George Frederick HANDEL (1685-1759)
Giulio Cesare in Egitto (1724)
Lawrence Zazzo (counter-tenor) - Giulio Cesare; Natalie Dessay
(soprano) - Cleopatra; Isabel Leonard (mezzo) - Sesto; Varduhi
Abrahamyan (contralto) - Cornelia; Christophe Dumaux (counter-tenor)
- Tolomeo; Nathan Berg (bass) - Achilla; Dominique Visse (tenor)
- Nireno, Aimery Lefèvre (baritone) - Curio
Paris National Opera Chorus, Le Concert d’Astrée/Emmanuelle
Haim
rec. Palais Garnier, Paris, 1, 4 and 7 February 2011
VIRGIN CLASSICS 0709399 [2 DVDs: 85.00 + 131.00]
Giulio Cesare remains the most popular of all Handel’s
operas, and the reason is not altogether far to seek. Most of
his operas revolve around matrimonial tangles involving either
mythological or legendary figures, or historical figures whose
true history is so twisted and altered that they might as well
be mythological. In Julius Caesar however he stuck relatively
close to the historical facts regarding Caesar’s entanglement
with Cleopatra in Egypt. The fact that he was working with real
characters seems to have inspired him to a greater degree of
emotional involvement. It is noteworthy that the programme note
by the librettist Nicola Francesco Haym prepared for the first
performances emphasised the historical background of the opera,
to the extent indeed of almost ignoring the actual plot of the
opera itself.
In his original performances, too, Handel was working with the
leading singers of his day, and he wrote music for them which
not only presented formidable technical demands but required
dramatic and emotional sympathy too. Here we are lucky to have
some leading singers of the current day - and not only in the
field of baroque music - who give a considerable degree of lyrical
and dramatic involvement in the roles of the very real characters
they are playing. Natalie Dessay brings real star quality to
the part of Cleopatra, and Isabel Leonard is similarly inspired
as Sextus; both project plenty of fire into their faster arias,
and both are suitably plangent in their slower ones. Varduhi
Abrahamava has less opportunity for display (especially since
her final aria of triumph is taken at a rather sedate Allegro)
but she brings passion and depth to her laments.
The role of Caesar himself has always presented a problem, since
Handel originally wrote it for the castrato Senesino,
and castrati are in remarkably short supply nowadays.
In the early days of the Handel revival it was common practice
to take the part down an octave for baritone or bass, but this
quite rightly is no longer acceptable as the transposition plays
havoc with Handel’s carefully contrived registers and
orchestration. René Jacobs, himself a counter-tenor,
has however pointed out that to employ counter-tenors in Handel’s
castrato roles is equally inauthentic. Handel himself,
if a castrato was not available, had no hesitation in
employing women to take on the male roles; it is clear that
he valued expression and power above a simple matter of gender.
It is impossible for us now to do more than make an educated
guess as to the actual sound that the castrati produced;
the only gramophone recording, of an aging chorister in the
Papal Choir, suggests a more heroically focused sound than modern
counter-tenors produce, but there are no grounds for suspecting
that this recording is typical of the sound that the castrati
made on the operatic stage. Vazzo makes a valiant attempt to
mimic the sound we hear on that old 1904 recording, but the
result still lacks heroic power and there is an alarming disjunction
between the sounds he emits at the top and the bottom of his
range. Indeed one is almost reminded of Marilyn Horne or Huguette
Tourangeau on those old Sutherland recordings. But the real
problem is that the heroic tone he seeks to produce militates
against the expression that Handel clearly regarded as so important
(to the extent that he would rather employ a singer of the wrong
sex than a counter-tenor), and the emotional intensity that
we find in performances of the role by singers such as Janet
Baker is totally missing. Given that the casting of this role
will always inevitably involve some form of compromise, one
would prefer the warmth and richness of an artist like David
Daniels to an attempt to mimic the sound of an original castrato,
an attempt which inevitably will fall short of the trumpet-like
tones which we are informed Senesino and his ilk produced. Oddly
enough in the second and third Acts Zazzo’s voice seems
to settle down; his delivery becomes less strident and his registers
are better integrated, although he never really achieves a sense
of warmth. Perhaps these Acts were recorded on a different day?
The other singing on the male side of the cast is similarly
flawed. The role of Nirenus is allocated to a tenor whose whining
tone produces entirely the wrong sort of characterisation; indeed
his arias are something of a trial; in later performances of
the opera Handel rewrote the part for a woman. Nathan Berg singing
Achillas, a role which demands a bass with a very wide range
and flexibility, has good solid bottom notes but sounds strained
and thin in his upper register. Christopher Dumaux as Ptolemy
has a very similar kind of voice to Vazzo, which works as a
characterisation of this thoroughly unpleasant spoiled child;
but he has to work very hard indeed to deal with the insanely
elaborate music than Handel has written for him.
The production too does not help. The costumes by the director
Laurent Pellay are very definitely intended to be of the period
of the late Roman republic - although Ptolemy, a Greek, would
not have looked like the Pharaoh of a much earlier period of
Egyptian history that we are shown here - but the setting is
presented in a modern museum, with the characters presented
like exhibits in a series of showcases and wheeled around by
museum attendants dressed in costumes of the present day. These
attendants also take peripheral parts in the action itself,
for example openly ogling Cleopatra when she bares her left
breast. In modern productions of Handel operas producers usually
give their imaginations free rein, but given the historical
nature of the plot of Giulio Cesare of which Haym was
so proud this can often work against the music. The sort of
presentation we are given here, although less deliberately anachronistic
than some other modern designs - Sellars springs to mind - nevertheless
serves only to distract from the emotional seriousness than
Handel invested in the music. We are given instead a series
of displays which are admirable in themselves, and are often
very impressive in isolation, but they are not allowed to cohere
into a dramatic whole.
In the vision of the Muses as the beginning of the second Act
the scene shifts into the art gallery section of the museum,
with the attendants wheeling on various paintings on oriental
subjects from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - and
at one point, in a horribly coy self-referential moment, a portrait
of Handel himself. The attendants continue to inter-react with
the singers - they become Ptolemy’s and Cleopatra’s
armies at one point. At other times they seem to ignore them
altogether, as when they continue polishing a display case which
Cleopatra takes delight in smudging when they are not looking.
These and other such moments are clearly intended to be comic,
but the audience - who are all too ready to applaud an aria
before the music has actually stopped - resolutely refuse to
be moved to laughter. The problem remains that the opera is
being treated as a display of individual exhibits treated in
isolation rather than as a whole. Only at the end, when the
museum is being closed down for the night as the final chorus
is being sung - incidentally Handel wrote for this chorus to
be sung by the eight soloists, not by a separate chorus as here
- do we get a proper sense of closure.
Comparisons of this staging with the 1984 English National Opera
presentation (currently available on DVD from Kultur), with
Janet Baker as Caesar, work almost entirely in the latter’s
favour. The production at the ENO may seem slightly staid now,
and the unmistakable figure of Baker is very obviously a woman
dressed in armour, but it does have the advantage of taking
the emotions of the opera seriously and gains considerably in
dramatic tension by so doing. For a modern re-interpretation
which is free from Pellay’s dubiously comic glosses, try
David McVicar’s serious updating from Glyndebourne, also
with a female Caesar (available on DVD from Opus Arte). The
only real problem with the ENO video is the fact that the music
of the opera itself is drastically abridged, with over half
an hour of music removed. This may have been necessary for staging
- the score is one of Handel’s longest operas - as Mackerras
claimed in a booklet note with the original CD reissue of the
recording. We lose some lovely numbers such as Sesto’s
slow aria towards the end of the first Act.
On the other hand this production too makes quite a number of
cuts, and not only in recitatives. Caesar, for example, loses
his final aria (which Baker and Mackerras give us); and both
Mackerras and Haim cut the whole of the final scene from Act
Two, choosing to end with Cleopatra’s lament. Otherwise
Haim and her musicians do a good job by the score, and her period
instruments have more character than Mackerras can attain with
his generally modern forces. The booklet credits Benoit Hartoun
as ‘claveciniste’ but from what we see Haim herself
sits at the harpsichord to direct the orchestra; whoever is
actually playing during the recitatives deserves to be complimented
for the many sensitive touches they bring to their role.
Incidentally neither the DVD packaging nor the booklet give
any indication of individual tracks, which means that anyone
wishing to pick out an individual track will have to spool through
the relevant disc.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Natalie Dessay brings real star quality to the part of Cleopatra.