by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, May 8, 2006.
There is nothing in music more unstoppably beautiful than a Handel aria
moving in slow, regal splendor. It is like a godly machine, crushing
all ugliness and plainness in its path. Consider “Ombra mai fù,” an ode
to a shady tree, from the 1738 opera “Serse.” It has a stately tempo
marking (Larghetto); a swaying meter of three-quarter time; a hypnotic
procession of quarter notes in the bass; and immaculate lyric turns in
the upper parts and the solo voice. As Baroque art goes, it is not very
baroque. Not a single note is out of place, or seems to have been put
there for a decorative purpose. The aria is all structure, as if it
were an ideal modern building whose girders are gorgeous in themselves.
There is something uncanny about how the segments are joined together.
Often, the changing chords of any given bar pivot on a single tone, and
this tone is found sometimes in the bass, sometimes in the middle
parts, sometimes on top. Like a great river in the sun—the best way to
track such music is by a triangulation of metaphors—the aria glitters
on the surface and flows powerfully below.
For a long time, the better part of George Frideric Handel’s output
seemed destined for oblivion, with “Messiah,” the “Water Music,” and
other popular favorites standing in for the rest. In the past decade or
two, however, beauty has triumphed over time, and dozens of Handel’s
operas and oratorios have crossed over into the mainstream repertory.
So far this year, “Hercules” has been staged at BAM,
“Acis and Galatea” has played at New York City Opera, and “Solomon” has
had a concert performance at Lincoln Center. This month, “Rodelinda”
runs at the Metropolitan Opera. Deluxe recordings are piling up; some
recent highlights are René Jacobs’s vigorous version of “Saul,” Alan
Curtis’s tasteful “Radamisto,” and strongly characterized recitals by
Sandrine Piau, Cecilia Bartoli, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who sings
a near-definitive “Ombra mai fù.” With the release of Curtis’s
“Lotario” in 2004, all thirty-nine surviving Handel operas have been
recorded.
It’s a bit of a mystery why Handel has become so crucial for
early-twenty-first-century listeners. The prior century made a cult of
Bach, whose music takes the form of an endless contrapuntal quest.
Perhaps, in an age of information overload and ambient fear, we have
more need for Handel’s gentler, steadier art. At the same time, though,
this composer appeals to the permanent hunger for high-class melodrama
and psychological theatre. Not only the operas but also some of the
oratorios have proved stageworthy; Peter Sellars’s deeply gripping 1996
production of “Theodora,” which is available on DVD, was a landmark in
this respect. Handel commands our attention with bold changes of tone,
vivid swings from joy to rage, and spells of paralyzing sadness. From
time to time, he lifts his façades to disclose a shadowy background,
full of broken forms and desperate gestures. He does not conceal the
artifice of his mythological stories—deus-ex-machina endings seem
designed to cause as much amusement as awe—and thereby acknowledges the
limits of art. He does not want to save the world, only to make it
better for a little while.
Handel was born in Saxony in 1685, moved to London
in 1712, and died there in 1759. Scholars have lately been poking
around in the corners of his biography, trying to flesh out the opaque
image that appears in standard histories—that of the grumpy German
music master with the waspish tongue. Ruth Smith has studied the
composer’s relationship to the politics of his time, showing how his
grand Israelite oratorios metaphorically celebrated the regime of King
George II, while also leaving room for religious dissent and contrary
thought. Donald Burrows has emphasized the piety and workmanship of
this seemingly worldly, lordly figure. Gary Thomas and Ellen Harris
have delved into the composer’s sexuality, drawing implications from
the fact that he often moved in what would now be described as gay
circles. We get the sense of a crafty character who had a flair for
satisfying diverse constituencies without becoming captive to any of
them. He was at once a great artist and a great entrepreneur, who
somehow insured that business imperatives never compromised his
artistic values.
Unconfirmed reports of a gay Handel—there is no definite evidence of
a relationship either with a man or with a woman—have caught the fancy
of directors, who have used them as an excuse to camp up the operas
mercilessly. Seldom is there an up-tempo scene in Handel without a lot
of prancing to dotted rhythms, often in ersatz Mark Morris moves. City
Opera’s recent Handel productions have worked the camp angle, though
not to excess. Mark Lamos stages the pastoral tragedy “Acis” as an
ambisexual garden party disrupted by a ridiculous dancing version of
the giant Polyphemus, but he manages to find tenderness and complexity
in the scenario. By having Damon, Acis’s boon companion, hold his
friend in his arms during the aria “Consider, fond shepherd,” he echoes
a remarkable find in Harris’s book “Handel as Orpheus”—that the
climactic trio of the opera is based on a same-sex love poem by
Alexander Pope. There is something recognizably Handelian about this
production’s intermingling of preciousness and heartbreak. By contrast,
Luc Bondy’s stark, modern staging of the oratorio “Hercules” is too
solemn by half, unable to give life to those long sections of the work
in which characters set out their feelings as ornate décor.
One reason that opera companies are so Handel-happy is that there is
a practically infinite supply of singers who can spin out his intricate
vocal lines with agility and ease. In “Acis,” Philippe Castagner and
Sarah Jane McMahon sang the leads fluently; Jason Hardy brought a
strong bass voice and goofy dance moves to the role of Polyphemus; and
the young tenor Nicholas Phan rendered the part of Damon in clean-cut,
attractive style. The star of BAM’s
“Hercules” was the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who, in a string of
recent appearances, has transcended a first-rate technique to deliver
portrayals of transfixing, sometimes frightening intensity. “Solomon,”
at Lincoln Center, was led by David Hansen, a pure-voiced young
Australian who is typical of a new breed of matinée-idol countertenors.
Two more representatives of the type are singing in the Met’s sumptuous
production of “Rodelinda”: the star German countertenor Andreas Scholl
and the up-and-coming Christophe Dumaux. There is little reason to
think that Handel would have disapproved.
New York’s unofficial Handel festival brought to town two more or
less infallible interpreters of the composer: William Christie, who
conducted Les Arts Florissants in “Hercules,” and René Jacobs, who led
the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in “Solomon.” Both men have a
knack for making stylized Baroque forms sound alive and spontaneous:
rhythms bounce along with quasi-popular energy, vibrant colors burst on
the ears. Christie, who has come to BAM
almost every year since 1989, is a familiar quantity, as coolly
dazzling as ever. Jacobs, who has issued a string of brilliant and
provocative recordings on the Harmonia Mundi label, is seen here much
less often, and his conducting of “Solomon,” by turns opulent and
intimate, humorous and savage, forbiddingly grand and envelopingly
warm, was the revelation of the season.
There is a sequence in Act III of “Solomon” that presents Handel’s
genius at its vertiginous height. The King is showing off the Temple of
Jerusalem to the Queen of Sheba, and orders musical performances to
adorn the setting. Among them is a dark, violent chorus of “hopeless
love,” which plunges through a harmonic vortex from G minor to E-flat
minor and back again. It is an enormous shock in the context of a
generally festive piece. Then Solomon calls for a mood of calm, and the
vortex vanishes. It’s as if Handel were telling us that music is
nothing more than a magic trick that he performs on command. You might
suspect him of cynicism, except that these disparate movements add up
to their own temple of sound, which has withstood the centuries and
shines brighter than ever. The last line of the oratorio, thundered
over chords of marble, becomes self-referential: “But the fame of the
just shall eternally last.”