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Opera Australia assistant musical director Tony Legge |
Eccentric titles aside, even today producing Handel operas means having to overcome long-held prejudices about the musical theatre of the era.
In Partenope even seasoned opera goers have to keep their wits about them to keep track of the plot, in which a man (Arsace) played by a woman (Catherine Carby) is engaged to a woman (Rosmira), who is dressed as a man because she is in disguise. “Yes it’s confusing,” Opera Australia assistant musical director Tony Legge laughs, “but it’s also very funny, like a Noël Coward farce.”
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In this version of the story, the counter-tenor (Christopher Field as Armindo) ends up winning the heroine.At the height of the baroque revival it was unheard of even to play music of the era on modern instruments. “But playing on baroque instruments can be quite annoying because they don’t stay in tune and you have to keep on stopping the performance to tune. It’s like driving an old car that keeps breaking down,” says Legge, who has conducted baroque ensembles in London.
However, when Handel’s operas were first being revived in the early 20th century, castrato roles were often transposed for tenors and basses. Today, with more counter-tenors available and audiences growing to appreciate their style of singing more, that no longer happens as often. Nevertheless, baroque opera is still transposed more often than operas of other periods.
Legge says: “In classical music we tend to get stuck in this pompous idea that nothing should be changed, yet Handel transposed music all the time – his operas are like Broadway musicals in which the music is adapted to suit the strengths of the cast.”
Trying to replicate the performance practice of the past is futile and unwise, he feels. “In the 18thcentury, orchestras played badly and singers were out of control. There were no stage directors and the audience, who came to the opera to eat and gossip and hear famous singers, talked all the time – baroque audiences would have thought our custom of sitting in darkness and silence crazy.”Modern audiences expect to see first-class acting and orchestral performance of the highest standard. It’s the reason why few conductors attempt to adhere to the baroque custom of sitting in the middle of the orchestra and playing the harpsichord. “I need to conduct to enable the players to achieve the standard of performance that the audience expects,” Legge says.
It is with the audience in mind that modern opera companies cut pieces. “Today’s musicians tend to be very obedient to the composer, but the truth of the matter is, if you saw an opera production as the composer had written it, you’d squirm in your seat. Wagner had stage directions for people riding wooden horses, which would just seem naff today – Wagner himself would have changed it.” “Cutting a whole scene or aria is best because no one misses it. If you cut part of an aria, people do tend to notice.”
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Modern singers, like their baroque counterparts, often write their own cadenzas – Emma Matthews, for example, wrote one for Partenope’s Sydney première. Legge says: “Cadenzas have to observe the stylistic rules of baroque music – there are musical things that you can’t do, which is why singer and musical director collaborate.”If opera companies have come a long way since the first Handel revivals, Legge believes that this process has gone as far as it can. “I was there when these works were premièred on the modern stage in the 1960s and 70s, and it was incredibly boring. Now we know more about baroque music, singers no longer perform the music as slowly and the productions have become very exciting.”
What would Handel have produced today? “Musicals I think. He’d probably get into pop music as well – like Mozart, he was fantastic at writing melodies. It’s very difficult for contemporary composers to do that, because modern harmonies don’t lend themselves to melody. But I think the only way forward for opera is for top composers to write popular music.”