Class 1: If it’s Baroque… A. Alternative Versions 1. Title Slide 1 (Jephtha in Paris, Claus Guth) The illustration shows a staged production of Handel’s oratorio Jephtha—not intended for staging in Handel’s time, and certainly not like this. Handel will be the featured composer for this class; we shall compare selections from four different works, in order to explore what we feel about them, and to define what's what. Unlike the Baltimore version of the class, however, which went into other eras as well, I have decided to confine this one to the Handel’s time and before, roughly 1600–1765. Hence my new title, “If it’s Baroque…”, with the implication that there are special problems involved in putting earlier opera on the stage today. 2. Poussin: Landscape with Orpheus and Euridice Let us begin with an example from one of the first operas ever written, and certainly the earliest to be performed with any frequency today, La favola d'Orfeo (1607) by Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643). The story is well-known. Orpheus marries Eurydice and is very happy. But then a messenger arrives to tell him that Eurydice has been bitten by a snake and is dead, so Orpheus goes down to the Underworld to rescue her. The scene we are about to see comes just before the tragedy. This first part of the opera, however, emerges from an earlier tradition: that of the court masque; it was not composed for performance in a theater. As you will see, there is as much dancing as singing, and the air that Orpheus sings is in a strong rhythm characteristic of Renaissance dances. It uses a device called hemiola, in which six notes can be divided either into two groups of three or three groups of two. Oddly enough, it surfaces again in Latin American music, such as the song "America" from West Side Story. 3. Stills 1: Gilbert Deflo I shall play a two-and-a-half-minute segment in three versions, beginning with the short chorus in which the Shepherds sing Orfeo's praise. We’ll discuss them after we’ve watched all three. The first is a 2002 production by Gilbert Deflo in Barcelona, which tries to do everything in the style of the original period. [I have shown this before in another class, incidentally, but I’ll try to keep such repeats to a minimum.] 4. Monteverdi: Orfeo, "Vi ricorda, o boschi ombrosi" (Deflo) 5. Stills 2: Trisha Brown The second, I think from 1998, is the work of an American choreographer, the late Trisha Brown. There is so much dance in the score that it is not hard to make this the dominant medium, rather than singing. Besides, she is working with a collaborator, the British baritone Simon Keenlyside, who takes great pride in his athletic abilities. — 1 — 6. Monteverdi: Orfeo, "Vi ricorda, o boschi ombrosi" (Brown) 7. Stills 3: Barrie Kosky The third example is just about its exact opposite, a 2012 production at the Komische Oper Berlin, by a director we shall see a lot more of, the Australian Barrie Kosky. Two points to note before I show it: it is sung in German, and the score has been arranged by a New Zealand composer, Elena Cats-Chernin. This is not so radical as it sounds. Early operas were seldom scored for specific instruments, but for whatever players were available, who would largely improvise their parts over a written bass line. Four centuries old or not, there is an in-the-moment quality to early opera that you sacrifice at your peril. 8. Monteverdi: Orfeo, "Vi ricorda, o boschi ombrosi" (Kosky) 9. Stills 4: all three versions So there you have it! Let's discuss. [I don't know, but am prepared to guess, that the questions of which performance seems most "right" and which is most enjoyable will have quite different answers. A point to ponder, if so.] 10. Rameau: Les Indes galantes (Paris, 1999; Andrei Serban, director) I now want to stretch your expectations even further, with a scene from a production in Paris that opened only last fall. It is from Les Indes galantes (“The Gallant Indes”) by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683– 1764), written in 1735. The previous production in Paris looked something like this: a simplified baroque tastefully updated. The plot, such as it is, is a series of excursions to foreign climes: Turkey, Peru, and Central America; the scene we are going to see is from an act called “The Savages.” Of course the thing positively reeks of cultural appropriation and colonialism. And with Paris reaping the fruits of its colonial legacy in constant racial and social unrest, such a production is irrelevant at best, insulting at worst. So what director Clément Cogitore and choreographer Bintou Dembélé have done is turn the situation on its head, by inviting the street people onto the stage of the venerable Opéra Garnier to match their own culture to Rameau’s music. See what you think. Don’t worry about the words; the chorus is just singing about how pleasant their forests are. 11. Rameau: Les Indes galantes (Paris, 2019; Bintou Dembélé , choreographer) 12. — still from the above What did you think? There will be those who will say, I’m sure, that it was never intended to be done this way, and Rameau would be turning in his grave. Maybe, but the conditions in which it was intended to be done are different in almost every respect from those today. That particularly aggressive dance style, known apparently as krumping, takes some getting used to, but I am amazed by how well it fits Rameau’s music. And you can hear the effect on the audience. I’ll get back to more comparisons later, but first I need to give you some background explanation, both generally about who does what in opera, and specifically in terms of baroque conventions. — 2 — B. Basic Concepts, Mostly Baroque 13. Stage director and conductor I have been talking about stage directors: Gilbert Deflo, Trisha Brown, Barrie Kosky, and Clément Cogitore. This might be a moment to check what exactly a stage director does. That’s easy. A modern opera production is typically in the hands of two people: the conductor, who is responsible for everything you hear, and the stage director, who is responsible for everything you see. They share the singers between them. This graphic (featuring two Canadians, as it happens) should make things clear. Of course when I say that stage directors are responsible for the set design, costume design, lighting design, and choreography, I don’t mean that they do everything themselves. Generally speaking, they work with a team of specialists in these fields—but they all report to the stage director. A stage director, actually, is a fairly modern concept; until the later 19th century, so far as I know, the staging just more or less happened. Wagner, however, staged every detail of his own works, and his grandson Wieland Wagner, working in the 1950s, could be cited as the first stage director in the modern sense, independent from the conductor and his co-equal. Nowadays, composers are expected to take a back seat and leave it to the professionals. 14. Staging an old work 1 15. Staging an old work 2 16. Staging an old work 3 17. Staging an old work 4 But the stage director is very much in focus when it comes to staging an older work today. Any staging of an older opera involves building a bridge between the past and the present. • You start with a score, and you read everything in it; the music is your Bible. But no score earlier than about 1870 will tell you what to do on the stage. • So the first task is to imagine what the composer himself would have seen; more on that in a moment. • But time has passed. What has changed in terms of: musical understanding, theater technology, the availability of singers, the expectations of the audience, and our political and moral perspectives? • Every production is thus an act of interpretation, of bridging the past to the present. I don’t expect to answer all these now, but bear these questions in mind as we look at actual productions in the weeks ahead. The photos on the right, incidentally, are all modern productions of Handel’s Tamerlano. They range from the restrained period production by Jonathan Miller at Halle to two such different concepts as those at by Davide Livermore at La Scala, Milan, and Graham Vick at Covent Garden, London. — 3 — 18. Czesky Krumlov 1 19. Czesky Krumlov 2, with stage machinery 20. Czesky Krumlov 3 The earliest production photo in the sequence I have just shown is from the 18th-century theater at Cesky Krumlov, near Prague; we shall be returning there next week. But it serves to demonstrate the theater technology of the time, which basically consisted of painted wings, headers, and backdrops which slid or dropped into place, together with devices for managing the appearance of gods from above or devils from below, and some simple mechanical devices for things like water. Despite the appearance of perspective in this photos, everything is painted on the flat surface, and all the painted surfaces are front on to the audience. Now this is a technology that can be recreated today, but should it be? The use of flat, obviously painted scenery puts the opera into quotes, as it were. It also calls for a rhetorical acting style to match.