Handel did full-frontal grief and anger in 40-plus operas which were, until recently, regarded as unstageable. Opera Theatre Ireland's James Conway, who has made a point of producing them, to acclaim, now tackles Ariodante, a tale of sexual jealousy in Scotland, writes Arminta Wallace
The entire aria hinges on just two words. For almost a full 10 minutes, the singer pleads with his beloved to come back - "Deh, ritorna" - while the violins sigh and swoop in despair. As a piece of music, Cara Sposa from Handel's opera Rinaldo is stunning in its perfection. As a piece of psychology, it is a very modern - and startlingly accurate - depiction of the shock and mental paralysis caused by grief. That Rinaldo's distress is due to his girlfriend having been carried off, not by death, but - in one of the delightfully daft "smoking gun" plot developments typical of 18th-century Italian opera seria - by a marauding black cloud doesn't undermine the composer's achievement for a second.
Handel does in-your-face, full-frontal grief like nobody else. But then he also does a pretty mean joy - not to mention anger that would curdle milk at 20 paces.
Which makes it all the more astonishing that, for many years, Handel's operas were considered unstageable, his characters dismissed as cardboard cutouts. In its biographical note on Handel, the 1964 edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music doesn't even regard his 40 or so operas as worth mentioning. True, Giulio Cesare and Rinaldo are listed under "see also"; but the somewhat cryptic entry for Giulio Cesare reads - in total - "Three-act opera by Handel. Libretto by Haym (Prod. London 1724)".
A quarter of a century later, the sleeve notes for a CD of Handel arias performed by the US countertenor David Daniels are rather more expansive. "One of those miracles of the operatic art where the plot and psychology of the characters are at one with the music and are perfectly adapted to the length of the work and its dramatic curve," they declare, while the 1993 Viking Opera Guide refers to the opera's "superb and sustained dramatic effect".
Here in Ireland, thanks to a series of Handel stagings by Opera Theatre Company, we are now well versed in the joys of onstage opera seria; but as OTC's artistic director James Conway recalls, the company's initial venture into the territory was not exactly greeted with unmitigated delight. "When we first did Tamerlano at Kilmainham Jail in 1992, people were saying stuff like, oh, it wasn't a good example of a Handel opera. Or - and this appeared in print, for goodness' sake - 'the da capo aria is not to the taste of the Irish people'."
Before long, though, OTC was not only touring Handel opera successfully around Ireland, but exporting it to the UK - and to the wider world. Flavio embarked on a lengthy Belgian tour in 1994. Three years later, Amadigi travelled to Paris and New York. A new production of Tamerlano put in an appearance in Brno, in the Czech Republic, while yet another staging made it to Melbourne and Lisbon.
Two years ago, OTC's Rodelinda also crossed the Atlantic to New York - and Conway cherishes hopes that the production may tour in India. "That's an adventure which hasn't happened yet. But who knows? The leader of our orchestra, as well as playing baroque fiddle, plays Karnatic music, the classical music of southern India. Imagine that: what you could learn from Karnatic musicians, and how they would respond to this kind of operatic tradition . . ."
The story of the small Irish touring company with the big reputation for Handel stagings is an adventure in itself. How - and why - did it all start? "At the time, in the early 1990s, the Handel operas were just not being done, and it seemed like a good opportunity for a company this size," says Conway. "I had a hunch that we could do them without savaging them, or performing them in a way that had nothing to do with the composer's intentions.
"When I came to OTC as artistic director, I had a choice. I could do pieces that would pull houses all over the place - which, of course, is one objective for a small company. But my life is too short to do stuff that I don't think has a chance of being really moving - for me, and for the people in the audience. I go to the theatre a lot, and life is definitely too short for most of the evenings that I spend there. I believe you've got to take risks. Maybe I'm snooty, but I wanted to make art, and I do think with these Handel operas - and with lots of other things we've done - we succeeded."
For Conway, who has directed five of them including the forthcoming production of Ariodante, bringing baroque operas to life is a delicate business. "There are some directors who can take a Handel opera and then take a theme - say, child abuse - and reach some new truth about that theme through the medium of the opera. But I can't do that. I wouldn't be interested in doing it, anyway."
Nor is he interested in what he calls "persuasive perversities" - setting operas in public toilets, or using an all-ethnic cast, or dressing everyone in tie-dyed cling-film. "I want things to have meaning," he says. "There's this truism about Handel opera, that it's static. Well, nothing is static if it's true, if it's honest. If you make it too busy, with lots of running around, it just seems long.
"All you can do, with somebody like Handel, is hope to do some kind of service to his incredible inventiveness. Nothing about Handel opera is ever casual, however quickly it was written. Every time there is a repetition, there is a meaning for it. The repetition of a musical phrase is not an accident, ever."
Trusting the music is easy. But to achieve the kind of theatrical vividness he aspires to as a director of Handel opera, Conway says he also needs to trust both himself and his cast. "I've learned that you don't have to think of an idea for every second - but I still find myself wanting to. Ariodante has two of the most extended joyous arias Handel ever wrote. Now, big old tragic arias are one thing. OK, you have to stop yourself from telling the singer to go down on their knees, or roll around on the stage, because everybody's seen that before. But joyous arias on stage? What do you do? I worry that it's going to look like somebody standing there singing 'I'm happy happy happy, I'm oh so very happy'.
"I think, 'Ohmigod, all I've got are two walls and a person! What can I do with them?' And of course the best thing you can do is let them be - but it takes enormous confidence to just be, on stage."
HE has chosen to set the tale of sexual jealousy at the court of the King of Scotland on a bleak, windswept Scottish coast among a strict Reformist community. He also urged his performers to rent the video of Lars Von Triers's study of cultural dislocation, Breaking the Waves, by way of preparation for rehearsals.
"Ariodante is an opera about goodness - or about an idea of goodness which a society holds dear, and which excludes many," he says. "When the opera was written, it is reckoned that approximately 40 per cent of the women of London were prostitutes. Women were either rigidly virtuous or without reputation - either good or bad, in the eyes of some in society. It was terrifyingly easy to fall through the net, to fall out of acceptable society."
On stage, Ariodante has a happy, if somewhat bittersweet, ending. As to whether this latest chapter in OTC's Handel adventure will prove to be the final one, nobody quite knows. Conway is currently working both with OTC and with English Touring Opera, to the benefit of both - Ariodante will tour the UK with ETO later this year - but he will eventually be leaving for good. Having persuaded Ireland of the delights of da capo, he nowaims to bring bel canto to the Brits. "ETO is funded to the tune of a million sterling a year, which sounds like a lot, but that has to stretch from Perth to Jersey, employing a ton of people as it goes, so the money gets worn very thin.
"I want to do bel canto, and I want to do something English, so my marketing theory is that we ought to be able to sell these pieces to English heritage people by saying, 'Look! We're doing Queen Elizabeth - in frocks!' " A decade ago, the idea of Tamburlaine the Great haunting the hallways of Kilmainham Jail might have seemed equally outlandish.
OTCs production of Handel's Ariodante opens at the Helix, DCU on February 7th and 8th, then tours to Wexford (February 11th), Cork (13th), Kilkenny (15th), Limerick (18th), Belfast (21st and 22nd), Galway (25th), Mullingar (27th) and Derry (March 1st). The OTC orchestra will be conducted by David Adams; set design is by Michael Vale, with lighting by Aideen Malone
