Handel’s rarely performed operas seem to be in vogue this festival season: besides the premiere of Riccardo primo in both Karlsruhe and Halle, the Handel Festival Halle and the Handel Festival Göttingen have staged operas less often seen on stage. Both Arminio (1737) and Faramondo (1738) were composed at a period when Handel was less successful as an opera composer. Whether it was due to the stress of working on too many commissions simultaneously or the changes of musical taste in London that led him to turn his artistic attention to other genres remains open for discussion. But in April 1737 Handel suffered a stroke from which he recovered in a spa in Aachen, with Faramondo, composed later that year in London and the operatic premiere at this year’s Göttingen festival, marking a period of new creative energy. However, like some of the composer’s other operas from the thirties that achieved less fame than his Ariosto “trilogy” (Orlando, Ariodante, Alcina) or Serse, Faramondo has seen a substantial reduction of recitative from the original libretto, which renders the dramatic action less clear. The model that served Handel as a point of departure was not Apostolo Zeno’s “reform” libretto, but Francesco Gasparini’s setting (1720), in which substantial cuts to Zeno’s original version had already been made. Handel set only a reduced number of arias from Gasparini’s libretto to accommodate both his cast and his predilection for arias of a longer span. The subsequent curbing of the classicist dramatic ideals so dear to Zeno and the bypassing of opera seria conventions (e.g. the lack of exit arias for tense dramatic situations that require them) render a musical-dramatic appraisal of the opera somewhat problematic.

The level of musical inspiration in Faramondo, however, is not up for debate. Nor can we establish any causal relationship with the fact that Handel borrowed extensively from Gasparini’s opera, since we know of many other cases when Handel transformed someone else’s work into something entirely different, making it therefore entirely “his own”. The vibrant score came to life with the help of the Festival Orchestra Göttingen (aka FOG), possibly the best instrumental ensemble out there when it comes to playing Handel, under the guidance of Laurence Cummings, artistic director of both the Handel Festival Göttingen and the London Handel Festival. In contrast to the latter, which stretches out over a period of more than a month, the Göttingen festival brings together players from the whole world over an intense shorter period for orchestral and chamber music-making, resulting in a specific, highly individual ‘sound body’, as unified as if the musicians were playing and breathing together with Cummings throughout the whole year. If to this we add singers whose voices and stage personae are perfectly suited to their respective roles, who have enough experience to tackle the high-powered professional environment of the festival and who are open to new ideas, we have the ideal combination for a little known work like Faramondo.

Like last year’s festival premiere, Siroe, Re di Persia, this opera too requires a decisive directorial approach that knows exactly where it wants to take the somewhat flawed libretto and the consequently stilted dramaturgy. Both productions unfolded on a multifunctional revolving set that is remarkably stylish in visual terms, the unified space of an aristocratic manor conceived for Siroe giving way to a more complex spatial conception in Faramondo. Paul Curran’s production follows a tradition of setting the tangled plots of dynastic intrigue and power struggle characteristic of opera seria in underworld surroundings, often reminiscent of (the Italian) mafia. The pseudo-historical plot of the opera depicts the conflicts between Faramondo, alleged first king of the Franks, and the Germanic tribes such as the Cimbri, whose king Gustavo has sworn revenge on Faramondo, and the Suebi, whose king Gernando is Faramondo’s rival for the love of Gustavo’s daughter Rosimonda. Curran devised a detailed (sub-)cultural identity for each of the three groups, setting them in the ambivalent context of a glittery casino, with high heels and smart evening gowns worn by the two female protagonists (verging on the tacky, but never crossing the line), and an urban backdrop, the dark alleys where ‘capos’ and their soldiers are stabbed and prisoners are kept in storage rooms. The action unfolded quite naturally in this dual environment, which was nevertheless not meant to be over specific, for while Faramondo and his soldiers were unambiguously identified with contemporary military police forces and Gustavo’s entourage with the Mafia, Gernando and his followers’ extravagance left more to the imagination. Designer Gary McCann also provided a strong visual link to the world of the baroque with a quasi-seventeenth-century painting of a menacing hunting scene, an apt metaphor for the situation many of the opera’s characters find themselves in.

This kind of interpretation may not be entirely original (one has seen it many times before, especially in stagings of another dynastic opera by Handel, Rodelinda, in both David Alden’s Munich production and Richard Jones’s recent one at the ENO). But it is to Curran’s credit that he populated this slightly artificial, albeit naturalistic, stage world with convincingly portrayed individual characters in the best realistic, psychological tradition. Combined with carefully polished singing that nevertheless sounded incredibly fresh and as if ‘made up’ on the spot, it contributed to a fascinating identification of the audience with all the characters. Take the example of the typical bass villain, Gustavo, who at no point lost his humanity, although Njål Sparbo must have prepared for the role by an industrious study of Martin Scorsese films. Already in the recitatives his Italian sounded frightfully idiomatic, not to mention the terrifyingly menacing cries of ‘vendetta’ in his second and last aria, ‘Sol la brama’. The cruelty to his son Adolfo (countertenor Maarten Engeltjes) is obviously rooted in troubled family relationships, and was effectively contrasted with genuine disappointment at the treason of his right-hand man Teobaldo (baritone Edward Grint). Although given only one modest aria, Grin proved that Stanislavski’s maxim about there being no small parts only small actors also applies to opera seria, or at least to this performance. Sparbo is only slightly older than the rest of the cast, and therefore highly improbable as Engeltjes’s biological father, but this did not detract from the production’s powers of persuasion, and shows the extent to which the soloists internalised their roles. This is certainly true of countertenor Christopher Lowrey, who, equipped with several pairs of female lace undergarments, relished portraying Gernando’s sleaziness. In terms of singing, both countertenors were equally attractive in their voice control as well as in musical craftsmanship, although their arias are very different, written by Handel so as to contradict the hierarchy of roles in opera seria. Consequently, the title of secondo uomo was evenly shared between the two.

The ladies didn’t fall behind the gentlemen in the slightest. Although it was announced that mezzo soprano Anna Starushkevych caught a cold in Göttingen, this seems to have had little effect on her interpretation of the demanding role of the conflicted Rosimonda, who is propelled by a wealth of contradictory forces including her desire to get revenge for her brother’s death, duty to her father, and suppressed love for Faramondo. Of her several restless arias, ‘Sì, l’intendesti’ is the most effective, as Rosimonda can give full vent to her – for a change – unambiguous contempt for Gernando. Helped by Curran’s directorial approach, the soprano Anna Dennis in the dramatically secondary, but musically no less attractive role of Faramondo’s sister Clotilde, made perfect sense of the unusual showpiece aria ‘Combattuta da due venti’. Handel has left us with no doubt about the status of the primo uomo, since the title role of Faramondo, written for the famous castrato Caffarelli, is by far the most attractive in the opera. Its high vocal range and virtuosity might have had a hand in the casting of the mezzosoprano Emily Fons instead of one of her male colleagues. Fons is a young, but musically already fully formed singer who will undoubtedly go far on the international operatic stage. She displayed enviable musical craftsmanship in arias as widely different as ‘Rival ti sono’ and ‘Se ben lusinga’, which revel in coloratura cascades (here effectively underlined by neurotic smoking on stage!), and the cantabile ‘Sì, tornerò’ and ‘Poi che pria’, combining these two aspects masterfully in the musical highpoint of the opera, the aria ‘Voglio che sia l’indegno’, in which Faramondo wavers between legitimate rage against Gustavo and compassion for Rosimonda’s filial love.

Unfortunately, Mother Nature intervened to deprive us not only of Curran’s take on the opera’s happy ending, but also of Clotilde’s aria ‘Un aria placida’ and Faramondo’s solo ‘Virtù che rende’, integrated into the final coro. A storm broke out during the third act and flooded the backstage, forcing the management of the festival to interrupt the performance due to safety reasons. This not only deprived the audience of the last 10-15 minutes of the opera, but – since I witnessed the production’s Dernière – also left the whole team waiting for a fitting closure to the festival. However, rather than discouraging us, the incident prompted everyone to applaud this exquisite production even more, a testament also to the successful renewal of the Handel Festival Göttingen under its new artistic management over the past three years.

The Göttingen International Handel Festival took place between 29 May and 10 June 2014.

Production photograph © Alcirdo Theodoro da Silva  (Emily Fons (Faramondo)) .