Classical music has a mindset. Or I might call it an ideology. Two parts of it are:
- Classical music is a high, refined, deeply serious art.
- And so scholarship about its history is greatly important, and tells us how our masterworks should be performed.
But what happens when these two points conflict? When scholarship shows us that some of our masterworks — as they were performed in their time — were neither high, serious, nor refined?
I think that then we drop our scholarship, without ever saying that we’re doing that. So we can still perform our music as if it were high art.
Case in point…
…Handel’s operas. One of which, Alcina, I saw reasonably well performed at the Washington National Opera, with supple and spirited conducting by Jane Glover. (Well, most of the singers had no idea how to sing Handel, but later for that.)
Only problem with Glover’s conducting and many other things that were good was that no kind of unified performance concept — involving music or anything else — would have been possible in Handel’s time. Or desirable. Or even appropriate for the music! (Which is true in our time, too. A point I’ll get to later.)
And that’s because Handel’s opera performances (and all Baroque opera) were and were expected to be…
…anarchy!
I should first explain that these operas were meant to be entertainment. And not very high entertainment, either. What by far was most important — what the audience — came to see — was spectacle.
A caricature of a Handel opera performance. But if this is how the caricature looked, the actual performance also must have looked extreme.
The spectacle came in two flavors.
First, scenic spectacle: The stage directions in Alcina call for collapsing mountains, the sea flooding the stage, cages full of wild beasts, and rocks and animals transformed into people. All shown on stage, in Handel’s time, with what we could call 18th century special effects.
And then musical spectacle, which I’ll describe in a moment.
So where was the anarchy?
First in the audience. They didn’t listen quietly. They talked during the performance, listened only when they felt like it, and shouted at the singers, whenever something really pleased or displeased them, or got them going in some other way.
Which, simple common sense suggests, meant that the performers would try to get the audience’s attention, by any means necessary. That contributed to anarchy.
Which also came from Handel himself! He led the performances from the harpsichord. Improvising, well, spectacularly. He was one of the great attractions at his operas. (Meaning that the discreet continuo playing we hear today is, historically, all wrong.)
And you’d think the orchestra would have improvised, too. First because Handel would have set the tone, and then because improvised ornaments were 18th century practice. (There are even reports of all the violinists in 18th century German orchestras improvising — believe it or not — independently. Which meant that they were all playing different versions of their melody.)
And the singers!
They also set a tone of anarchy, which surely affected everyone. (Including journalists writing about the performances, one of whom once speculated, in explicit detail, about the sexual habits of two sopranos who’d gotten into a physical fight on stage.)
The singers, first of all, were exotic, simply because they were Italian, Italians being flamboyant rare birds in Handel’s London.
They dressed extravagantly, wearing costumes (often glamorous or wild) that they brought with them from Italy. (No unified production concept there!)
And they ornamented their music madly. Most of the musical pieces in Baroque operas, Handel’s included, are da capo arias. Meaning that there’s a first section, then something contrasting, and then back to the top (which is what “da capo” means), as singer and orchestra repeat the entire first section.
As aria follows aria, all with that shape, these operas today can seem stately, if not unvaried and dull. But in Handel’s time, the singers didn’t simply repeat those first sections. They transformed them into something new and often wild, by changing, ornamenting, and just about rewriting their music, making the original melody unrecognizable.
So the da capo arias weren’t predictable, as they often seem now. Just the opposite, because you never knew what the singers — extravagant Italian virtuosos — were going to do.
This was the musical spectacle the audience came for. We have no idea today what it was like, because our practice now is to ornament discreetly, true to the classical music mindset, “we’re refined.”
But in the Baroque era, the singers went nuts. That must have pushed the operas over the anarchy edge. Our discretion means that we miss the theatrical point of these operas, and also that we’re unfaithful to them musically. In spite of all our claims to be historically authentic.
I know two recordings that give me some idea of how this was. First, a recording of Handel’s opera Rinaldo,l ed by the extraordinary René Jacobs, in which all kinds of crazy things happen. Including singers singing along with orchestral music, and insane improvisations during secco recitatives. You can stream this on Spotify, or buy the CD on Amazon.
Then there’s a recording of a Rinaldo aria, sung by Ewa Podles, who ornaments almost as wildly as 18th century singers did.
If anyone knows other anarchic performances, I’d love to hear about them!
***
And finally a word about why I think the Washington singers — most of them, anyway — didn’t understand Handel.
Handel’s music moves in lines. I think that you can see that in the printed score, even if you don’t read music. The singer in each aria sings pretty much continuously, except for introductions, endings, and brief interludes played by the orchestra.
And in this singing, the line is all-important. There are high notes and low notes, but they’re all connected, and — this is what I think you can see, even if you don’t read music — never interrupt the music’s flow.
So now we have (to give just one example) Angela Meade, singing the title role in Alcina. She’s used to another style of music, Italian operas from a later time, by Bellini, Verdi, and Puccini.
In those operas, high notes are much more emphatic. Again, you can (I think) see that easily in the printed score. If there’s a high note, either it stands out on its own, or else it’s the crown of a musical arch, in which it’s built up to and then subsided from.
Meade, singing the title role, would sometimes find some music where a high note briefly sounds like Puccini. And so she’d sing it like Puccini, with extra emphasis, finding notes before it (if she could) that could function as a buildup.
Which spoiled Handel’s line. And sometimes made a lower passage that came afterwards — or even a single lower note — sound as if it had no point. So the music made no sense.
Bravo, Greg !
Very enlightening post. I think and hope performers of Handel and other music from that time are going to get more and more anarchic. After all, as you point out, that’s what a “historically informed” performance practice would call for.
It may be that performers have lapsed into a worshipful style with composers like Handel because their music was so well composed that later generations of musicians have tended to treat it with great “respect.” And then there’s the overwhelming effect of the Messiah. I’m sure that all of that sacred text (sacred to some people, anyway) had the irresistible effect of making the performance style super-respectable, and the fact that it is far and away the best-known Handel composition bled over into the way it is considered imperative to do his other stuff. That’s my theory, anyway.
I notice that recent recordings of the Water and Fireworks suites are getting more unrestrained with their flourishes. These were supposed to be very exciting pieces at the time, and shouldn’t be sauntered through routinely.
Well-written and timely. Thanks for this.
Opera in England (and France) back in the day was like watching TV in your living room with your (tipsy) friends. It filled many of the same needs. It was a hell of a lot more fun than attending opera today, where the board up it’s butt has another board up ITS but. In the old practice, when all were hushed and attentive and you could hear a pin drop, it was because the music, drama and players COMPELLED that ambience into creation. They weren’t reluctant to laugh at the funny parts, and if you were poor at your job, the patrons would not politely pretend otherwise.
What was once lively has become a museum. Next stop, if thing don’t change, the museum becomes a morgue.
I recently was invited to speak to a fifth grade classroom about my Go-Go Symphony, which mixes funk/jazz/pop with classical genres. I played a video of Chuck Brown playing go-go, DC’s own genre of dance funk. They loved it and danced to it. I asked them for their impression of it. They said it sounds like there is some jazz in it as well as what felt like an “incomplete” beat. I think that was their layman’s way of saying it was syncopated, or that it swings.
Then I played them a video of an orchestra playing Beethoven’s fifth. I asked them what their impression of “classical music” is. One girl said she thought is was boring and that it puts her to sleep. She said it looks like the musicians are just sitting there playing the notes; whereas in the Chuck Brown video I had played previously, they were less afraid of making mistakes. A boy agreed, saying the Chuck Brown band was not afraid to make mistakes and might turn mistakes into a “magical creation.” The classical orchestra does not do that, he says. I was quite impressed with these kids’ articulate observations.
Well, of course they’re not just sitting there playing the notes, but it takes some experience with that moldy old style of music to realize that. (They’re not afraid of making mistakes, either!)
I don’t think it’s much of a secret among professionals that many symphony players do in fact just sit there playing the notes. And then, in my experience, complaining afterward about the conductor. And, going beyond just playing the notes is or was a violinist with a notable American orchestra, who played air violin at rehearsals and performances. Or in other words didn’t play any notes at all, with or without any feeling. I heard this almost literally unbelievable story from the executive director of that orchestra, after we’d had a couple of drinks. Of course I asked how the man could keep his job, and the answer was that the musicians wouldn’t agree to have him fired, because they didn’t want to give that power to management.
But I guess that remarkable situation is a digression from the main point here. In tribute to blank note-playing, I can offer a joke, told to me by the concertmaster of a major American orchestra. “What’s the happiest day in an orchestra string player’s life? When they get tenure, and never have to practice again.” Or something told me by a back-stand violinist from one of the absolutely top orchestras in the US. I’d asked him how the violins stayed together, playing the complex rhythms of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. “We don’t,” was his quick and unabashed answer.
Of course these are worst-case stories, and it’s easy to exaggerate the disaffection (to put it in a mild way) of American orchestral musicians. But still that disaffection is real, and leads often enough not just to audible consequences, but to visible ones. That is, even a casual observer can see that the musicians aren’t all deeply involved in what they’re doing. Just look at their body language.
As for the fear of making mistakes, after 20 years of teaching at Juilliard, I can say that my students will say they’re terrified of making mistakes where anyone can hear them. Technical perfection has become not just a given, but the number one requirement for any American orchestra musician. Musicians auditioning for orchestra jobs know that they’d better play absolutely perfectly, and also in an orthodox way, not taking any musical risks, or doing anything with the music that isn’t what the people listening have always heard.
And finally the visuals are important. They tell a true story that even a kid who doesn’t know classical music will correctly understand. A really good funk group is going to look much more involved with the music than most symphony orchestras are. Which is because they really are more involved. Though of course there are orchestra musicians whose involvement is unmistakable. When I heard the Mariinsky Orchestra at the Kennedy Center a week or so ago, I was interested to see that there was an odd number of second violinists, meaning that one, at the back of the section, had to sit alone, with no stand partner.
I was curious to watch her, to see how she looked when she played in such an exposed position. The answer was wonderfully gratifying. She put her whole soul and body into the music, without being in any way excessive. I loved watching her.
And there’s one orchestra I’ve seen where everyone looks like that. This is the Berlin Philharmonic. All the musicians move when they play, putting their bodies into every note. This is something that musicians in other orchestras not only don’t do, but may be forbidden to do. I remember coming out of Carnegie Hall after a Berlin Philharmonic concert. A musician I knew in the NY Philharmonic came running up to me. “Did you see how they moved,” he said, carried away with admiration. “I’d be reprimanded if I moved that way!”
I really hate to be home-town-chauvinistic all the time, but anyone who wants to see an orchestra that doesn’t sit there playing the notes should drop in to a concert of the City of Brotherly Love Orchestra (you know who I’m talking about). Maybe there are some back-stand robots in it, but I look at the whole bunch pretty carefully and it doesn’t seem so to me. And they certainly don’t sound like it.
I also know from my own experience playing that a musician can be pretty deeply involved in playing her or his instrument without exhibiting a lot of gyrations. Sorry if that sounds too “classical,” but I think it’s true.
I’m certainly not against swaying, dancing, jumping around, clapping your hands, and shouting for joy if that’s what you’re moved to do, but I get a little peeved with people who assume that someone who’s “just sitting there,” in their eyes, is necessarily bored, lazy, or just a prisoner of routine. Tain’t necessarily so.
(Also, sometimes jumping around and shouting for joy makes it difficult for the people around you to hear the music. There’s a whole theory about listening to what’s called “classical music’ that I could elaborate, but maybe some other time.)
Jonathan Carney, concertmaster of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, is one musician who really moves when he plays. When I first saw him I was almost distracted from the music. Now I enjoy watching his enthusiasm for the music.
I agree about the Washington performance, but what upset me more than the way Alcina punched those high notes was the overall ugliness of the sets, if you could call them sets, and, with only a couple of exceptions, the costumes. (And the lighting, but oh, never mind…) I do completely agree about the static ABA stolidity of those arias. It was heartbreaking, especially as the decades-long Handel revival seems to be ending. i wonder if there’s a dvd of Renee Fleming in Rodelinda—so dreamy—or David Daniels and Michael Maniachi in Julius Caesar? I pray that this Alcina won’t be the last staged Handel I see….
Anyway, while I thought the sets and costumes were truly horrible (especially for an opera set on a mythical island), even most of the singers were physically wrong. Poor Alcina was too heavy to stand or move, and had to prop herself on a lighted cube most of the time—which sapped that bit of potential energy from the performance. And surely somewhere there must be an adorable countertenor who could have filled the role of Ruggiero, or even a tall or commanding mezzo, instead of the short, pale, pudgy, poorly wigged mezzo who sang well but hardly looked a plausible leading man—especially next to her much taller, strong-jawed love interest. Only Morgana, sung by a beautiful, sweet-voiced, dramatic performer, received any kind of enthusiastic response from the packed house when I was there, in part, I believe, because she was a welcome visual relief, on top of her skills.
I was close behind the conductor, and somehow felt she wasn’t to blame, so your perspective is illuminating. In the end I enjoyed being there. After I thought to close my eyes.