After an unfortunate 2013, when the Halle Handel Festival was cancelled due to extensive flooding, it seems that it is expanding and flourishing. Around fifty ticketed performances and as many free ones are taking place in twenty localities this year, stretched out over a period of more than two weeks (27th May – 12th June). The number of operas being performed has reached six, even eight if we count Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and The Loves of Mars and Venus, a masque by J. Eccles and G. Finger. Out of these, four are festival productions and co-productions, taking place at Halle Opera and the Goethe Theatre in Bad Lauchstädt. As somewhat of a novelty, more attention has been given to Handel’s pasticcios, operas that he assembled from other works, and, in the case of the performed Didone abbandonata (HWV A12) and Catone (HWV A7), music by his younger Neapolitan contemporaries L. Vinci and L. Leo. With a lesser number of oratorios and some large-scale choral works, as well as chamber concerts and crossover manifestations, the focus was again on an in-depth investigation of Handel’s operatic world, resulting in the staging of his rarely performed operas Sosarme, Re di Media, Publio Cornelio Scipione and Lucio Cornelio Silla, a revival of the 2015 festival production, currently in repertory at Halle Opera.
The festival programme has a special place for guest performances by leading names in the world of historically informed performance, whether ensembles or soloists. I can say with confidence that the performance of Acis and Galatea (the ‘Cannons version’ of 1718) joined both of these under the guise of the Dunedin Consort and its director John Butt. The Ulrichskirche, a Halle church adapted into a concert hall, served as the perfect setting for the performance of this masque in its original version, written for smaller instrumental and vocal forces. A body of fourteen instrumentalists and five vocalists was heard in a crystal clear manner as the sound travelled with ease to the last of the thirty rows of seats on that June 4th afternoon, aided by the venue’s excellent acoustics. The period ensemble based in Edinburgh displayed heightened sensibility to Handel’s pastoral style and conveyed much of the intimacy of the music making that must have permeated the first performance in the Duke of Chandos’s stately home. At the same time, conductor John Butt was open to presenting individual takes on the score, enriching it with details such as the slightly modified tempi for da capo repeats in the arias, as well as a gradual dramatic build-up in the unconventional trio for the main protagonists, ‘The flocks shall leave the mountains’.
In the orchestra, a unified sound blended strings and winds with a knowing continuo support on the harpsichord from Butt himself, aided by additional organ and bassoon. Although the score prescribes a less dense texture with no divisions between the violins, it nevertheless sounded rounded, with a particularly strong presence of the two oboes. Frances Norbury and Oonagh Lee alternated between playing oboes and recorders, with Norbury’s oboe solos proving particularly enchanting in several numbers of the score. The singers also achieved a fine balance between their roles as chorus members and soloists. Similarly to the orchestra, the choral numbers never sounded unbalanced in the inherent contrast between rich inner voices sung by the three tenors (Nicholas Mulroy, Thomas Hobbs and Nicholas Pritchard) on the one hand, and the soprano Joanne Lunn and the bass Matthew Brook on the other. Although there are only four choruses in the masque, the first two (‘Oh, the pleasure of the plains!’ and ‘Wretched lovers’) were sufficient to indicate the wide scale of the singers’ expressive powers. The moving moment of ‘Must I my Acis still bemoan’, when the remaining male members of the chorus attempt to console Galatea who is devastated by the shepherd’s violent death, showed a perfect blend of choral homogeneity and soloist display that is at the heart of this work. The latter has perhaps been most convincingly presented by Joanne Lunn’s Galatea and Matthew Brook’s Polyphemus. The bass did not shy away from comedic representation of the grotesque giant and immediately stole the heart of the audience, but, even more importantly, presented a confident and sophisticated musical portrait. Lunn’s soprano, on the other hand, with its warm, hearty sound and fine musicianship, was also perfectly suited to the demands of the part.
One of the roles of a festival such as the Halle Handel Festival is the exploration of less known works. Whereas nowadays opera houses are happy to stage masterworks such as Giulio Cesare, Rodelinda, Ariodante, Alcina, Orlando or Serse, festivals can be testing-grounds for neglected gems. However, even with the best intentions of the organisers and the performers, it is unlikely that Sosarme and Silla are going to become newly discovered Handel hits. This, of course, does not mean that the festival has not fulfilled its educational purpose by performing them on the purely musical level even if the interpretive role of the staging has not been equally successful in both cases. The example of these two operas shows how the somewhat generic nature of opera seria, even at its most unconventional in Handel, makes the success of a staging depend on how one brings the musical constituent parts of an opera (of which highly inspired numbers abound) into a convincing unified whole on stage.
Sosarme, Re di Media, first performed in 1732 as a production of Handel’s ‘Second Academy’, has a complicated genesis. Scholars are intrigued to this day by the question of why Handel changed the setting from the Iberian peninsula to Asia Minor, but whether this was motivated by wanting to avoid an offence to the Portuguese as British allies (since their royal family is portrayed in an unflattering light), or if it had anything to do with the conflict between George II and his son is not relevant to the approach taken by director Philipp Harnoncourt. He decided to transpose the military feud about the succession to the throne between father and son into a contemporary fable of social rebellion. In the set he designed together with Katja Rotrekl, a seemingly typical German family house occupies central place, disintegrating in the course of the action both physically and symbolically as family relations worsen. The contrast between the anarchist entourage of the son Argone (countertenor Michael Taylor), surrounded by youthful extras, and his father Haliate’s (tenor Robert Sellier) more mature retinue clad in grey formal attire, was a functional, albeit banal allusion to social class, at the same time at odds with the Brechtian touches dominating the action in the course of the second and third acts. Elisabeth Ahsef’s costumes were probably aiming at even more specific semantic allusions, but suffered from the typical ailment of not taking the persons of the singers who are going to be wearing them into consideration. In my opinion, in the case of mother and daughter Erenice and Elmira they were not only far from flattering to their interpreters – Henriette Gödde and Ines Lex, respectively – but also failed to characterise the female members of the family in their efforts to reconcile father and son.
In his monograph on Handel’s operas written between 1726 and 1741, although insisting that the score of Sosarme is ‘tantalising’ in purely musical terms, Winton Dean not only dismissed the libretto as ‘lopsided’, but pointed out that this opera was one of the rare instances of the composer ‘sacrificing consistency and dramatic relevance to expediency’. Although it is beyond doubt that this is not one of the best librettos Handel had set, the comparison with the staging of Lucio Cornelio Silla will show that the way we judge Handel’s operas in dramaturgic terms greatly depends on our preconception about how they should be staged. In Sosarme the director, together with conductor Bernhard Frock, adopted the ideal of musical ‘fidelity to the score’, in line with Halle Handel Festival’s policy of using (newly published) volumes of the critical edition of the composer’s collected works, the Halle Handel Edition. Only two arias that do not excel in musical or dramaturgic terms were dropped from the performance, with occasional cuts of redundant recitative. Even the casting strove to reflect the disposition of voices at the first performance, with the parts originally written for castrati (Sosarme and Argone) assigned to countertenors and Melo treated as a trouser role as in 1732. Through their experiences accumulated at the festival, the members of the orchestra of Opera Halle are by now sufficiently versed in the art of historically informed performance to compete with some other festival ensembles. Nevertheless, that night (I saw the performance on June 3rd) they lacked what the Dunedin Consort displayed in abundance. Not enough interpretive wit and finesse combined with an absence of musical drive, enhanced by the shortcomings of the staging, contributed to the impression of a static evening that presented the score in a correct reading faithful to the intentions of the composer, but lacking the ability to tantalise.
To a lesser extent, this could be applied to the singers’ contribution to Sosarme, Re di Media, as well. Benno Schachtner (Sosarme), Ines Lex (Elmira) and Henriette Gödde (Erenice) sung their demanding roles with an aura of self-confidence occasionally verging on the routine. This certainly does not apply to Gödde’s moving rendition of the aria ‘Cuor di madre, e cuor di moglie’, expressing the extent to which Erenice is torn between her husband and her son in typically Handelian pathetic terms. The bass Ki-Hyun Park, a long-time member of Opera Halle, was equally confident in his three arias as the schemer Altomaro, even if he sang them in somewhat broad strokes. Namely, the first aria, adapted from Polifemo’s aria in the serenata, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, features highly demanding leaps to the extremes of the register. The other two verge on the comical and paint a surprisingly fitting jolly portrayal of the villain, so they could have benefited from a more nuanced reading. The last mention goes to Julia Böhme in the role of the noble illegitimate son Melo: the German contralto provided the most accomplished vocal performance of the evening.
Soprano and Opera Halle member Ines Lex is the only link between the casts of Sosarme and Silla. It cannot be easy to sing two big parts in Handel’s operas for two nights in a row (I saw the performance of Silla on June 4th), and my overall more favourable opinion of Stephen Lawless’s production as opposed to Harnoncourt’s must have had a hand in the better impression Lex made as the tortured Flavia, one of two objects of the tyrant Silla’s unwelcome advances. Musically, the two productions were governed by similar ideas of fidelity to the score, although the conducting styles of Frock and Enrico Onofri were very different. Onofri lent the Händelfestspielorchester Halle some of the vitality Italian baroque ensembles are known for, thereby transcending Winton Dean’s and John Merrill Knapp’s scathing view of the score. The effect of a vibrant musical flow and dramatic immediacy was well conveyed although Handel’s musical inspiration is not evenly distributed in this 1713 score, one of the shortest operas he ever wrote. The fact that the production team took the bold decision to perform it without an interval, and without cutting a single aria, says a lot about the approach taken.
Lawless had a different idea about how to deal with a less-known, somewhat imperfect opera by a great master. Presumably working together with his dramaturg André Meyer, the director subjected the opera to a careful reshuffling of scenes in the second and the third act in order to adapt the libretto to the specific dramaturgic premises. Namely, the action was not only transposed from republican ancient Rome to fascist Italy at the height of World War II (countertenor Filippo Mineccia was especially convincing in drawing parallels with the figure of Mussolini), it was also given a dramaturgic frame clearly outlined in a pseudo-historical newsreel at the beginning of the performance. Confined to house arrest in the midst of ally bombings with his family and closest associates, the condition of the ailing dictator Silla worsens. With increasing illusions of grandeur, he begins to inflict sadistic behaviour on the few people he has on his side. The introduction of mental instability, associated with dictators in the remote as well as the recent past, manages to give credibility to what Dean and Knapp considered a dramaturgic defect of unrealised violent threats that often lay at the heart of more successful opera seria librettos, too.
The mythological bass figure of ‘Il Dio’ (imposing Halle opera member Ulrich Burdack) who in his only aria in Act Two encourages Silla to ‘Guerra, strage, furor!’ (War, carnage, fury) was identified with Silla’s servant Scabro, a silent part that has a key role in the libretto. The tribune Lepido (Jeffrey Kim) was turned into Silla’s physician, supplying with medications not only the dictator but also his own wife Flavia, distressed about their fate. Claudio’s overt criticism of Silla’s politics was dramaturgically justified by making him a member of the family, whereas his love interest Celia’s vacillation between him and Silla was embedded in the uncertain situation of the power struggle. A directorial masterstroke culminated during Metella’s moving aria ‘Io non ti chiedo più’ at the beginning of the third act, when together with Scabro and Lepido she decided that it was time to put a stop to her husband’s misdeeds that had so far included not only the attempted murder of Lepido and Claudio but also the rape of Flavia. The latter is, unsurprisingly, contrary to the libretto, because the eighteenth century did not allow such content. The subsequent attempted drowning of Silla as he was going to leave for Sicily was also presented convincingly and, irrespective of whether Silla’s sudden coming back to life for the obligatory happy ending was intended as realistic or symbolical, a final projection of a bomb sealed the communal fate of the protagonists in a poignant way.
The singers benefited from this kind of directorial take on the opera, not only because, in elegant period costumes, they were placed into the more delicate ambiance of a bourgeois manor (both costumes and the functional, dynamic revolving set were by Frank Philipp Schlößmann), but probably also because they were able to conceive their parts in the tradition of psychological realism. In terms of musicianship, they all held up to high festival standards, the weakest link being the mezzosoprano Antigone Papoulkas (Claudio), lacking in lustre and forcefulness required of this heroic role. Countertenor Jeffrey Kim, well-known to Halle audiences from his previous guest performances at the festival, has a light, almost translucent timbre almost at odds with Lepido’s mature appearance, which wouldn’t have been a problem in itself had the virtuoso renditions of Lepido’s arias not occasionally lacked in substance. Eva Bauchmüller’s portrayal of the smaller role of Celia was a more rounded interpretation, but the focus was naturally on the main protagonists, Silla (Mineccia) and Metella (Romelia Lichtenstein). The Bulgarian-born soprano, who has been a member of the Halle Opera for more than twenty years, was awarded the Handel Award of the Halle Handel Festival this year for her accomplishments in as many as fourteen roles in Handel’s operas, and her portrayal of Silla’s loving and mistreated wife who eventually takes matters into her own hands displayed her significant artistic experience to the utmost benefit of the production. Mineccia, on the other hand, showed off just the right amount of charisma while playing the infamous dictator, as well as a technically secure countertenor voice that delivers with substantial musicality.
Finally, one should ask the question if the two reviewed operatic productions have succeeded in their attempt to revitalise these rarely performed works. Musically, both offered convincing historically informed performances. Onofri imbued the festival orchestra with a bit more flair and all the vocal soloists proved to be able performers, which was best perceived in the tasteful standard of aria ornamentation, kept at a high level throughout. It is difficult to say what kind of directorial approach would do justice to Sosarme or Silla. The Halle festival seems uninclined to forms of historically informed staging that we have been witnessing at the festivals in Karlsruhe and Göttingen in the past few years, presumably because they do not correspond with the tastes of a wider operatic audience. It remains to be seen if this is a valid argument or not, but it is interesting to observe that, irrespective of their different styles and a common wish to be faithful to the score, Lawless’s production benefited from a bolder dramaturgic intervention (that still left all the arias and duets intact) more than Frock’s and Harnoncourt’s did from dropping only two arias that seemed superfluous. Perhaps a work like Lucio Cornelio Silla will prove to be more suited to innovative reinterpretations, whereas Handel’s great masterpieces can take on a wider range of directorial approaches? It remains to be seen whether this assumption is correct, if and when other festivals and opera houses take up the challenge of staging some of these neglected operas.
Sosarme will be performed in November 2016 at Halle Opera. The last performance of Lucio Cornelio Silla was at the Halle Handel Festival on June 9th.