Handel, Giulio Cesare in Egitto : Seattle Opera, soloists, cond. Gary Thor Wedow, dir. Robin Guarino, set designer Paul Steinberg, costume designer Constance Hoffman, Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, Seattle, 24.02 & 9.03.2007 (BJ)

 

How did I love it? Let me count the ways.

 

First and supremely, it hardly needs saying, for the work itself. Handel, whom no lesser a judge than Beethoven called “the greatest composer that ever lived” and “the master of us all,” wrote more than 40 operas, several of which have begun just in the last half-century to regain a place on the stage. Among them, in the view of many, the three premiered in the 12-month period beginning on 20 February 1724 – Giulio Cesare in Egitto, Tamerlano, and Rodelinda, regina de’ Longobardi–constitute the crown, and Giulio Cesare may well be the finest jewel in that crown. On that account, it must certainly be reckoned among the greatest operas ever written, comparable on equal terms with the best of Monteverdi, Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi, Strauss, and (if you like that kind of thing) Wagner.

 

Then there was the singing. I went twice, in order to see and hear both of Seattle Opera’s casts, and the standard of both was for the most part extremely high. And there was some knowledgeable and stylish work done by the orchestra under the direction of Gary Thor Wedow, who is clearly familiar with the important performance conventions of baroque opera and led his forces with aplomb. Curiously, and contrary to what usually happens, the orchestral playing seemed less assured and the ensemble less secure at the penultimate performance than it had been on opening night; but this may have been partly due to the differing  challenges posed by the singers in question, of which more later.

 

So far, so good. But now I must come to some less agreeable judgements. Like most Seattle Opera productions, this one offered eight performances packed within the space of 15 days, which explains the company’s customary deployment of two casts, one of which generally gets to appear on the big nights and the other takes the matinees and whichever other evenings are adjacent to the Saturdays in the run. In the nature of things, what may be called the No. 1 cast usually features the better-known stars. In this instance, advance publicity made it seem clear that the company’s first production of Julius Caesar was built very specifically around the celebrated Polish contralto Ewa Podles who was the main occupant of the title role.

 

Ms. Podles is certainly the possessor of a remarkable voice, but I have long been troubled by certain aspects of her use of it. Her chest tones are indeed spectacular, possibly the most impressive of their kind since the days of Clara Butt nearly a hundred years ago. The upper register, however, is vitiated by the prevalence of one single plummy tone-color that rules out any response to different vowels; and there is, furthermore, no apparent relation between the lower voice and the higher one–they might just as well be emanating from two different singers.

 

That is purely a vocal point. But now, seeing her on the operatic stage for the first time, I found her physical mannerisms totally seditious of any convincing dramatic portrayal. First of all, she seems unable to sing rapid divisions–of which there are many in Handel–without letting her head oscillate like that of a bobble-head doll. Then there is her posture, leaning forward constantly from the waist, which makes identification with a great general impossible–there was no way we could envisage the person before us ever bestriding the narrow world like a colossus. Even worse, perhaps, was the banality–frivolity almost–of her gestural vocabulary. In the wonderful aria in which Giulio duets with a virtuoso violin part, she registered pained surprise at least a dozen times, in plain disregard of the principle of diminishing returns. And when Pompey’s son Sesto, just before the opera’s end, told Caesar that he had avenged his father’s murder by killing Ptolemy, Podle’s little glance at Cleopatra, as if to say, “Good kid, this, huh?”, was ludicrous to behold. All these weaknesses made her depiction of Julius Caesar appear comic rather than heroic, reminding me of nothing so much as the identical twins in that marvelous satirical film The Boys from Ephesus (“after Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors,” as the opening credits put it–“ . . . a long way after!”).

 

Now it so happens that this issue raises an interesting question. Whom is one to blame for such dramatic ineptitude–the singing actor or the director? When, at a later performance, I saw the other Giulio, in the person of the English mezzo Anna Burford, who was making her US operatic debut, none of these physical inanities were to be seen. Vocally, I was a little disappointed in her during Act I, but she rose nobly to the challenge of later arias, though I would suspect that she is happier in sustained music than in rapid virtuoso material. Dramatically, in any case, she was everything that Ms. Podles wasn’t. Not only does Ms. Burford have the kind of looks that made her assumption of a quasi-imperial role believable, but she stands up straight, which helps no end. Instead of endlessly feigning surprise at the violin’s sallies in that aria, she treated the whole thing as a delightful game, smiling winningly, and even at one point laughing aloud. And she received Sesto’s news with the dignity it surely deserved.

 

It may well be (as an artist-manager friend of mine suggested when we were chatting during intermission on the first night) that Ewa Podles  is “undirectable.” If that is so, then I must acquit Robin Guarino on the above counts. But for many other infelicities her production cannot be pardoned. Paul Steinberg’s set (which, admittedly, the director inherited from a Florida Grand Opera production) was one of those anti-operatic ones with spaces around the sides, so that one saw characters emerging from the backstage area before it was time for them to make their entries. I would suggest, sadly, that Ms. Guarino does not understand human motivation. Over and over, we were shown characters who had suffered grievous wrong standing motionless while someone else sang, then suddenly lunging at their tormentors, only to return to inactivity for another few minutes before renewing their assaults when the next bit of singing ended. Cornelia, persecuted by Achilla’s unwanted and ambivalent attentions, was made to alternate attempted escape with inexplicable rushes at her tormentor. With regard to the director’s handling of singers, moreover, the characters were constantly being forced to sing from kneeling positions and even while rising to their feet, or to deliver their arias from so far upstage that otherwise impressive voices were robbed of their impact.

 

Let me return for a moment to some positives. It was striking that, aside from Ms. Burford’s Giulio, and from strong performances in smaller roles by Arthur Woodley as Achilla, Joseph Rawley as Curio, and the young male soprano David Korn as Nireno, the Sesto was the outstanding singer in both casts. Carolyn Kahl, in the later performance, used her commanding height to good effect and sang splendidly. Kristine Jepson, in the first cast, was if anything even more of a star both dramatically and in the expert use of a sumptuous mezzo-soprano voice. Of the two Cornelias, I thought Helene Schneiderman, on opening night, the stronger both vocally and dramatically. Her successor, Gloria Parker, sang well enough. But "well enough" is not good enough for such a superb aria as "Priva son d’ ogni comforto." This is one of the two arias in the work (the other being Cleopatra’s "Piangerò") that rank alongside "Che farò senz’ Euridice" in Gluck’s Orfeo and a few other examples in Mozart and in Handel himself as supreme expressions of the profoundest pathos through an unclouded major mode. Ms. Parker might just as well have been complaining about the shortage of good domestic staff for all the pathos she conveyed, strolling around the stage with impregnable sang-froid like the handsome woman she certainly is.

 

You may not believe this, but I still have to deal with the worst aspects of what we saw–or in certain cases didn’t see. It is sad to think that audiences of which many members must be presumed unfamiliar with Handel’s operatic masterpiece were seeing and hearing it in a version shorn of some of its greatest musical and theatrical elements. I can understand the impulse to shorten a work that, even thus cut, played for three hours and a half (including two long intermissions). But it would surely have been better, if cuts there had to be, if they had been made by leaving out a few da capo sections than by brutally excising one of the most beautiful arias in the whole work. This is Giulio’s “Non è si vago e bello,” the expression of his burgeoning love for Cleopatra. It is a gem, and a highly original one, in many regards: the violins play in unison with the surpassingly tender melody throughout, and, contrary to the usual pattern, aria in this case leads directly into recitative. I am not complaining merely about the loss of a beautiful piece of music, or even about the stunting that consequently diminishes the development of the Julian character. If you take out such an unconventional stroke of invention as this, and leave out also the vocal ensemble, “Viva, viva il nostro Alcide,” in which with equally daring originality Handel’s overture reaches its conclusion, the result is to conceal to a substantial degree the boldness and imagination of a composer too often accused of recycling his own (and, yes, sometimes other people’s) ideas.

 

So let me assure anyone previously unacquainted with Giulio Cesare who saw this production that the opera is much greater than we were allowed to perceive. (Anyone who wants to hear and see the work at its best is urged to investigate the splendid Australian Opera production, available on DVD, with countertenor Graham Pushee, a surpassingly intelligent Julius, delectably partnered by Yvonne Kenny’s beguiling Cleopatra.) The physical side of the Seattle production was perhaps even more damaging than those textual depredations. Constance Hoffman’s multi-styled costumes (borrowed, like the sets, from Florida) were unobjectionable. But the idea of having troops of supposed Roman and Egyptian warriors poncing around in Donald Byrd’s mind-boggling and quite unnecessary choreography was an unspeakable intrusion, especially in the overture, which is a section of an opera score that directors seem regrettably unwilling to leave unillustrated.

My final salvo is directed, once again, at Mr. Steinberg’s sets. Quite apart from their operatic inappropriateness, the notion that Egypt might be usefully conjured up in the minds of viewers by basing the scenery on an array of pyramids in primary colors typified the lack of intellectual maturity that characterized the production as a whole. The first two acts were bad enough. As to Act III, it is worth recalling the dictum of the 19th-century historian and essayist Thomas Babington Macaulay. Cited by the musicologist Sir Donald Tovey in the context of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Macaulay “shrewdly observed that the size of the Great Pyramid was essential to its sublimity, ‘for what could be more vile than a pyramid thirty feet high?’.” Well, I finally have an answer for Macaulay–eight pyramids three feet high are viler far. This may not have been Giulio Cesare on Ice, but it conveyed a disconcerting suggestion of Giulio Cesare in a Toyshop.

 

Speight Jenkins’s Seattle Opera has given its admirers over the years, and even in the brief year and a half since I moved to the area, many wonderful things. I respectfully suggest that this was not one of them. Handel deserves much better, and I hope that perhaps in the future the Seattle public may be presented with a version of one of his operas more in keeping with its sublimity and its musical and human depth.

 

Bernard Jacobson