Staging Handel's "Messiah"?...
...and not just staging it, but making it into a relevant, compelling, modern Passion Play?
The Messiah holds a very special place in my musical history. My mother was given the Sir Malcolm Sargent version as a house present when one of my new school friends came to spend the holidays with us at the end of my first school term in Shropshire. This was a perfect introduction to both the work and my further discovery of the planet across the Channel - an entirely English reading, spacious, luminous and free from angst, very much like Beecham's, which I would discover soon afterwards. I played it continuously on my small Philips record-player for months.
I later fell in love with Klemperer's majestic, Prussian, very Old Testament version - part of the rich Walter Legge EMI-produced corpus; recorded with the Philharmonia in London, with, of course, the arch-impresario's own wife, the great Elisabeth Schwartzkopf, as well as Nicolai Gedda, Jerome Hines and Grace Hoffman. I've never minded Klemperer's unhurried tempi, because he never loses tension, whether here, in his definitive
St Matthew Passion, in
Zauberflöte, even in his unfinished Ring (the
Walküre's first act only, enough to blow Solti's competing Decca Ring in the water.) By that time I had acquired a Dual hi-fi system with a warm sound which did the choruses and the trumpet solos more justice.
In the meantime, living in New York, I discovered the traditional Christmas
Messiah sing-along at Avery Fisher Hall; a lovely, joyful, entirely un-French custom which delighted me. (
Nous? Let rip?
Vous plaisantez, j'espère?) AND I KNEW ALL THE WORDS; had known them since I was twelve. (Being simultaneously introduced to Jennens's KJV libretto and to Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer at morning Chapel did more to teach me English than probably anything I learned in class.)
The Handel revival had barely started then; most of my friends dismissed him as barely above Elgar. Certainly Klemperer did little to shake the 19th-century massive, Mendelssohnian tradition. The early Baroque ensembles took the opposite tack, aggressively so. They were hard work and not much joy. I recently tried to listen again to my Jean-Claude Malgloire, La Grande Ecurie et la Chambre du Roy Handel LPs - nope, still bored to tears.
And then of course, while traditionalists like Colin Davis, Neville Marriner, even Gardiner, continued to produce beautifully-executed, museum-quality
Messiah performances (what we call here
des fonds de tiroir, reliable sellers in any back-catalogue) the full-blast Handel mania hit in the 1990s, sustained by daring opera stagings which you couldn't, at the time imagine inflicting on Verdi and Puccini. I have a theory that
opera seria is far more relevant to our cynical times than the great romantic works - we find dying for love faintly ridiculous, but we recognise the cold-headed, duplicitous political manoeuvrings in
La Clemenza di Tito,
Alexander's Feast or
Giulio Cesare - one of the many clever choices in the Glyndebourne Giulio Cesare McVicar production is to make his Ptolemy so recognisably like Uday Hussain or Bashar Assad; a spiteful, weak man with a bloodthirsty security apparatus.
But even today, with newer readings like Harnoncourt's, René Jacobs's or Ton Koopman's, I would never have thought possible to apply opera's new stage breakthroughs to
The Messiah; in effect stripping it of centuries-old layers of monumental, dead oratorio varnish. And yet it does work, and HOW. It perhaps could not have happened elsewhere than in Vienna, at the Theater an der Wien in 2009 - in the heart of Germanic Counter-Reformation, not so very far from Oberammergau, but also in a city with a radical theatre tradition, and experience in many kinds of revolutions.
I hesitate to post a short mashup video, but this gives an idea of the production values. (My DVD, needless to say, is in the post.) The imagery, of course, will be familiar; it helps if you do know the score:
And this is the Bejun Mehta scene which drew me in:
Jean-Christophe Spinosi conducts his appositely-named Ensemble Matheus. The production is brilliantly conceived and directed by Claus Guth, Conrad Kuhn and Christian Schmidt, with a silent dancer as the central sacrificial figure, and a sign-language performer acting as both Everyman and one-woman Greek chorus. In addition to a strong cast of soloists, it features the stupendous Arnold Schoenberg choir, who sing Handel's great choruses with detail so crisp you hear notes you never knew were there before. I came across this wonder while trolling YouTube for more Bejun Mehta: he is the alto voice here; but everyone is terrific, turning amazing acting performances.
Talk about giving meaning back to words.
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