George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Handel’s operas, the main focus of his energies for over 30 years, were all but forgotten within 20 years of his death. The English historian of music Dr. Burney, a great admirer of Handel, in his celebrated General History of Music (1776-89) was particularly keen to draw his readers’ attention to the opera Alcina. After observing that ‘few of Handel’s productions have been more frequently performed, or more generally and deservedly admired, than this opera’, Burney appeals for its reinstatement: ‘Upon the whole, if any one of Handel’s dramatic works should be brought on the stage, entire, without a change or mixture of airs from his other operas, it seems as if this would well sustain such a revival.’
Burney’s words fell into unresponsive minds: Alcina along with all Handel’s 40 operas, had to wait at least another 140 years until it was staged again. There was a performance at Leipzig in 1878, in a heavily edited version, then a gap until 1957 when the Handel Opera Society staged Alcina in St. Pancras Town Hall, London, with Joan Sutherland in the title role. Perhaps Burney’s words had settled in some musician’s mind; surely its champions knew that Alcina was Handel’s last great operatic success in his lifetime, and reasoned that what made it appeal to the audiences of the 1730s might work again in the 1950s.
Alcina has a number of features setting it apart from most of Handel’s operas, notably a considerable part for chorus and some important ballet music. This brings variety to both music and spectacle – breaking up the sequence of da capo solo arias and recitatives characteristic of most Italian opera seria. In Alcina these arias are at least as varied and brilliant as any by Handel. The opera is dominated by the main protagonist, Alcina herself, a role easier to cast from modern resources than the castrato roles so prominent in Handel opera…easier, that is, if you have a soprano as brilliant in florid music as Joan Sutherland.
Even so, the Handel Opera Society was showing courage - ‘plunging dauntlessly on’ as one London critic wrote of that 1957 production ‘into the long list of Handel’s operas’. The public, even the knowledgeable public, was perhaps not ready – as the same critic averred: ‘Dramatically considered, Alcina is a stagnant pond’. Is the public ready even today? It is no accident that Alcina is the only Handel opera to have been mounted by The Australian Opera – the conductor was Richard Bonynge, who had coached his wife in the part of Alcina so many years before, and who in 1957 was to conduct the first recording of the opera – arguably, the first adequately performed complete Handel opera on disc.
The recording was an offshoot of a stage production. Joan Sutherland, in the intervening years, had sung Alcina in Germany, then in Italy, in a production especially mounted for her at the Teatro La Fenice, Venice. The producer on that occasion was Franco Zeffirelli, and his production was later seen in Dallas and at Covent Garden. Alcina was an opera highly likely to appeal to a producer with such flair for spectacular effect as Zeffirelli. It is a magic opera; Alcina herself is a sorceress living in an enchanted island world of luxury and sensual indulgence, and the plot gives repeated opportunities for rapid transformations, elaborate costumes and backdrops. Yet Zeffirelli treated the opera in such a way, many critics considered, as to diminish its dramatic impact. He presented Alcina as an entertainment given by some Royal patron to his courtiers; it is set within the palace, with the singers, after each aria, bowing to their aristocratic audience, and courtiers not only commenting visibly on the action, but even singing the choruses (these, in Handel’s conception, aren’t comments, but an important part of the dramatic action).
Fear that opera seria’s conventions would prove a barrier to modern audiences led this producer to make Alcina a comment on those conventions. One critic felt that the singers of two of the main parts, Joan Sutherland and Monica Sinclair as Bradamante, repeating their 1957 roles, seemed, in the new production, to have lost the opportunity ‘to strike their listeners in the midriff’. The ‘business’ of the courtiers, charming in itself, distracted from the music; more seriously, it destroyed the essence of Alcina, which is illusion.
'A necromancer in the midst of his enchantments'
Handel would hardly have been pleased. His great admirer Mrs. Pendarves (later Mrs. Delany), delighted by the first performances, had written that ‘whilst Mr. Handel was playing his part I could not help thinking him a necromancer in the midst of his enchantments’. It was to this sense of illusion that the Australian Opera production of Alcina in 1981 sought to return. The framework was that of the 18th century theatre. Handel did not question its conventions, and turned them into strengths. The design of the production was based partly on the 18th century Drottningholm Court Theatre near Stockholm (made famous as the setting for Ingmar Bergman’s film version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute). Drottningholm is nearly unique in having its 18th century machinery intact, so that scene changes can be made with the effect intended, even with the curtain up. As the designer of the AO production, John Pascoe, wrote: ‘Baroque opera relies to a large extent on visual change and splendour as a setting for the glittering jewels which are its arias. I hope I have achieved some of this spirit’.
The choice of a director was indicative: of a man of the theatre, mainly ballet, Sir Robert Helpmann. This was to be a stylised production, aiming to re-create a world of enchantment, integrating movement, design, and music. The visual presentation strove for unity by underlining the marine element in the storyline – changing, for example, the urn, receptacle of Alcina’s magic power, into a magic pearl, and all the beasts (Alcina’s transmogrified former lovers) into monsters of the deep.
There is much in Alcina to suggest this approach, but my recollection of the effect of the production in the theatre leaves a slight unease – was this another of those compromises adopted by major opera companies? Do they still fear that an opera seria, no matter how fine, simply won’t work for modern audiences unless the fullest of theatrical accessories are brought to bear? Was Alcina, after all, from the dramatic point of view a ‘stagnant pond’?
One has the feeling that the magical element in Alcina hasn’t always been taken seriously by modern (especially British) commentators. The libretto of Alcina has been maligned and misunderstood – ‘unbelievable’ crops up often in critical discussion. People quite happy to accept the fantasy of – say – Star Wars seem quite unable to surrender to the richer fantasy of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, from which Handel’s libretto for Alcina derives. Yet there was a time when this poem, written in Ferrara by the courtier Ludovico Ariosto between 1505 and 1537, was almost universally read and enjoyed – it was certainly familiar to the more educated of Handel’s audiences, and he drew subjects from it for three operas: Orlando, Ariodante, and Alcina. These are among Handel’s finest operas, which is no accident. Mrs. Delany was right, Handel was something of a necromancer in the theatre, and the romantic strain in his imagination was released by the supernatural element in Ariosto. There was also less need for the plot to take a strictly rational course.
Orlando furioso as source
Orlando furioso is the story of the madness of Roland, driven crazy by his unrequited love for Angelica, daughter of the Great Khan. Orlando is Roland, Charlemagne’s knight, whose death on the pass of Roncesvalles in 778 is sung in the Chanson de Roland. Around this semi-historical, semi-legendary figure Ariosto weaves a long and complex narrative, light-heartedly jumping centuries to comment on events of his own day, prophesying the greatness of the House of Este, the rulers of Ferrara. Their line was shown to stem from the marriage of the knight Ruggiero and the lady Bradamante, whose love is the subject of the part of the Orlando furioso story from which the story Alcina is drawn.
Ruggiero, flying around the world on the hippogriff, truly a science-fiction beast, alights on Alcina’s magic island (somewhere near Japan, perhaps?), where he soon falls in thrall to her sorcery of love.
The chief differences between the libretto and Ariosto result from changing narrative description into drama. Handel’s librettist brings Bradamante to the island, in disguise as a knight, accompanied by her tutor Melissa, whose name was suggested by the good sorceress Melissa, who in Orlando furioso appears to Ruggiero disguised as his former tutor Atlante, to bring him back from his unmanly course, to the paths of duty. This happens in encounters between the betrothed couple, with the additional drama of Ruggiero’s failure to recognise not only Alcina’s true nature, but for a long time his own wife. The sub-plot of the flirtations of Alcina’s sister Morgana, also an invention of the librettist, serves to create the typical 18th century opera distribution of characters, each with da capo arias apportioned and placed according to each character’s relative importance.
The libretto is, then, a long way after Ariosto, and strips from him much of his poetic vision. Even as ‘librettese’, nevertheless, this remains a story full of powerful symbolism: the smashing of the urn of enchanted powers, the return of reality after illusion, the setting free of those under Alcina’s spell. More importantly still, the opera is about the nature and power of love –this is Ariosto’s theme in the Orlando furioso too, under all the fantastic overlay; Handel found it and responded.
Alcina contains words and music of arias Handel originally composed in Italy for different contexts. These must have been inserted by the composer (who probably had a hand in shaping the libretto); the added arias tend especially, to have strong emotional content (as Winton Dean, the foremost student of Handel's dramatic works, has pointed out).
Here we approach the crux of what makes Alcina work as an opera, and what would prove the sceptics wrong about the dramatic viability of the best of opera seria, what would vindicate Burney’s claim that Alcina was one of the Handel operas most worth reviving. Not the magic, not the scene changes, not even the opportunities for vocal display of the most dizzying kind – Alcina has all those. Music holds them all in balance making for vivid character and drama – that is Handel’s major achievement in Alcina.
Great musical dramatist
Those who believe that Handel was a great musical dramatist contend that when the music is allowed to make its intended effect the drama comes alive. In other words, Handel knew what he was doing. His carefully planned schemes shouldn’t be interfered with – whether by excluding whole arias or their da capo sections, shortening or excluding orchestral ritornelli (so that the producer won’t have to find something more for the character to do) – all these upset the way Handel worked on the expectations of his audiences. A locus classicus of interference is allocating the aria ‘Tornami a vagheggiar’ (at the end of the first act) to Alcina. Intended for Morgana, it perfectly expresses the return of her fickle affections to their true love. Admittedly Handel, in later productions of Alcina, gave the aria to Strada, the singer of Alcina, but this was because he didn’t have for Morgana a singer who could manage it. His first thoughts were best, because the aria contradicts Alcina’s disposition throughout the first act, her infatuation with Ruggiero. Allocating so brilliant a piece to a minor character shows Handel prodigal with his invention. Alcina herself already has six superb arias, carefully placed at key points in each of the three acts. At first, she is the amorous voluptuary (Dean’s phrase), a type of woman Handel always portrayed well (think of Semele). In Act II she becomes the scorned lover. This aria (‘Ah! mio cor! schemito sei!’) was much admired, notably by Mrs. Pendarves. It begins with a slow lament in C minor, with mournful detached chords for the strings. Then, in a forceful fast section in the major key, Alcina tries to dispel her love for Ruggiero ‘Is she not Alcina, a queen and a magician?’, but suddenly the first part returns, without any repeat of the orchestra’s introduction; it is as though, says Dean, Alcina’s mind, seething with thoughts of revenge, is suddenly overwhelmed by the recollection of her love.
In the great scene where Alcina conjures the spirits, only to find they do not respond, because her magic powers have been over-trumped, Handel leaves us with considerable sympathy for this woman. He has persuaded us to see her not just as an evil sorceress, but as a woman deeply in love.
By a superb dramatic irony, this scene is immediately preceded by what became the most famous aria in the work, Ruggiero’s ‘Verdi prati’ (Green meadows). Leaving Alcina’s kingdom, he looks back with lingering sensual longing on its delights, which he knows will soon turn back to their true, horrible aspect. One of Handel’s most celebrated disputes with a singer shows that he knew what he was about here. The famous male alto castrato Carestini, who played the part of Ruggiero, rejected the aria when it was first sent to him, presumably because he thought this lovely rondo too lacking in opportunities for showing off. Handel, according to Burney, went to the singer’s house in a great rage, and upbraided Carestini: ‘You toc! Don’t I know better as your seluf, vaat is pest for you to sing? If you will not sing all de song vaat I give you, I will not pay you ein stiver!’
Even the ballets and choruses in Alcina, on the face of it decorative entertainment, are used by Handel to considerable dramatic purpose. Their inclusion was no doubt prompted by the availability of the famous French ballerina Mille. Sallé and her troupe. There was something of a scandal – Mlle. Sallé’s costume was too daring for English tastes: ‘She ventured to appear without skirt, without a dress, in her natural hair and with no ornament on her head. She wore nothing in addition to her bodice and under-petticoat but a simple robe of muslin arranged in drapery after the model of a Greek statue’. This is a costume eminently practical for a freer kind of dancing than the highly stylized movements, under an elaborate head-dress, of French baroque opera. Mlle. Sallé was anticipating not only Gluck’s ‘reform’ operas such as Orphée et Euridice, but even Isadora Duncan! Handel places these ballets and choruses carefully, to evoke the delights of Alcina’s island at the beginning, to heighten the impact of Alcina’s great invocation of the spirits in Act II, and to rejoice at the return to human form of all Alcina’s victims in the finale to the opera. Handel wasn’t trying to reform opera, but he wasn’t afraid to bend the conventions to heighten the drama.
If Handel’s music can make its full impression, and the production takes its cues from the marriage of music and drama, then the end of this opera can be very moving. The characters have taken on human dimensions and evoke our sympathy, in this opera about love. If it is surprising that this happens in a magic opera, remember Mozart’s Magic Flute. Handel was a necromancer indeed.
First published in Opera Australia 1987