Handel’s Rodelina through HD at the movies

Renee Fleming as a plangently eager Rodelina: her husband is alive after all, and she is on the lookout for him

Dear friends and readers,

Score another triumph for Renee Fleming and the Met: the production of Handel’s Rodelina (1729), conducted by Harry Bicket, manages to convey a moving depth of genuine or authentic emotion, aesthetically pleasing experience, not to omit beautiful singing from a Baroque opera whose dramatic stylization is formalized, plot-design and literal enactments of the characters improbable even on their own terms, and requirement for two castrati, an impossible demand to fulfill.

The story is complicated. Antonio Salvi did not go to the usual 16th to 17th century Renaissance Italian epic-romance narratives (Tasso, Ariosto) nor classical Latin sources, but turned to one of these 8th century chronicles of high violence, cruelty and (implicitly) raw sex, which I’ve read versions of in my research on the Colonna in Rome in the 13th century at literal war with the Orsini (see my Vittoria Colonna section on my website).

The whole atmosphere and motives are transformed by a point of view that by the end of the 18th century would come to be called “sensibility.” Salvi and Handel tell the story of a widow pressured to marry under threat of death to her son,precisely what is found in Racine’s Andromache, with the emphasis changed to her grief as a mother, as in in Ambrose Philips’s English translation and adaptation, The Distressed Mother.

Rodelina (sung by Fleming) is more than a distressed mother; she is a great heroine who is of intense importance to everyone in the manner of later 17th century heroic romances (by people like Madeleine de Scudery). The opera contains central elements of the sentimental comedies of the English stage: a male protagonist, Grimaoldo (sung by Joseph Kaiser), reforms. Here it’s not a matter of sexual transgression, but handing back the kingdom to Rodelina and her (feeble) husband, Bertarido (Andreas Scholl) in a fit of depression and remorse, which (unlike the English plays which save the reform for the last scene of the play) begins somewhere in the second act. Psychologically and politically speaking, a very difficult role to enact. Twice Grimoaldo is urged to kill someone he ought to kill: Rhodelina insists he kill her son before she marries so she can loathe him utterly:

Bertarido insists in a very long aria (that Jim said was utterly characteristic of what was given to castrati to sing) that he too be murdered rather than restored to the throne:

Poor man, he cannot get himself to murder the man he deposed or that man’s son. Why I never did figure out. I should stop making fun. It’s tragically (I say tragically) easy to mock the good impulses of the human soul. In the 18th century in art there was a powerful need to make these triumph over everyday amorality, perhaps as part of the reformist Enlightenment.

Izzy was entranced throughout; she leaned forward and listened intently. She seemed moved at the scenes and character’s arias. She wrote her thesis at Sweet Briar for her degree in music on Handel and his operas. This is only the second one she’s been able to see and hear. The previous one was Giulio Cesare at Glimmerglas, which we bought the CD of about half an hour after the performance we enjoyed was over. She wrote a wry insightful review herself.

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The opera opened with Rodelina in prison — her beautiful linen and comfortably appointed bed were not meant to be realistic but rather fitting for an opera diva

For quick review: it began slow and at first I was interested as an 18th century person: I observed how the blocking had been stylized into specific groups against specific individuals. See how the plot-design resembles Racine’s Andromache, how beautiful the costumes though not realistic and opera set in 18th instead of 8th century). Then sometime during the 2nd act they got to me. Perhaps it was the slow build-up of each character’s personality and thwarted promise. began to have my heart beat to their when Fleming as Rhodelina eager for her husband appears. Then it was she and Andreas Scholl just making up, Scholl is a counter-tenor, it was just so poignant and the two high voices interchanging heart-aching melody.

Little human moments in the staging began to multiply by the second act too. Such as Urnolfo, Bertarido’s side-kick, who at the absence of Andres Scholl, sings to the little boy, helps him with his homework (which he was hard at work at complete with improbable quill several times) and hoists the child on his back to walk away.

Stephanie Blythe as Eduige was moving by the end when she joined forces with her sister-in-law. Here they are in Bertarido’s prison in the last scene where they still believe he has been murdered.

Eduige tries to comfort Rodelina

Counter-tenors as replacements for castrati: we had two in Rodelinda. Andreas Scholler in the case as Bertarido, and Iestyn Davies as Unulfo. Such men use half their vocal chords is the same it’s done, cut off part of their range in the way someone might in playing a violin stop the lower register; it is a kind of falsetto but they have beautiful harmonic sounds and can project the sound. Jim maintained it’s not the same voice as the castrato. The scenes with Fleming were just beautiful and we were meant to hear the two high voices and did not strain his voice as she was central to the singing:

Rodelina and Bertarido are re-united

The original castrati had depth and power from the large lungs of a man. Jim says the castrati combined this with the flexibility of a coloratura soprano voice which can make all sorts of notes quickly. Jim thought one scene towards the end where Bertarido is nagging Grimoaldo to kill him Scholler was really strained.

For my part, it was jarring for me to watch men come out with what seemed women’s voices and it made me wonder about the 18th century audience watching these things. The cross-dressing of women in men’s outfits would please the male audience as they would see thighs, knees, calves and could dream of the rest. Surely it was not done as a travesty. It would be a man performing femininity, but he’d be over-sized. I know in this earlier era slavery was omnipresent, it was fine to press men, flog them, whip a servant to death (with impunity) and the castrating of such men was apparently condoned sufficiently for people to go to such operas and enjoy them. So did they even register this person as violated or simply did they wallow in a voice? We once a the City Opera in the 1970s a Guilio Cesare production with Beverly Sills where Norman Lear had the part of the lead male written for a castrato originally; so the voice was made into a base baritone. I remember liking that opera but Jim said the music was somehow not as good this way, did not emerge with the subtlety of tones and harmonies intended.

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Watching the staging and tech crews was especially interesting if not altogether understandable to me. There were apparently two sets of scenes which gave a vista that moved out to imagined infinite distance. During the intermission we were shown how they connected to one another and were moved back and forth.

What I liked were the imitations of 18th century melancholy pictures of loss and death. Here we see a plinth of the type used to commemorate people at the time:

The production design was by Stephen Wadsworth, costumes by Martin Pakledinaz.

You might say the reviews have been positive. Rather most of them show the reviewer not familiar with baroque or later 17th and early 18th century operas. So they say vacuous pleasing utterances, sometimes about the scenery and sometimes the music or singing.

And as to one of the two supposedly chief sponsors of this and other HD productions, see “My Own Private Army” on the Mayor’s boast that he had used the NY police department against the people of the city that way.

Ellen

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