So many modern opera productions of the classics are radically, even provocatively, reimagined, ill-considered, half-baked, and just plain tiresome. I don’t want to pay big bucks to go to an opera house to have my eyes assaulted by a bunch of grotesque imagery calculated to undermine the glorious music. If I want to feel grim and depressed, it’s much less expensive to go to the movies. It’s the composers’ genius that has kept opera alive all these years, not the desperate antics of flash-in-the-pan directors.
That said, every once in a while, a bold swing for the fences thrillingly connects. Fresh approaches to Baroque opera, in particular, seem to have yielded their share of unexpected delights, perhaps because the old ways often pretty much reflected what Peter Schaffer’s Mozart complained about, in his earthy fashion, when he characterized the kind of opera peopled with classical and historical heroes as being moribund, the characters so lofty that they sound as if they defecate marble.
In some respects, I suppose, I am a product of my time, so I don’t mind a little flash now and again, to keep things lively, even if it is a concession to the eye more than to the ear. I was delighted by David McVicar’s take on George Frideric Handel’s “Agrippina,” for instance, with, in one manic aria, mad Nero cutting cocaine with a credit card.
Now, for Handel’s birthday, here’s one to set aside for the weekend. A traditional production of “Giulio Cesare in Egitto” (“Julius Caesar in Egypt”) opens in 48 B.C. This one, however, is built on the premise of a Howard Carter-like figure uncovering an Egyptian tomb in the 1920s – only to have the contents spring to life. The approach was conceived by George Petrou, artistic director of the International Handel Festival Göttingen.
The production opens with a quote from Carl Jung, rendered in the style of a silent movie intertitle: “Where love reigns, there is no will to power, and where power takes precedence, love is absent. One is the shadow of the other.” Cleopatra emerges from a sarcophagus, the priests are all dressed like Anubis, canine-headed Egyptian lord of the underworld, and there are mummies all over the place. Nireno’s aria that opens Act II is given ‘20s-style jazz inflections. Furthermore, on this occasion, it is sung from the wings while lip-synched and pantomimed by the production’s assistant director, because the scheduled singer was under the weather!
Handel was 39 when he wrote the music. Is the production in line with what the composer imagined? Well, not exactly, but it looks like it could be inventive and fun, in an escapist kind of way. I look forward to sitting down and watching the whole thing. Nothing screams Handel like hot sand, jodhpurs, and pith helmets.
Happy birthday, Handel!
