Handel’s Saul: Saturday 10. Opera on 3

[doversoul1]

Starts at 18.15

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06gp9ps

This has been posted on the Glyndebourne Festival 2015 thread but I thought it might be worth its own thread.

It’s a tremendous cast and a lavish staging from the photos; money is no objet sort of a production. I am curious to see it but I don’t think I can take in the music while watching all this on the stage.

I am rather intrigued by the director’s explanation that Handel wrote Saul as an oratorio because Biblical stories were not allowed to be staged therefore there is a lot of scope for them (the current production team) to fill in the gap (or something to the effect).

http://www.glyndebourne.com/tickets-and-whats-on/events/2015/saul/

I thought Handel wrote oratorios because staged operas were becoming unfashionable, and chose biblical stories as suitable subject for the form. Therefore I thought an oratorio was a fully realised work as it was. Still, I suppose there is no reason (apart from my personal preference) to oppose staging of an oratorio.

All that besides, here is the libretto if anyone is interested in.

http://opera.stanford.edu/iu/libretti/saul.htm

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I thought Handel wrote oratorios because staged operas were becoming unfashionable, and chose biblical stories as suitable subject for the form. Therefore I thought an oratorio was a fully realised work as it was. Still, I suppose there is no reason (apart from personal preference) to oppose staging of an oratorio.

Well - except, perhaps, that Handel's operas are amongst the very finest ever written and there are several that haven't been staged recently.

[kuligin]

Well - except, perhaps, that Handel's operas are amongst the very finest ever written and there are several that haven't been staged recently.

Or indeed at all by any of the British companies eg Riccardo Primo, Sosarme, and Poro spring to mind.

And what do the chorus do through those long wonderful contrapuntal choruses?

[ardcarp]

Well - except, perhaps, that Handel's operas are amongst the very finest ever written and there are several that haven't been staged recently.

...and it's worth reflecting on the fact that Handel operas were not staged (AFAIK) in the 19th and first two-thirds of the 20th C. Indeed they were thought un-stageable along with other Baroque opera, until the likes of Lewis and Leppard brought them to life again.

[jean]

Don't forget Charles Farncombe and the Handel Opera Society, which dates from 1955.

[doversoul1]

So why stage an oratorio?

And what do the chorus do through those long wonderful contrapuntal choruses?

They seem to be joining in the action / acting (see the Glyndebourne link in the OP).

[doversoul1]

I listened up to the end of part one (not Act One) and gace up. I found all those whooping, yapping and banging too tiresome to be listening. Pity, I was very much looking forward to hearing Iestyn Davies’s David. Apparently, this is Saul re-imagined as an opera.

I think I’ll listen to this instead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8ryor9Y7Mw

Georg Friedrich Händel - Saul HWV 53
Gabriel Concort and Players: Paul McCreesh

[aeolium]

I'm not sure I'd be so dismissive about the idea of staging the oratorio, ds. Saul seems to me to contain very dramatic music written to a dramatic libretto. There had been musical precedents in the setting of the story, with Purcell's dramatic scena In Guilty Night and only a few years before Handel's own setting, Porpora's related 1734 setting Davide e Bersabea. Winton Dean called Saul "one of the supreme masterpieces of dramatic art, comparable with the Oresteia or King Lear", though Jonathan Keates in his Handel biography thinks the atmosphere of Saul owes more to Racine than Euripides.

But staged or not, the music is extraordinary, with Handel deploying powerful and varied orchestral forces, including carillon, organ, trombones and kettledrums. I thought last night Iestyn Davies was marvellous as David, and there was fine support from Paul Appleby as Jonathan and Lucy Crowe and Sophie Bevan as Merab and Michal. As for the title role, Christopher Purves' performance on stage may for a watching audience have been spellbinding but on radio it came across as simply distracted by all the extraneous stage business. For me, Handel's madmen should always go mad musically - and why was a baritone chosen for this role when it was written for a bass, so much more terrifying in his fury?

[doversoul1]

aeolium

Oh, I know I shouldn’t (be dismissive about staging an oratorio), and yes, Saul has many dramatic music and dramatic libretto but like many other Biblical oratorios, whilst all the dramatic elements are there, to me, it somehow seems to lack dramatic effect in the narrative (plot, if you like), and the characters seem to be more like representations of ideas rather than unique individuals. All this does not matter when I am ready to listen to it as an oratorio but a staged oratorio feels (to me) a little like a fable or a folktale turned into a full length novel.
(this is how I think about things now but I shall probably regret saying all this one day when I know the work better).

Having said all this, I can’t honestly say I can hear the difference on the radio. I probably can’t but I have an awful lot of fixed ideas about things that get in the way (I know I shouldn’t let them). However, what really put me off from last night’s broadcast was, as you point out, the noise from all the extraneous stage business including the whooping and yapping from the chorus (I guess). I was sorry to have to give up as I thought Iestyn Davies was an ideal David and he sounded wonderful.