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Renewed interest in Handel (16 Jan 2009)

A little way up the west side of London’s Haymarket stands Her Majesty’s Theatre. Opened in 1897 to a flamboyant Victorian design by Charles J Phills, it is the fourth theatre on the site and home to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical The Phantom of the Opera, which has been in residence for more than 20 years.

The phantom of the title may still be active on performance days but another ghost might also haunt the theatre’s corridors – a middle-aged German in a powdered wig and frock coat, the spirit of George Frideric Handel, 250 years after his death. In the 1720s, when his operatic career in London was at its height and he was striving to keep up with the demand for new works, Handel was presenting two new operas a year at the King’s Theatre, which then occupied this plot, including masterpieces such as Giulio Cesare and Rodelinda.

Yet the 9,000 performances that Lloyd Webber’s musical has clocked up to date are far in excess of even the most successful of Handel’s more than 40 operas. The thirst for novelty in his day meant that few operas were revived after their initial run. For the composer, it was useful to be able to recycle arias in later operas, safe in the knowledge that most people would not recognise them. As it was, Ariodante achieved 11 performances in its opening season and Orlando managed 10. The sexually enticing Semele lasted only four, though Handel did try bringing it back later with some of its more explicit lines cut. Even Serse, a baroque masterpiece, was withdrawn after only five performances.

So why has there been such a resurgence of interest in Handel’s operas in the past 30 to 40 years? Given the number of productions around, it is safe to say that the average opera-goer today has had the opportunity to see a lot more of Handel’s operas than the composer did in his own lifetime.

That long period of neglect lasted for most of the 250 years since his death. John Eliot Gardiner, one of the pioneers of the revolution in period performance practice in the 1970s, thinks it is important to view Handel’s new esteem in that context. “The question is not why Handel’s operas are popular now,” he says, “but why they were forgotten for so long. Throughout the 19th century Handel was a victim of Victorian attitudes. They performed his music with vastly inflated forces, often using two or three times the number of performers Handel intended. That had all the negative impact in terms of heaviness and slowness that you would expect. It was a complete distortion of Handel’s musical world.”

As musical director of the International Handel Festival Göttingen from 1981 to 1990, Gardiner recalls finding Handel’s music being performed, even there, in an outdated manner – traditional instruments, slow tempos and the voice parts often reallocated. A generation earlier, a visitor to Rome or Naples could have seen Giulio Cesare with singers like Renata Tebaldi, Franco Corelli and Boris Christoff – exciting, but a bit like asking Mike Tyson or Lennox Lewis to contest the featherweight title.

To anybody who has lived through the huge changes brought about by Gardiner and the other conductors who led the period instrument revolution, the effect has been like watching an overweight prima donna emerge as a slim, elegant heroine. Suddenly, the music moved with new grace and lightness of step. But what of Handel’s theatre, which can seem slow and formulaic to a generation brought up on television drama?

One of the major Handel productions of 2009 will be Alcina at La Scala, Milan, in March. Robert Carsen, the director, has had considerable experience staging baroque operas and is not surprised that Handel’s operas – some of the longest and slowest in the repertoire – have become popular.

“If theatre tries to copy the world of video clips and mobile phone calls, it generally doesn’t work,” he says. “Audiences want the pace of life to slow down when they are at the opera. Handel’s ability to make us experience time in a completely different way is a unique gift.”

Carsen agrees that the stories can be convoluted but does not see it as a serious problem. “Handel’s operas are primarily psychological drama, not plot driven,” he explains. “That is one of the reasons they have come as a revelation to our generation. The operas mostly deal with archetypes – sorcerers, knights and so on – and the audience is free to concentrate on what is happening in the characters’ minds. For example, the aria ‘Ah, mio cor!’ in Alcina lasts around 14 minutes, almost as long as the entire second act of Puccini’s La Bohème. That means the music is able to penetrate Alcina’s thoughts in a profound way. These are operas which enable you to see deep into their characters’ minds and hearts.”

For all that, there are people who are still to be convinced. While recognising the great music in many of the operas, Gardiner for one believes the oratorios are more dramatic, arguing that the high sacred drama of Solomon or Jephtha has more life in it than the static aria-and-recitative conventions of many of Handel’s operas. The same thinking may explain why the Salzburg Festival has chosen to mark the anniversary this year with a new production of the oratorio Theodora, which Glyndebourne has already shown to be so powerful on stage.

Overall, however, there are fewer major new opera productions than one might have expected; none at any of the main US opera houses, and although Vienna will see Partenope, Venice has Agrippina and there are attractive revivals elsewhere, it is not the worldwide celebration of Handel the opera composer that the occasion might have prompted. Handel lovers in the UK might do better to stay at home and listen to BBC Radio 3’s complete Handel opera cycle, one opera each Thursday afternoon throughout the year except during the Proms season. Perhaps opera companies feel they have completed their rediscovery of Handel’s operatic legacy and are moving on to pastures new.

Still, there will be non-operatic Handel aplenty, especially in his adopted home town of London. The annual London Handel Festival, starting on February 23 (Handel’s birthday) and ending on April 14 (his death day), has a programme featuring some top Handelian performers. Messiah will be broadcast live on April 14 from Westminster Abbey across Europe via the European Broadcasting Union by BBC Radio 3. The Foundling Museum, to which Handel bequeathed the score and parts for Messiah, is offering an exhibition on Handel the Philanthropist; and the Handel House Museum in Brook Street, the composer’s home for 36 years, has an exhibition, Handel Reveal’d, and a new oratorio commission.

Two hundred and fifty years on, Handel can content himself with the fact that he really is the longest-running show in town.

Renewed interest in Handel