MusicorumN° 14 - 2013

Université François-Rabelais de Tours

« Haendel après Haendel »Construction, renommée, influence

de Haendel et de la figure haendélienne

La  revue  Musicorum,  réalisée  avec  le  soutien  de  l’Université  de  Tours,  et  plus particulièrement de l’équipe d’accueil Interactions Culturelles et Discursives, permet de situer le   domaine des sciences de  la musique dans un cadre pluridisciplinaire. Son objectif est de favoriser  la  diffusion  de  la  recherche  en  musicologie  sans  exclusivité  d’époque.  La  revue accueille des articles originaux, des actes de journées d’études et de colloques.

Direction : Laurine Quetinlaurine.quetin@orange.fr

Comité de rédaction :Pierre  Degott  (Université de Metz),  Albert  Gier  (Universität Bamberg),  Sylvie  Le  Moël (Université de Tours), Marie-Thérèse Mourey (Université Paris-Sorbonne), Denis Vermaelen (Université de Tours).

La responsabilité éditoriale de ce numéro a été assurée par Pierre Degott et Pierre Dubois.

Site internet :www.revuemusicorum.com

SOMMAIRE

« Haendel après Haendel »Construction, renommée, influence

de Haendel et de la figure haendélienne

Préface                Pierre Degott et                  Pierre Dubois

La construction d’une icône aux multiples facettes

Turning the Handel: how Handel and his Music Survived 250 Years               Donald Burrows

The Changing Faces of Handelian Historiography       Pierre Dubois

Haendel à Karlsruhe : un festival récent et ses ancêtres     Albert Gier

La Renaissance de Haendel au miroir des traductions     Adrian La Salvia

Haendel mis en fiction : mythe ou réalité

The German Belletristic Literature about George Frideric Handel: Fact and Fancy               Annette Landgraf

From Facts to Fiction: Handel’s Operas between 1754 and 1920         Pierre Degott

The Great Mr Handel (1942): Handel’s First Biopic, its Sources and Wartime Allegory     Matthew Gardner

Haendel revu et corrigé : la deuxième moitié du XVIIIème siècle

When Giulio Cesare was not Handel’s Giulio Cesare: The Opera on the London Stage in 1787         Michael Burden

John Marsh and Handel   Brian Robbins

Sharp, Haendel, Nares et les autres       Françoise Deconinck-Brossard

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Fascination et rejet de la figure tutélaire : les XIXème et XXème siècles

La Réception du Messie en France au XIXème siècle      Lionel Duguet

Un exemple de transfert culturel : l’introduction des concertos pour orgue de Haendel dans le répertoire des concerts en France au XIXème siècle               Denis Tchorek

Handel Redux: Late Romantic Organ Composers and the Handelian Legacy             Steven Young

‘Move over, Handel!’: The English Musical Renaissance andthe Quest for New Musical Heroes           Gilles Couderc

L’héritage haendélien et Michael Tippett :Georg Friedrich Haendel, modèle et contre-modèle              Jean-Philippe Heberlé

Haendel, notre contemporain

Men and/or Women: Gender Ambiguity and Performance Practice in Stagings of G. F. Handel’s Operas and Oratorios       Ivan Ćurković

Les pérégrinations du genre, ou « Bent that bends » :des castrats aux contreténors, de la tradition à la « monstruosité »     Maja Vukušić Zorica

Reflexiones de la música del Haendel en el cine:¿Música clásica o música popular?                 Yaiza Bermúdez Cubas

Les métamorphoses de Terpsichore : Haendel et la danse aujourd’hui              Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud

Université François-Rabelais de ToursSeptembre 2013 - Tiré en 100 exemplaires

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Men and/or Women:Gender Ambiguity and Performance Practice

in Stagings of G. F. Handel’s Operas and Oratorios

The status of G. F. Handel as the most performed operatic composer before Mozart was attained in the course of the twentieth century and confirmed by monographs dealing empirically with performance practice [see Rätzer; Deshoulières]. His only ‘rivals’ for this ‘title’ (Monteverdi, Gluck and Vivaldi) have been performed with increased frequency in the past decades, with the crucial difference that only a much narrower selection of their works is present on the operatic stage, as well as in catalogues of operatic DVDs. In the process of expansion of Handel’s operas to the modern stage, both ‘historically informed performance practice’ and ‘Regietheater’ have played a vital role. The combination of these two interpretive approaches is somewhat contradictory, as pointed out by Leopold [see Leopold 2009, 8-9], for the former wants to reconstruct the aura of the historical moment of the work’s creation, whereas the latter seeks to reinterpret it, lending it an aura of contemporaneity. The first approach is essentially modern or modernist [see Kenyon, passim], while Regietheater in opera is sometimes regarded as a postmodern phenomenon [see Herr 2009, 448]. One of the purposes of this study is to attempt to highlight the fact that this interpretive dualism is crucial to the way Handel’s works function on the modern stage, especially in relation to the casting of male roles, which are ambiguous in terms of gender.

Roger Donington begins the chapter ‘The Castrato Voice’ of his The Interpretation of Early Music with a reference to the last surviving castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, the only one whose voice was recorded:

The power and beauty of this man’’s voice in woman’s tessitura is unbelievably impressive: above all, it sounds unexpectedly but entirely masculine. Thus our substitution of a female soprano, mezzo-soprano or contralto, though it is what Handel himself did when short of a castrato, is inevitably a misrepresentation. A good countertenor (i. e. male alto) makes a plausible substitute, if he has power and agility enough. [Donington, 523-4]

It is striking that for Donington it was the masculinity of the castrato voice that legitimated casting countertenors rather than women in roles originally written for castrati. This seemingly decisive opinion is rendered less definitive in the course of the chapter, as Donington allows not only for female soloists to perform these roles, but also for transpositions of the vocal and orchestral parts to suit male voices such as tenor or bass, a practice more or less abandoned by the nineties. The Handel specialists Winton Dean and Donald Burrows presented more sophisticated scholarly arguments in the seventies and eighties. Aware of the fact that Handel always composed operatic roles with specific, individual singers (and not necessarily their gender) in mind, they tried to answer the question of who should perform, not only the roles written for, and/or performed by castrati, but also the male roles written for women, by

Men and/or Women202 asking why Handel had made his casting choices in the first place. Still, for Burrows, ‘even if we admit that today’s sopranos, altos and countertenors can achieve musically the same as Handel’s castrati, there remain certain reservations about the portrayal of male characters on stage by women’1 [Burrows, 141]. The same sort of reservations seems to be behind the so-called ‘naturalistic’ directing and acting style practised at the Handel Festival in Halle in the past, going hand in hand with the transposition of castrato roles for tenor or bass. Despite the changes that have taken place in operatic acting in the past few decades, requiring the singer to be as able an actor as a musician, traces of this – to put it more bluntly – embarrassment can be noticed even in some recent writing on the matter: ‘It is difficult for the public of the 20th and the early 21st century [sic], embedded in strong gender dichotomy, to take a woman as a manly hero seriously. Casting a man seems “more natural” ’2 [Herr 2009, 459].

Nevertheless, the careers of both female and male singers specialising in Handel roles of the alto range have been flourishing and it is no longer a question of women and men having to fight for a particular role. One could even say that Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s claim that the choice of instruments in performing early music depends chiefly on what we want to accomplish by them, has become true when it comes to casting castrato roles. The ‘instrument,’ lost in history and impossible to reconstruct out of ethical reasons, has to be ‘replaced’ by a modern one. Opinions on whether this replacement should be male or female are less polarised nowadays then before, as will be shown by a comparative analysis of DVD recordings of Handel’s operas in this study. Still, dealing with the interdependence of gender and performance practice still seems to be a problem on a theoretical level, with a lot of perpetuation of arguments from previous decades.

In the shoes of the castrati

Although she invests her argumentation with a historical narrative as well as a technical differentiation between countertenors and male altos, Laura DeMarco cannot hide the fact that she is a staunch enemy of casting countertenors instead of female singers in castrato roles. Remarks presented casually, such as ‘a relatively rare voice and, in any generation, something of a freak of nature’ [DeMarco, 174] as well as her main conclusion, that the ‘substitution for a castrato of either a true countertenor or a male alto is absurd’ [DeMarco, 180] are tainted with contempt, whereas her main argument about the ‘undramatic’ nature of the voice equates ‘dramatic’ with ‘loud.’ Her attitude is comparable to the similarly extreme, but slightly more superficial arguments in favour of casting countertenors presented twenty five years ago by Charles Farncombe. He claimed that female singers in castrato roles should be an exception, ‘because the vocal range of a countertenor corresponds to the castrato’s. […] For a female alto or mezzosoprano this register offers little possibility for the unfolding of vocal brilliance’3 [Farncombe, 105]. Both points of view are distinguished by excessive self-confidence about the capacities and limitations of vocal practice, but DeMarco’s insistence on Russel Oberlin and

1 - Auch wenn wir also zugestehen, dass heutige Soprane, Altstimmen und Countertenöre musikalisch dasselbe leisten können wie Händels Kastrate, bleibt dennoch ein gewisser Vorbehalt gegen die Darstellung männlicher Figuren auf der Bühne durch Frauen.2 - Eine Frau aber ernsthaft als männlichen Helden anzusehen ist für das von der strengen Geschlechterdichotomie geprägte Publikum des 20. und frühen 21. Jahrhunderts schwierig. Die Besetzung durch einen Mann erscheint “natürlicher”.3 - Denn der Stimmumfang eines Countertenors entspricht fast genau dem des Kastraten… Für einen weiblichen Alt oder Mezzosopran bietet diese Lage wenig Möglichkeit zur Entfaltung stimmlicher Glanzes.

Ivan Ćurković203

Marilyn Horne shows that she is not entirely up to date on the emergence of new voices educated in the tradition of the early music movement. Meanwhile, countertenors have influenced mezzo-sopranos and vice-versa, in a way that sometimes blurs the differences between the two of them, as shown by the specific vocal timbre of a mezzo-soprano like Marijana Mijanović.

The interchangeability of countertenors and female singers in contemporary performance practice is often compared to the interchangeability of castrati and female singers in Handel’s age. The comparison relies on the logic of the substitute, despite frequent warnings that castrati as performers elude comparison, either because of their musical superiority [De Marco 2002, 177-9] or because they are attributed with mythical traits [Burrows, 137]. Nevertheless, even someone particularly sensitive to the questions of gender identity such as Christopher B. Palme acknowledges that this ‘playing with the attribution of gender by Handel was fully autonomous. […] The assignment of a heroic role, for example Xerxes or Radamisto to a male castrato or a female soprano was, if not fully indifferent, then primarily determined by musical-aesthetical factors that had nothing to do with the authenticity of gender or anything similar’4 [Balme 1999, 129]. Whatever the gender identity of either group of singers or of individual performers was, it wasn’t considered an obstacle to a portrayal of similar roles. Although there is no doubt that the castrati had pride of place in Handel’s operas as much as in opera seria of his contemporaries, his own practice seems to point to a need for diversity and flexibility in contemporary performance:

It’ll become obvious that there is no uniform timbre of the castrato, but rather individual differences between singers. We can choose between the most different voices today, too, and good singers can even vary their timbre up to a certain limit. […] Why shouldn’t men as women, male and female altos, countertenors and castrati be able to cultivate the same timbre in the same register? 5 [Burrows, 138-41]

Admitting that both female singers and countertenors can rise to the musical challenge of a castrato role with comparable results doesn’t mean that their respective differences do not contribute to the specificity of the interpretation on the musical level. The theatrical aspect of their stage performance is anchored in gender by the simple fact that it is perceived by today’s public and brought into a relation with the gender identity of the character they are portraying. Many contributions to the conference Barocktheater heute: Wiederentdeckungen zwischen Wissenschaft und Bühne [see Gess, Hartmann and Sollich] concentrated on this aspect, advocating diversity in performance practice.

Some claim that musicologists have neglected the sexuality of the castrati in favour of their voice [Freitas, 4], whereas others are of the opinion that gender studies have lingered too long on sexuality as the most obvious and most scandalous object of study [see Leopold 2000; Strohm, 18]. John Rosselli warns pointedly against the danger of marginalisation of the castrati, whereas they were in fact highly respected in the societies of Italy and Spain [Rosselli, 2]. Still, a sense of estrangement or discomfort is something that cannot be eradicated from the perception

4 - Spiel mit dem Geschlechterzuordnungen etwa bei Händel völlig autonom war War die Besetzung einer Heldenrolle, etwas eines Xerxes oder Radamisto, durch einen männlichen Kastraten oder eine weibliche Sopranstimme wenn nicht völlig egal, so doch vorranging durch musikästhetische Faktoren bestimmt, die mit geschlechterbezogener Glaubwürdigkeit oder ähnlichem nichts zu tun hatten.5 - Hier wird deutlich, dass es kein einheitliches Kastratentimbre, sondern individuelle Unterschiede zwischen den Sängern gab. Auch heute haben wir ja die Wahl zwischen den unterschiedlichsten Stimmen, und gute Sänger können ihr Timbre – in gewissen Grenzen – sogar variieren… Warum sollten also nicht, so meine ich, Männer wie Frauen, Altisten, Altistinnen, Countertenöre und Kastraten in ein und derselben Tonlage dasselbe Timbre kultivieren können?

Men and/or Women204 of the castrato voice, exemplified by the following reaction to the same recording of Alessandro Moreschi that Donington found masculine: ‘The shattering emotion of an operatic scream must belong to an opposite phenomenon – a sense of identifying with, and losing oneself in, a sound and body that is not our own[…] The voice, in its utter strangeness, cuts off the possibility of my forming any real or imagined connection with the singing body’ [Bergeron, 10].

It is difficult to imagine a comparable reaction to today’s widespread countertenor voice. The voice is well researched both historically and from the point of view of vocal technique [see Giles; Jacobs]. Both authors insist on the differentiation between various historical occurrences of the countertenor voice-type (the Renaissance falsettist, the English countertenor, the French haute-contre) and its modern equivalents. They stress that falsetto is only one among several registers that the voice can use and devise different typologies. René Jacobs, whose role in the emancipation of the countertenor from the English tradition is decisive for the musical education of most contemporary countertenors, uses a peculiar, gender-induced metaphor to stress the need for a versatility of technique and timbre in the formation of a polychromatic voice:

What we have lost is the ideal of the alto as a hermaphrodite voice. Both male and female altos in the bel canto period, from the first castrati to Pauline Viardot, were liked for the ‘bisexual’ character of their voices. […] A good alto voice is never a one-register voice. Unfortunately, the bel canto ideal of the hermaphrodite voice is threatened with a sure death by modern one-register theories that favour the one-color voice as well as by the modern ideal of the white, straight and sexless voice in early music. [Jacobs, 306]

As we can see, the vocal qualities of the countertenor voice alone produce gendered discourse, all the more a reason not to overlook this aspect. At the same time, the voice is gradually becoming less and less estranged for audiences, not just because of the sheer quantity of countertenors active on the operatic stage, but also because, along with a quantitative, there is also a qualitative boost, sometimes accompanied by an expansion of range [Gess, Hartmann and Sollich, 130].

The implications of Thomas Laqueur’s famous ‘one-sex model’ for the phenomenon of the castrato have been considered by many authors [see Balme 1999, Liebscher; Freitas; Saskia Maria Woyke in Gess, Hartmann and Sollich, 89-103; Herr 2009]. Freitas makes a convincing point that on the background of Laqueur’s model, the castrati were considered to be caught between the stages of boyhood and manhood and increasingly eroticised precisely for this reason. Balme and Liebscher [drawing heavily on Balme] consider the positioning of the castrati in the middle of the one-sex spectrum as a cultural prerequisite for the above-mentioned interchangeability of castrati and female singers in high male roles: ‘This “freedom of movement” provides for at least a partial explanation for a casting practice that swapped female singers and castrati almost arbitrarily. What we today undifferentiatedly call a “convention” was partly based on a contemporary worldview’6 [Balme 1999, 133]. However, even when seen through the lens of the fluid one-sex model, the castrato’s voluminous virtuoso voice was considered to outweigh the ‘femininity’ of his castration.

6 - Diese „Bewegungsfreiheit” liefert auch sicherlich eine partielle Erklärung für die Besetzungspraxis, die Sängerinnen und Kastraten beinahe beliebig austauschte. Das, was wir heute etwas undifferenziert „eine Konvention“ nennen, war zum Teil im Menschenbild der Zeit begründet.

Ivan Ćurković205

The seeming contrast between the body and the voice that may have characterized the

stage presence of the castrato, and certainly characterizes the appearance of the countertenor and the female singer in a male role nowadays is deconstructed by Sigrid Nieberle’s use of the term ‘Stimmbruch’ (mutation, but also breaking of the voice). ‘Hence, the term can point to the difference between body and voice, as well as challenge assumptions about a “sound-sex” conditioned by the body’7 [Nieberle, 110]. To assume that the human voice is gender-determined by the body (in other words, by the genetic code) seems unreasonable in the light of a western musical tradition that subjects singing voices to extensive technical training, and Nieberle has no difficulty proving that ‘natural voices,’ such as soprano, tenor or bass, are as much a ‘cultural construct’ as the countertenor voice. The category of the performativity of gender (stemming from Judith Butler) is important also for Balme when he analyses how the castrati came to be a problem for English theories of acting in the eighteenth century. With the emergence of the two-sex model, the stage presence of the castrati wasn’t considered compatible with the nascent category of expressive acting because the actors themselves were considered incapable of experiencing love in ‘real life.’ That is why Balme points to the need for ‘an alternative consideration of the castrati in light of a performative and not an expressive economy of gender’8 [Balme 1999, 138], and there is no reason why one shouldn’t take his advice in the examination of modern performance practice.

At the same time, the gender-specificity of the castrati’s stage presence was strongly embedded in aristocratic perceptions of court life. As pointedly shown by Leopold in a historical account drawing on Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, heroic roles in opera seria reflect the dual nature of manliness, whereby court life, strongly determined by women, encouraged the development of the feminine side of men in contrast to the political and military sphere [see Leopold 2000; Leopold 2009, 159-74]. A high male voice was not just symbolic of love and sexuality, as shown by Freitas, but presented an ideal of manliness in a lover who ‘stood by his beloved as her equal and allowed for an erotic relationship at an equal level’9 [Leopold 2000, 240], the level of vocal range and timbre. When considered in such a cultural context, it is no wonder that the sexuality of the castrati was not an issue for most of their contemporaries [see Leopold 200, 229], at least in Italy. The private personality of the castrato was of little interest to the public precisely because his performance was performative and not expressive.

Still, if there was a ‘clear separation between the person of the singer and the role’, how could it be that the ‘interest of the public applied not exclusively to the performers’ art of singing and acting, but also to their elevated star status as not merely an artistic, but also a social phenomenon’10 [Seedorf, 126-7]. Seedorf insists elsewhere on the distinction between castrati and female singers in the same male role [see Gess, Hartmann and Sollich, 80], so that one might ask why the gender of the performer was important while his or her private personality was not? Kordula Knaus in her dissertation on cross-dressing in Italian opera of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries warns that most approaches to the phenomenon assume that the gender

7 - Der Terminus kann mithin aber auch auf die Differenz von Körper und Stimme verweisen und verschieben sowie Annahmen über ein körperbedingtes ›Ton-Geschlecht‹ in Frage stellen.8 - Eine alternative Betrachtung der Kastraten im Zeichen einer performativen und nicht expressiven Geschlechterökonomie.9 - Liebhaber gleichberechtigt neben seine Angebetete trat und eine erotische Beziehung auf gleicher Ebene zuließ.10 - Klare Trennung zwischen Sängerperson und Rolle… Das Interesse des Publikums galt allerdings nicht ausschließlich der Gesands- und Darstellungskunst der Akterure, sonder bezog sich auch auf deren herausgehobenen Star-Status als nicht allein künstleriches, sondern auch gesellschaftliches Phänomen?

Men and/or Women206 identity of the singer as a private person does not affect his or her gender identity on stage at all: ‘When a woman sings a male role or vice versa, it is not the gender difference between the existing body and a stage identity of the opposite gender that is crucial, but the difference between a singer in a certain gender role and a stage character in the opposite gender role. […] Both the real and the theatrical level should be involved in the discussion’11 [Knaus, 19]. If it is questionable whether these considerations should apply to the era of the castrati, it is less debatable that they are projected on modern performance practice. As Tina Hartmann claims, ‘we are not watching 18th-century opera through the eyes of the 18th century, but bringing our own conceptions of masculinity and femininity along[…] Therefore, I believe that today’s performances should handle the question of gender as well’12 [see Gess, Hartmann and Sollich, 137]. Seedorf goes even one step further, saying that it is the task of directors to subvert binary gender oppositions [see Gess, Hartmann and Sollich, 138].

Directors’ Handel

‘Regietheater’ is ‘a form of theatre established at the beginning of the 20th century in which the director dominates’13 [Anon. in Sucher, 348]. It went hand in hand with the development of theatre as an autonomous art form rather than just a reproduction of a dramatic text [see Sandhack, 839]. New theatre aesthetics (e. g. Brecht’s epic theatre or the Theatre of the Absurd] evolved and the need to reinterpret the classics of dramatic literature became stronger. Operatic theatre retained some of the representative forms of bourgeois theatre, among others through a concentration on a narrow operatic repertory of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries [see Kühnel, 14], so it took longer for the innovations of Regietheater to take root there, despite the fact that pioneers such as Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig implemented some of their innovations in productions of early opera (Handel’s Acis and Galathea and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in Craig’s case, as shown by Deshoulières [see Deshoulières, 31-3]. When elements of Regietheater came to be introduced into opera in the 1970s, the non-bourgeois character and the open form of baroque opera was found to be suited to new directorial approaches, to the extent that the music critic Ellen Kohlhaas found that Handel ‘had become one of the main testing grounds for experimental Regietheater’14 [Könemann et al., 88].

Jürgen Kühnel outlines these approaches using the example of productions of Mozart operas, but they can be equally applied to Handel. They include deconstructive, discontinuous approaches to dramaturgy and characterisation, narrative elements (e. g. the introduction of a narrator or the focalization of events through one of the characters), temporal transpositions (most often into the time of the creation of the opera or into the present), intertextuality, abundant, often associative visual imagery or its opposite, minimalism in the tradition of Grotowski’s ‘poor theatre,’ as well as multiple levels of irony [see Kühnel, 21-7]. Many of these tendencies, such as the interplay of temporal levels, visual and semantic eclecticism as well as

11 - Wenn eine Frau eine Männerrolle singt oder umgekehrt, ist somit nicht die Geschlechterdifferenz zwischen einem real vorhandenen Körper und einer andersgeschlechtlichen Identität auf der Bühne ausschlaggebend, sondern die Differenz zwischen einer Sägnerin oder einem Sänger in einer bestimmten Geschlechterrolle und einer Bühnenfigur in der gegenteiligen Geschlechterrolle.12 - Wir schauen die Oper des 18. Jahrhundert ja nicht mit den Augen des 18. Jahrhunderts an, sondern wir bringen unseren Konzeptionen von Männlichkeit und Weiblichkeit mit ein… Deshalb, glaube ich, müssen sich heutige Inszenierungen auch zur Geschlechterfrage verhalten.13 - Zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts durchgesetzte Form des Theaters, in dem der Regisseur dominiert..14 - Zum Hauptversuchfeld des experimentellen Regietheaters geworden ist..

Ivan Ćurković207

the domination of visual imagery, were perceived as a trend in performances of Handel operas in the late 70s and the 80s and were assessed both negatively [Persché, 107] and positively [by Kohlhaas, in Könemann et al., 88]. Since then, Regietheater has evolved from conceptual into ‘post-conceptual’ [see Balme 2006, 58-60]. Exponents of Regietheater up to the 70s relied on a theoretical concept whose purpose was to interpret the work within a theoretical framework (often verbally outlined in the programme notes of the production), whereas artists such as Robert Wilson pioneered an era of theatre based on visuals rather than words. This kind of directorial thinking has left its traces on the staging of Handel’s operas as well.

Opponents of Regietheater insist on the importance of the fidelity to the work (‘Werktreue’). Christopher P. Balme goes so far as to compare the insistence on this type of fidelity to fundamentalism and comes up with the following ironic ‘commandment’: ‘Thou shall not sin against the Work’15 [Balme 2008, 43]. In opera, with its multiple levels of authorship, objections are more often raised to the fidelity to the music rather than to the libretto, the stage design or the costumes [see Klein, 64-75]. Klein gives an attempt to expose the emotion-laden discourse behind some of the arguments against Regietheater and advocates a rational dialogue between practice and scholarship, singling out the collection of essays OperMachtTheaterBilder (Leipzig, 2006) as exemplary. Interestingly enough, as many as three out of ten papers [see Balme 2006, Herr 2006, Zuber] deal with productions of Handel operas, which proves that Kohlhaas’ assertion still stands.

The problem of defining the ‘work’ directors should be faithful to has been widely discussed [see Balme 2006, Balme 2008]. A broader definition of the term ‘text’ enabled theatre semiotics to consider each theatre performance as a text in itself, consisting of multiple other texts, the verbal text of a play or the musical text of an opera being only one out of many. This made the notion of fidelity somewhat strained if not impossible to achieve a full extent, and more complicated in opera than in drama. Moreover, the aesthetic notion of the ‘work of art’ is inappropriate to eighteenth-century opera and the available sources often make it hard to pin down a ‘definitive’ text, a problem that editors of critical editions such as the Hallische Händel Ausgabe often face. It is also problematic that opponents of Regietheater in opera often tend to speak for the ‘average audience member.’ In a lucid account of Horst Zankl’s production of Giulio Cesare in Egitto in Frankfurt 1978, Ludwig Finscher analyses Walter Felsenstein’s three temporal levels (when the work was written, when the action takes place and the time of the performance), the shifts of perspective and the intertextuality of the production, but also claims that ‘the accumulation of historical associative material makes demands on the spectator that he should be at least as educated as the director or the designer’16 [Finscher, 92]. Persché’s opinion that the abundance of pictorial material in Achim Freyer’s Berlin production of Messiah [Persché, 107] is confusing for the public, is similarly condescending.

In spite of the efforts for authenticity on the musical level, performance of baroque opera that would be true to its original staging theatrically is something even more difficult to achieve, as stage practices of the eighteenth century are even harder to reconstruct. Still, there have been many attempts at what the theatre scholar Patrice Pavis calls ‘archaeological reconstruction’17 [Pavis, 248]. By drawing a parallel with ‘authentic,’ historically informed musical performance of early music, Tina Hartmann devises the notion of ‘historically informed

15 - Du sollst dich nicht am Werk versündingen..16 - Die Häufung von historischen Assoziationsmaterial… stellt an den Zuschauern die Forderung, er müsse mindestens ebenso gebildet sein wie Regisseur und Ausstatter.17 - Reconstruction archéologique..

Men and/or Women208 theatrical performance practice’18 [Gess, Hartmann and Sollich, 17]. Rather than belittling it, she sees in it great potential to overcome approaches to theatre that have developed post festum and are therefore to a certain extent alien to baroque opera. For example, ‘the notion of “naturalness” will be defined as a result of the late 18th and 19th centuries and thus no longer conceived as all-encompassing, but a historical phenomenon’19 [Gess, Hartmann and Sollich, 17]. Directors specialized in ‘authentic’ theatrical performance (mostly in baroque dance and gesture) such as Sigrid T’Hooft indeed invest a lot of creativity into the reinstitution of the artificial, stylized aspect of this long lost theatrical world. But as T’Hooft is aware herself, attempts to put such approaches into practice were often clumsy and inconsistent, so that ‘the use of gestures often looked like an obtrusive catalogue of mechanical movements’ [Gess, Hartmann and Sollich, 26]. Scepticism of whether this can be overcome is still often voiced [see Ellen Kohlhaas in Könemann et al., 89 and Wulf Konold in Gess, Hartmann and Sollich, 73-5]. Kohlhaas is of the opinion that the attempts of Shirley Win’s ‘authentically’ conceived Handel productions in Innsbruck to fill the ‘voids’ in the choreography that didn’t lend themselves to the application of knowledge supplied by dance treatises of the seventeenth century, appeared amateurish.

Burrows gives the following ‘solution’ to the lack of convincingness of a female singer in the role of Rinaldo, originally sung by the castrato Nicolini: ‘If one puts a female singer in a subtle costume of an 18th-century prince and follows in movement and gesture the clues in the quoted description of Nicolini (a positive assessment of his gesture and acting in the London Spectator), all the problems mentioned above will disappear’20 [Burrows, 142]. However, this attempt at neutralisation of gender ambivalence would require a detailed immersion in the aspects of ‘authentic’ theatrical performance outlined above on the part of both the singer and the public. On the other hand, like Seedorf, Jörg Behr thinks that Regietheater profits from the subversion of binary gender oppositions, as ‘the characters become more humane in their mixed gender identity’21 [Gess, Hartmann and Sollich, 152]. Whatever the directorial approach may be, strategies of either neutralisation or enhancement are present.

Comparison

For the purpose of this study, I have chosen a sample of thirty productions of Handel’s operas, including a few staged performances of his oratorios. The selection has been prepared on the basis of available DVD recordings published by 2010, but some more recent recordings and a few live performances are included as well. I have concentrated on performances from 1990 onwards as they are more symptomatic in terms of directorial tendencies. TABLE 1 lists the productions according to the following criteria: director, conductor, orchestra, opera house or festival, publisher, year of publishing and the share of countertenors in the performance of high male roles. All male roles in the ranges of soprano, mezzo-soprano and alto have been included, regardless whether they can be performed by countertenors or female singers. Roles of women

18 - Szenische historische Ausführungspraxis..19 - Der Begriff „Natürlichkeit“ als ein Ergebnis des späten 18. Und 19. Jahrhunderts definiert und somit nicht mehr als alles umfassendes, sondern als historisches Phänomen begreifbar wird.20 - Steckt man eine Sängerin in das dezente Kostüm eines Fürsten des 18. Jahrhunderts und richtet man sich in Bewegung und Gestik nach den Hinweisen in der soeben zitierten Schilderung Niccolinis, so werden fast alle oben genannten Probleme verschwinden.21 - Die Figuren werden nämlich durch ihre Mischgeschlechtlichkeit besonders menschlich – ein Phänomen, das auch die Popularität von manchen Stars des 20. Jahrhunderts nachvollziehbar machen könnte.

Ivan Ćurković209

disguised as men were excluded because the subsequent unmasking of these characters makes it difficult for them to be performed by countertenors. Productions will be referred to by the name they are given in TABLE 1.

The examination of the musical and the institutional background of the productions in relation to the problem of casting and gender yields no definitive results. Casting decisions are rarely influenced by the casting of the first performance, and although there is a tendency to perform the work in its ‘original’ form, there is room for artistic freedom such as leaving out arias or introducing arias from other works of the composer. The only thing that connects the productions musically is the person of the conductor specialised in historically informed performance, whether he is conducting ‘his own’ orchestra, a festival ensemble or a regular orchestra of an opera house. The choice of vocal soloists is not directly dependent on the size of the opera house either, countering arguments about the insufficient intensity of the countertenor voice.

Countertenors and/or female singers are found in equal share in the most diverse directorial styles. Some productions engage in dialogue with the time of the creation of the opera, either in terms of ‘historically informed’ directorial practice or as part of the interplay of temporal levels. ‘Authenticity’ is thus present in the form of baroque costumes, and, to a lesser extent, gestures in as many as seven productions (Admeto 1, Agrippina 1 & 2, Alcina 2, Amadigi, Ariodante, Serse 1), but under very different guises. Only Amadigi (directed by Sigrid T’Hooft) attempts an ‘archaeological reconstruction’ and will be discussed later on, due to its avoidance of countertenors. Agrippina 1 and Admeto 1 are comparable in their partial use of baroque gesture in certain elements of the staging, but whereas Agrippina 1 is consistent in a meaning-laden semantic duplicity (‘grand’ baroque gestures are used in the ‘public discourse’ of the characters but are unmasked as hypocritical by the typical realistic, comic acting style that they adopt in the boudoir), Admeto 1 uses elements of gesture only in the da capo sections of some arias, which is sometimes ironically charged, but often seems as a solution for lack of a better one. Ariodante and Serse 1 are examples of Regietheater in that they do not reconstruct, but engage in dialogue with the time of the work’s creation [for an analysis of Ariodante, see Herr 2009].

A slightly higher share of productions resorts to a determinable transposition of the action into a time and/or place other than that of the action or the time when the opera was created. The operas of eleven out of the thirty productions are based on mythological or literary subjects, more suited to directorial reinterpretation due to their intertextual connections. With their frequent recourse to supernatural elements they lend themselves less to historical transposition than Handel’s heroic, ‘dynastic’ operas. Among these, Giulio Cesare has been historicised particularly often, whether as an allegory of the American Middle East policies of the 80s in Giulio Cesare 1 (Peter Sellar’s influential production to be discussed in detail later on), or as a parallel between the Roman and the British Empire in Giulio Cesare 3. However, the latter production slightly undermines the political potential such an approach might carry with its oriental eclecticism: arias are choreographed in the manner of Bollywood films, which adds an ironic twist to a colonial reading of the opera. The other productions of Giulio Cesare in Egitto are even less interested in conceptual historicism. In their costumes, Giulio Cesare 2 and Giulio Cesare 4 make abundant, but eclectic temporal and spatial references within differing contexts (realistic in the former, Brechtian in the latter). Giulio Cesare 5 uses a narrative frame that places the action in a museum, with characters as statues coming to life, whereas Giulio Cesare 6 takes (among others) Sellar’s production as an inter-referential point. As we can see,

Men and/or Women210 many strategies outlined by Kühnel are present in the selection of Handel’s stagings, but rarely in an isolated or consistent form, which supports Balme’s claim on postmodern tendencies.

Historicizing approaches can also be found in Admeto 1, Admeto 2, Alcina 2, Alcina 3, Orlando, Rodelinda 1, Rodelinda 2, Semele, Serse 2 and Theodora. In Admeto 1 and Alcina 3 these attempts are partial. Admeto 1 takes the illness of the protagonist as a point of departure, placing him at the intensive care unit of a modern hospital, but fails to integrate this into a distinctive directorial reading, whereas Alcina 3 transforms the narrative ‘frame’ of the overture (preparations for a performance of an eighteenth-century opera) into a parallel between Alcina’s magic island and the illusionary power of theatre. Other productions are more consistent in their transpositions, but vary equally in convincingness. This is not necessarily dependent on how well grounded the transposition is, as the arbitrariness of the Japanese setting of Admeto 2 is not the principal cause for the weakness of the production. On the other hand, David Alden’s transposition of the action into a milieu of Italian mafiosi in Rodelinda 2 seems theoretically well grounded in that the contemporary spectator easily identifies the dynastic power struggles at the basis of the plot with the mafia, but it seems to limit the director’s fantasy when compared to Alden’s productions such as Ariodante and Rinaldo. Alcina 3, Orlando, Semele and Serse 2 fall victim to their own transpositions, as, for instance, more directorial finesse is needed to pull off a postcolonial reading of Alcina set in the Caribbean. At the same time, a political allegory of Semele set in the British royal family works perfectly in the first act, but dissolves in the other two, whereas a transposition of the action of Serse into an unnamed, most likely Italian totalitarian regime of the twentieth century adds nothing to the interpretation of the opera. The transposition of Orlando into a sanatorium (with the hero as a WWI officer suffering from posttraumatic stress, Zoroastro as his psychiatrist and Dorinda as his nurse) is executed more elegantly, but one can’t help having the impression that the precise, but one-sided transposition deprives the production of those layers of meaning (e. g. the pastoral and the comic) that don’t fit into the director’s concept.

According to the quantitative share of countertenor voices, the stage performances of Handel’s operas from TABLE 1 can be divided into three groups.

• propensity for countertenors;

• propensity for female singers;

• equal share of women and men.

Male presence as “rule”

If we try to find common elements in the stage production where countertenors play all or most of the high male roles, it will be evident that certain festivals, such as the Händel Festspiele Halle or the Glyndebourne Festival, as well as certain directors like D. Alden, A. Köhler and F. Negrin favour countertenors. Reasons range from the overtly pragmatic (the fact that Köhler is a countertenor himself), to the more musicological, such as the high number of castrati at the first performance in London (Rinaldo, Teseo). It is astonishing that in most cases the directorial treatment of countertenors should lack gender ambiguity altogether. In both productions of Rodelinda, the dramatic action not only stresses power struggles but also has strong male roles for tenor or bass, so it might be important for the director to make the protagonist Bertarido an ‘equal adversary’ (in terms of gender) to the remorseful tyrant, Grimoaldo (tenor). Countertenors are also favoured in operas and productions with distinctly comical elements. In operas such

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as Agrippina and Partenope, these are to be expected, as the librettos draw on seventeenth century traditions. At the centre of Partenope is the love triangle between queen Partenope, her suitor Arsace and Arsace’s fiancée Rosmira, disguised as a man and taking revenge on Arsace’s infidelity. Two strong and wilful women are opposed to a ‘weak’ and indecisive man. Besides Andreas Scholl in the role of Arsace, the mellow Armindo, Partenope’s other suitor, is also portrayed by a countertenor, so that the strong character contrasts are underlined by a gender contrast in the casting.

It is interesting to see how opposing decisions in the musical aspect of the casting of productions Agrippina 1 and Agrippina 2 yield similar results in terms of gender representation. In the former, the use of baroque gesture is combined with a thoroughly ‘inauthentic’ musical transposition of the parts of Nerone and Ottone an octave lower (for tenor and baritone). In Agrippina 2 both roles are sung by countertenors but their gender identity is not significantly different, especially in the case of Ottone. The differentiation between feigned courtly and genuine, ‘natural’ behaviour, conveyed by the use of gesture in Agrippina 1, is represented in Agrippina 2 in terms of styling and make up, as Ottone seems to appear less of a typical courtier than the other high male roles Nerone and Narciso and the bass Pallante. The rendition of Nerone in Agrippina 2 relies heavily on the individuality of Philippe Jaroussky in terms of both voice and appearance on stage. In combination with his musical and acting abilities, Jaroussky plays Nerone as a lascivious adolescent in a subtle combination of childishness and compulsion. But this doesn’t change the fact that despite an opposing vocal timbre, directorial treatments of these roles, written for both castrati (Nerone, Narciso) and female singers (Ottone), can be surprisingly similar and more or less neutral in terms of gender identity. To paraphrase Donald Burrows, if one puts a countertenor in a male costume, following in gesture and movement the tradition of realistic comedic acting, all problems of the gender ambiguity of his voice will disappear.

Productions of Handel operas whose librettos do not follow comical traditions still leave a lot of room for comical subversion. For instance, in Admeto 1 and Ottone the countertenor Matthias Rexroth has a unique way of inducing the otherwise ‘serious’ action with comic overtones and the lofty traits of his characters with a touch of irony, e. g. in a Brechtian reading of the aria ‘Dopo l’orrore,’ when Rexroth steps out of the role of Ottone, the king of Germany into the role of the slightly narcissistic primo uomo. Admeto’s conflict between his love for Alceste and Antigona, although tragic in the libretto and in Handel’s setting, gets an ironic treatment in Admeto 1. At the same time, in both Admeto 1 and Ottone the protagonist has an antagonist portrayed by a countertenor whose comical portrayal is even more pronounced: in Admeto 1 by Trasimede’s hysterical behaviour and in Ottone by the portrayal of Adalberto as a ‘mother’s boy’ of the politically overtly ambitious Gismonda.

Equal share

In productions where both types of voices are found, the question arises which one of them might be the ‘rule’ and which one the ‘exception,’ although one could object that this question implies just the kind of gender dichotomy undermined by the voices of Handel opera. In some cases the difference in casting has pragmatic musical reasons: few countertenors can meet the high technical demands (and extensive vocal range) of the title role of Ariodante or Serse. Still, unlike Serse 1, Serse 2 casts not just the title role, but also the less demanding role of Arsamene with a female singer, drawing parallels between the two brothers by similar hairstyle and make-

Men and/or Women212 up, a rather stereotypical ‘male disguise’ that does not help the production’s dramaturgy. It is often an ungrateful task to speculate on the reasons to why a particular role was assigned to a woman or a man, so I shall return to the already mentioned example of Giulio Cesare in Egitto as a case study, as its six productions offer ample material for comparison.

Although both types of performers are present in all productions except Giulio Cesare 6, there is a tendency towards a higher share of countertenor presence in the four high male roles in Giulio Cesare (Cesare, Tolomeo, Sesto, Nireno). TABLE 2 offers an overview of the casting of these roles, the productions being listed in an order that is a combination of chronology and the increased presence of countertenors. The roles of Cesare and Tolomeo seemingly conform to the hierarchy of roles in opera seria as primo uomo (protagonist) and secondo uomo (antagonist). In Giulio Cesare 1 it was considered important to cast countertenors in both roles, and out of the six productions, this was countered only by Giulio Cesare 3. The role of Sesto is a much more unconventional one. Many consider it an anticipation of the trouser role of the later eighteenth century, the role of an adolescent purposefully portrayed by a female singer [e. g. Herr 2009, 245], although Knaus warns against such simplifications. Roles of male adolescents (often a servant, and therefore a comic one) are found in seventeenth century opera as well, but might have been sung by boys, whereas in the eighteenth century the casting of a woman made it convincing that a male character should fall in love with a young man in female disguise. In opera buffa women sometimes played adult male lovers as a reference to the world of the castrati in opera seria [see Knaus, 209-31]. Clearly, Sesto, a seria character par excellence fits into neither of these ‘trouser role traditions,’ despite the fact that Handel wrote the role for Margherita Durastanti. It will be interesting to see how gender casting deals with what some consider as the dramatic deficiencies of the role: ‘Sesto is less successful [dramatically], if only because his range of mood is circumscribed by the plot. […] His part consists of four vengeance arias, similar in mood and all in minor keys.’ [Dean and Knapp, 498]

Peter Sellars’ famous and influential staging (Giulio Cesare 1) is an important landmark not only in the tradition of stage performance of this particular opera, but also in the performance tradition of Handel opera in general. It showed how a tendency for authentic interpretation (the opera was performed without aria cuts and without transposing castrato roles) can be combined with Regietheater, provoking opposing response. The discussion on Regietheater at the 1991 Händel-Akademie Karlsruhe is a good example. Whereas Andrew Porter praises Sellars for taking Handel as a dramatist seriously and for the ‘adherence to the original’22 [Könemann et al., 98], Persché is of the opinion that in Sellars’ unambiguous allegory the drama is rendered banal and the ‘characters lose their timeless dimension, which constitutes their grandeur but also their modernity’23 [Persché, 105]. Deshoulières also warns against the dangers of a one-sided translation of allegory [see Deshoulières, 526], but the fact that the production served as an important inter-textual reference to a production at the Salzburg Festival in 2012 (Giulio Cesare 6) confirms that it has survived the test of time.

Sellars’ satirical portrayal of Cesare and Cleopatra, especially the hilarious depiction of Cesare as a U. S. president resembling Ronald Reagan by Jeffrey Gall, lives on in similarly comic approaches to the role taken by Graham Pushee (Giulio Cesare 2) and Andreas Scholl (Giulio Cesare 6). Lawrence Zazzo’s rendition of the title role in Giulio Cesare 5 sets itself apart from the others by a peculiar caricatural estrangement, demanded by the directorial concept.

22 - Festhalten am Original..23 - Wird den Figuren jene zeitlose Dimension genommen, die Ihre Größe – und auch ihre Modernität – ausmacht..

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Out of them all, only Connoly’s rendition (Giulio Cesare 3), despite the fact that she is – or perhaps precisely because she is a woman – follows traditions of realistic, almost naturalistic acting. Her Cesare is definitely the ‘manliest’ of the six, confirming that, with an able actor at hand, drag performance can amplify stereotyped gender features very convincingly. But the female casting of the role is obviously not an integral part of the directorial concept because the production has been revived with the countertenor David Daniels in the title role.

The uniformity of casting countertenors in the role of Tolomeo is mostly due to the role’s musical suitability to solid, average countertenor voices of the alto or mezzo-soprano range as well as to the fact that Christophe Dumaux sings it in no less than three productions. The treatment of the role is somewhat more diverse, but often draws on the fact that Cleopatra refers to her younger brother as ‘effeminato amante,’ most obviously in Giulio Cesare 2 and 4. Giulio Cesare 2 makes ample use of stereotypical Pharaonic representation, often with ironic commentary. Director Negrin extends these traits to the character of Nireno, who along with an array of similarly costumed dancers assumes a central role in the production’s dramaturgy as a kind of driving force behind the events. Although musically a minor a role, as a eunuch Nireno is particularly suited to directorial reinterpretations of gender. Sellars in Giulio Cesare 1 neutralised the ambivalence by changing his name into Nirena and turning him into a woman, McVicar (Giulio Cesare 3) made use of homosexual stereotypes, Pelly (Giulio Cesare 5) met the expectations that the audience might have of an Egyptian eunuch based on popular culture, Leiser and Caurier (Giulio Cesare 6) turned him into a male transvestite or a transgendered female (keeping the name Nirena as a possible homage to Sellar’s production), whereas Wernicke (Giulio Cesare 4) reversed the process, casting a female singer to interpret the role as a female transvestite or a transgendered male.

Besides its perception as a ‘trouser role,’ the higher vocal range of the role of Sesto is one of the main reasons why this role is rarely performed by countertenors. In many productions this character often has difficulties in prevailing dramatically, along with his mother Cornelia. In Giulio Cesare 1, Sellars takes them both very seriously, making their suffering not only excessive, but also genuine. Thanks to her plaintive vocal timbre and expressive acting skills, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson portrayed the vulnerability of the young man drawn into war against his own will with particular emotional convincingness. Giulio Cesare 6 works the specific qualities of Philippe Jaroussky to the advantage of the staging, but Leiser’s and Caurier’s treatment of the character owes too much to Sellars’, preventing the countertenor from offering in theatrical terms anything that had not already been seen in Hunt Liebersen’s rendition. The voices and artistic personalities of these two singers are strikingly different, and Jaroussky would have had the potential to leave an individual mark on the role.

Reasons for the absence of men

Only a few performances out of the chosen thirty avoid casting countertenors altogether. Among them is the only example of ‘historically informed theatrical performance,’ Sigrid T’Hooft’s production of Amadigi at the Göttingen Handel Festival, a partial reconstruction of eighteenth-century stage practice that concentrated on gesture and choreography. The sets and the costumes, which would seem the easiest elements to reconstruct, were characterized by a strong presence of bright blue and red (the latter even including tartan patterns as a reference to Amadigi’s Scottish upbringing) and thus far from visually projecting a baroque ‘aura.’ Instead of candle lightning, electricity was used. T’Hooft expressed her enthusiasm for working with

Men and/or Women214 young (female) singers because they were open to learning the elaborate language of gestures. Interestingly, for me as an observer without in-depth knowledge of the eighteenth-century gesture system, the gestures used by the female characters didn’t seem that different from the standardized opera gestures known from nineteenth-century opera, whereas the gestures used by the mezzo-sopranos interpreting the roles of Amadigi and Dardano lacked distinctiveness and convincingness in comparison with their colleagues. One cannot say whether these male gestures would have been conveyed more convincingly by countertenors, especially as the perspective of the critic is impossible to separate from the perspective of the scholar. In any case, the experience certainly contradicts Burrows’ claim that ‘problems’ disappear under the ‘mask’ of costume and gesture. Kohlhaas’s criticism of Shirley Win’s productions raises the problem of consistency as well, but before judging the production one should remember that T’Hooft’s ‘authentic’ directorial method is a continual work in progress, hoping for a somewhat utopian introduction of baroque gesture into the singers’ training [see Gess, Hartmann and Sollich, 23-7], so that an insufficient internalization of the gestures at an early stage is understandable. The director might have been aware of this as the presence of dancers during the arias was much stronger than it would have been in Handel’s time and also included anachronistic elements of pantomime.

Another aspect of male absence stems from a rejection (or suppression) of gender ambiguity that justifiably causes disbelief in the audience. Arsamene in Serse 2 and Medoro in Orlando are provided with a stereotypical ‘male disguise’ consisting of slicked back hair and artificial moustache. The ‘mask’ is so easy to see through that it can be parodied in Rosmira’s disguise in Partenope. Whether a baroque costume or a fake moustache, masks rarely solve the problem of the genuineness of acting, and even such a detailed and carefully executed disguise as Sarah Connoly’s in Giulio Cesare 3 wouldn’t have worked without her perfectionist acting. So it is no surprise that productions that give up simple, outwardly solutions to gender representation not only become more interesting for this paper, but also manage to draw this aspect into the specificity of their theatrical interpretation.

In terms of gender representation the two high male roles of Orlando couldn’t have turned out more differently. Katharina Peetz wasn’t able to overcome the limitations of the above-mentioned ‘mask’ and her Medoro remained marginal to the production. Unlike her, Marijana Mijanović, thanks to her slender figure and dark, androgynous vocal timbre, managed to give her rendition of Orlando a highly specific gender quality. In a round table at the conference Barocktheater heute she said that she didn’t approach the characters she plays on stage as men or women at all, and indeed, her Orlando, neither a man nor a woman, is beyond binary oppositions of gender [see Gess, Hartmann and Sollich, 138].

Alcina is an opera whose libretto relies heavily on the exploration of gender identity: beside the convention of casting a castrato as the male protagonist, it addresses cross-dressing at the level of the plot. Bradamante disguises herself as a man on a mission to rescue her betrothed Ruggiero from Alcina’s magical realm, manipulates the love of Alcina’s sister Morgana and, perceived by him as a rival for Alcina’s love, provokes Ruggiero’s jealousy and contempt. The opera’s main dramaturgic force is disillusionment, so it is no wonder that a production such as Alcina 1 should draw gender onto the battlefield of identity. Literature on the opera has focused on the title character, whose depth of characterization is often considered exceptional [see Dean 2004, 319-22; Leopold 2009, 93-6]. Interestingly enough, Corinna Herr sees in the fact that Alcina falls in love with her ‘victim’ Ruggiero a symptom of her weakness and considers her a prototype of the femme fragile model of femininity that will prevail in nineteenth-century

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opera, whereas Silke Leopold stresses her inner strength as she ‘fights for her love with all means although she known that she can’t keep her younger lover’24 [Leopold 2009, 93].

Connotations of gender in establishing the dramatic strength and weakness of the characters in Alcina will be even more evident in the case of Ruggiero and Bradamante. Ruggiero as the role with the highest number of solos in the opera (although there is no doubt that Handel’s setting makes Alcina musically superior) is sometimes considered a ‘weak’ character despite the fact that the role is ‘one of Handel’s richest castrato parts’ [Dean 2006, 321]. Herr’s argument that we are dealing with an effeminate, ‘weak hero’25 [Herr 2009, 243] may be valid to a certain extent, but operates with a simplified gender opposition that isn’t productive for the theatrical exploration of gender identity. Her argument on Ruggiero’s ‘musical gender’ (absence of virtuoso arias, with the exception of ‘Sta nell’Ircana’ in the third act as a symbol of his won back manliness) is applied with reverse logic to Bradamante. Dean too claims that ‘there is not much of the feminine in her music’ [Dean 2006, 323], and Leopold and Herr interpret her final, third act aria “All’alma fedel”, the only one sung after Ruggiero has recognized her, as a sign of the abandonment of her ‘male’ role. Herr thinks that only this aria represents Bradamante’s feminine side in an inversion of musical affetti as it is sung after ‘Sta nell’Ircana,’ a vengeance aria that used to be typical of Bradamante’s musical expression up to then. The production Alcina 2 seems to support this interpretation, as Kristina Hammarström is literally taking off her male costume while she sings the aria. Nevertheless, Leopold rightly points to the fact that Bradamante was successful in her disguise because she was a knight herself, in the tradition of Boiardo’s, Ariosto’s and Tasso’s female warriors [see Leopold 2009, 157] and therefore beyond the binary gender spectrum.

At first sight, the same seems to apply to the interpretation of this aria in Alcina 1, although it is moved ahead for dramaturgic reasons from its position from the third act [III.4], to the beginning of the scene of Bradamante and Ruggiero’s reunion, overheard by Morgana [II.11]. The stage set of Alcina 1 is dominated by a big mirror, indicative not only of illusion and delusion, the main themes of the opera, but also of the processes of projection that some of the characters undergo in this production. Bradamante’s unmasking occurs as Morgana gazes at her, doubling her gestures while she undresses up to the point when she exposes the negligée under her shirt. Although the stage action – undressing and unmasking – is identical, it acquires a fully different meaning than in Alcina 2 because in Alcina 1 this is already the fourth attempt at Bradamante’s unmasking. So far she had been prevented from exposing her true identity to Ruggiero by Melisso (I.5), almost undressed by Morgana (I.14) and revealed herself to Ruggiero, although he refused to recognize her, thinking that it might be just another of Alcina’s spells (II.2). Rather than seeing in ‘All’alma fedel’ Bradamante’s unquestionable return to femininity, the Stuttgart production is obviously more in line with Leopold’s opinion that Handel didn’t conceive his characters musically in binary gender oppositions, especially not in the case of characters such as Bradamante or Rosmira: ‘Handel contributed little to the construction of unmistakable gender identities in his compositions. […] For him it was important to musically overturn differences between men and women, instead of emphasizing them in his music’26 [Leopold 2009, 157]. In order to explore his characters, Handel didn’t

24 - Mit allen Mitteln um diese Liebe kämpft und doch weiß, dass sie ihren jüngeren Geliebten… nicht erhalten kann.25 - Schwächlicher Held..26 - Händel trug wenig dazu bei, in seinen Kompositionen unverwechselbare Geschlechteridentitäten zu konstruieren… Ihm lag eher daran, die Unterschiede zwischen Mann und Frau in der Musik aufzuheben, statt sie mit der Musik zu betonen.

Men and/or Women216 hesitate to exploit the interchangeability of castrati and female singers in male roles, and it is not surprising that contemporary productions should attempt to do the same.

Clemens Risi rightly observes that seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century operatic treatments of magical contents (stemming mostly from Ariosti’s Orlando furioso and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberate) are all about the ‘perturbations unleashed by the perception of unclear identities’27 [Gess, Hartmann and Sollich, 179], supporting his claim by invoking Jossi Wieler’s and Sergio Morabito’s reading of the opera in Alcina 1. It ‘calls the model of reality that asserts itself violently at the end of the opera with the disempowerment of Alcina into question continually, from the beginning’ by ‘making recourse to the notion of the fantastic in its reception in surrealism’28 [Zuber, 123]. When Morgana finally recognizes Bradamante as a woman in the mirror while she sings ‘All’alma fedel,’ we are dealing with one of the production’s many ‘ruptures of consciousness, dreams, deceptions or the resurgence of the suppressed’29 [Zuber, 21]. The boundaries between Alcina’s realm and a supposed reality appear unstable. The character who looks into the mirror the most often is naturally Ruggiero, whose identity is the most unstable of all. Among others, he sees Melisso in the form of his mentor Atalante stepping out of the mirror, but after Melisso breaks Alcina’s spell with the help of the magic ring, his confusion only increases. After having refused to recognize Bradamante, he thinks he sees her appearance in the mirror, but it turns out to be Alcina in male costume, embracing Bradamante in female costume [see Zuber, 22]. The gender identity of Ruggiero in Alcina 1, sung by Alice Coote, is accordingly very complex. In contrast to Alcina 3, where Ruggiero was sung by countertenor Terry Wey without the remotest trace of gender ambiguity or in Alcina 2, where Vesselina Kasarova didn’t invest Ruggiero with much individuality, Coote’s gender coding of the role is not only very detailed, but develops significantly in the course of the production.

Coote’s initial portrayal of Ruggiero concentrates on an elaborate emulation of self-confident, unmistakably masculine-coded behaviour, not unlike that of Sarah Connoly in Giulio Cesare 3. But at the first signs of his jealousy of ‘Ricciardo’ (Bradamante adopts the identity of her twin brother) in the first act, Ruggiero’s self-confidence begins to fade as his vulnerability surfaces. Given what has already been said about Wieler’s and Morabito’s directorial concept, Ruggiero’s ‘transformation’ into the virtuous night with the help of Melisso’s magical ring is far from being smooth and unambiguous, but triggers a growing neuroticism that is conveyed very convincingly by Coote’s acute psychological portrayal. Parallel to Bradamante’s male disguise in the opera at the level of the plot, Coote initially takes up a strong, stereotypical male identity at the level of performance, only for it to be destabilised by the opera’s dramaturgy, as Ruggiero is torn between the identity of the hedonist lover and the moral knight. Freitas’ already mentioned perception of the castrato in a transitory stage between boy and man and its respective gender codes of sensual adolescent femininity and rational, self-controlling manhood might serve as an interesting reference point for the analysis of Ruggiero’s complex gender identity in Alcina 1. Alice Coote, a woman, plays Ruggiero, a man (originally portrayed by the castrato Carestini) whose process of winning back his masculinity in knighthood, the alternative reality to Alcina’s realm (in Wieler’s and Morabito’s reading an inner, psychological realm) is accompanied not only by a dissolution of his personality’s stability, but also his gender identity. This sort of ambivalence could hardly have been conveyed with a countertenor in Ruggiero’s role, and

27 - Verwirrungen, die die Wahrnehung unklarer Identitäten auslösen..28 - Wirklichkeitsmodell, das sich am Schluß der Oper mit der Entmachtung Alcina gewaltsam durchsetzt, von Beginn an, also permanent, in Frage zu stellen… auf den Begriff des Phantastischen in seiner surrealistischen Rezeption rekurrieren und in die Zukunft, in die Moderne, weiterdenken.29 - Brüche im Bewußtsein, Träume, Täuschungen oder die Wiederkehr eines Verdrängten..

Ivan Ćurković217

countertenors have to my knowledge not been cast as Ruggiero in numerous revivals of this production in various European opera houses, which shows that contrary to Giulio Cesare 3, a female singer in the main male role was part of the directors’ conception. Similarly like Lorraine Hunt’s rendition of the role of Sesto, a woman in the role of a conflicted young man was crucial to the production’s impact.

Conclusions

As recently as a few decades ago, the performance of high male roles in early opera by female singers and countertenors on the operatic stage was considered problematic. As the supply of countertenors was more limited, this task was more often taken by female singers. Since then, the early music movement has educated numerous countertenors, who were at first considered a competition to the female singers, and theoretical disputes followed. Today, opinion is less divided and both types of performers find ample room on the musical market. However, DVD recordings of Handel’s operas show a certain tendency towards a higher share of countertenors in performance of high male roles. At the same time, they have lost some of their subversive character (in terms of gender) and are often used for directorial projection of ‘classical’ masculine identities. Female singers, although still occasionally used in theatrical terms as a female ‘substitute’ for castrati with a stereotyped ‘male disguise,’ often achieve a stronger level of gender ambiguity at the level of performance, resulting in interpretational subversion.

Still, a lot of questions remain open. One must be aware of the fact that the examination of gender identity on stage should not, and cannot be isolated from its specific context of theatrical performance. This is where the already mentioned thin line between the discourse of the opera critic and scholarly discourse becomes slightly unstable. Had Lorraine Hunt Lieberson not left such a strong mark on the role of Sesto, my perception of the other singers’ (whether female or male) rendition of the role would have surely been less biased. What I have judged as unconvincingness in baroque gesture in Amadigi might have, in addition, been conditioned by the lack of vocal experience of the mezzo-soprano portraying the title role. And who knows, without Alice Coote, Alcina 1 might have lost some of its subversive impact. One must also be aware of one’s own perceptions of gender and of the extent to which these are historically charged. The theoretical discussion on gender and performance practice of the past four decades, taken as a starting point for the first part of the study, has been strongly influenced by the enormous changes in the shaping of both female and male contemporary identities. The complex impact of these changes on gender representation in stage performances of Handel opera requires further attention, but would exceed this particular study in both scope and aim. Although behind the boom of Handel opera lies a quest for authenticity in performance practice, we are bound to project our current selves onto this beloved piece of musical past. Being an integral part of that complex process is hopefully in no contradiction with an attempt to shed a somewhat different light on it.

Ivan Ćurković, University of Zagreb/Heidelberg University

Men and/or Women218

Ivan Ćurković219

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Men and/or Women220 TABLE 2 – Disposition of high male roles in 6 performances of Giulio Cesare

Giulio Cesare in Egitto 1 3 4 2 5 6Director Sellars McVicar Wernicke Negrin Pelly L.&C.Share of countertenors 2/4 2/4 2/4 3/4 3/4 4/4Cesare primo uomo M F M M M MTolomeo secondo uomo M M M M M MNireno eunuch F M F→M M M M→FSesto „trouser role“ F F F F F M

Ivan Ćurković221

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Ivan Ćurković223

Abstract

Due to a massive revival of Handel’s vocal-instrumental music in performance practice over the past twenty years or so, stage performances of the composer’s operas as well as some of his dramatic oratorios have become frequent not merely at specialised baroque festivals, but also in a large number of opera houses in Europe and the United States. At the same time, live video recordings of stage performances have begun to occupy an important place in operatic discography, which results in a wide range of Handel’s works available on DVD.

Tendencies in this multimedia aspect of performance practice are examined through two lenses: the so-called authentic interpretation of early music and the so-called director’s theatre (Regietheater), within a theoretical framework stemming from musicology and theatre studies. Interrelationships between these two approaches that are only seemingly contradictory will be examined, while concentrating on an important question that has repercussions on both of them. This question is: who is to interpret the roles ambiguous in terms of gender (written mostly for the castrati), females (mezzo-sopranos or contraltos) or males (countertenors)?

In an attempt to debate about an insightful answer to this question, concrete examples will be examined. In this process gender studies is going to be of prime importance, given the complex gender identity of castrati in opera seria of the 18th century. DVD performances will be subject to a rough statistical analysis showing a propensity of certain stagings for a predominant use of either countertenors or female singers in roles ambiguous in terms of gender, as well as some that cast both types of performers. The study will attempt to determine why.

MusicorumN°14 - 2013

ISSN : 1763-508XISBN : 978-2-918815-08-2

prix : 35 €franco de port CE

Tout au long du XVIIIème siècle, Georg Friedrich Haendel fut la figure musicale majeure en Angleterre, imité par ses contemporains et considéré comme l’incarnation même du caractère na-tional. De son vivant même, il devint rapidement l’objet d’un véritable culte et de très nombreuses publications lui furent consacrées. De la vaste Commémoration en sa mémoire organisée à Londres en 1784 aux nombreux festivals des XVIIIème et XIXème siècles, son œuvre et sa figure furent utilisées à des fins de propagande idéologique et patriotique pour célébrer la grandeur de la nation britannique. L’influence de Haendel devait durer bien au-delà de sa propre disparition et même après qu’on eut cessé d’interpréter ses œuvres sous leur forme originelle. Aussi, dans une perspective diachronique et pluridisciplinaire, le présent ouvrage envisage-t-il la résonance, l’influence et la renommée durable de la figure et de l’œuvre de Haendel qui n’ont cessé d’être relues et réinterprétées selon les époques.

* * * * *

Throughout the 18th century, George Frideric Handel was the dominant musical figure in England, imitated by his contemporaries and considered the very embodiment of the national character. During his life-time, he rapidly became the object of a lasting cult and numerous pub-lications were devoted to him. From the vast Handel Commemoration organised in London in 1784 to the numerous festivals in the 18th and 19th centuries, Handel’s figure and his work were used as means of ideological and patriotic propaganda to celebrate the greatness of the British na-tion. His influence lasted well beyond his own demise and even after his works had ceased be-ing performed in their original form. Thus, in a diachronic and interdisciplinary perspective, the present volume envisages the ‘resonance’, influence and lasting fame of the figure and work of Handel which have never ceased being re-read and re-interpreted depending on the period.