To
stage an opera seria requires the
director to engage with the genre’s various rules; to stage an oratorio is to
enter territory without any rules.
My review of Buxton Festival's Jephtha
My review of WNO's Jephtha on OperaToday.com
Further feature articles on Handel
My review of Buxton Festival's Jephtha
My review of WNO's Jephtha on OperaToday.com
Further feature articles on Handel
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