Baroque Opera and Historical Performance: A Reconsideration

TODAY THE FIELD of historically informed performance (HIP) has a lot more prestige, nicer paychecks, a raft of university positions, and overall more acceptance than ever before. In The End of Early Music (Oxford, 2007), Bruce Haynes confirmed that, although the field is mature and needs some redefining, things are mostly just fine. But is this really so? Consider ing the state of the HIP field in the 1980s and what one might have reason ably projected for the future at that point, I find the situation today to be disappointing. The overall level and quality of HIP has improved, but what technical improvements have occurred are over -

shadowed by the loss of philosophical inspiration and the onset of cultural amnesia. What has been lost, in both practical and philosophical terms, is the grand vision of revivifying the

glorious music of the 17th and 18th centuries, and the most obvious symptom of this decline is in the field of opera, which was always understood as the pinnacle of musical culture in any period.

I would point out these major failings:

Inspiration for the movement. The “why” behind HIP has become almost irrelevant. The idea of realizing the expressive meaning of the music from this extremely literate and intellectual

period in Western history was exhilarating. The excitement surrounding the fact that we might actually be able to re-create the sound and meaning of Baroque and Classic music was only the surface of something much bigger. At the outset of this quest, we were trying to get to the real point behind some of the greatest music in human history while they were

just trying to make careers. This distinction is largely lost.

Historical awareness within the field. Internet history, which is the only kind of history for many people today, is in effect written by various publicity departments and doesn’t begin to give a realistic idea of what was actually going on during the development of HIP decades ago. Aesthetic issues that were then considered of crucial importance are hardly mentioned today, whereas before there was enough audience, enough criticism and writing, and enough funding to create a meaningful conversation. Today’s audiences know much less, criticism is ever more bizarre, funding has dried up, recording is moribund, and many young

people in the field are unaware that the universities used to sponsor extensive classical concert series, or that public radio was once predominantly classical music.

The decline in Baroque opera. By comparison with today, the 1980s were truly a Golden Age of opera on period instruments, HIP performances led by pioneering figures in the field were put on regularly by major festivals, while a plethora of smaller but significant offerings were

happening all over. But by the 2002-03 season, Paris/Versailles had but two evenings of staged Baroque work all season, and one, the Lully ballet Le triomphe de l’Amour, had but a single solo dance before intermission. The 2014 Rameau year celebration in France lists a few versions de concert, but no staged work besides marionette theater and parodies. The Paris Opera recently removed a prominent early music conductor from one of its productions when the orchestra insisted to management that it was all too likely that she would be unable to achieve performances without major accidents.

The question of entrepreneurship. Today in the major conservatories there is a great emphasis on entrepreneurship. The key to the entire HIP field has always been “sweat equity,” as new groups started from scratch all over the place, willing to put in extra effort to make groundbreaking concerts possible in the first place. Off-beat, anti-establishment groups were how our field got started. This was also happening in the opera, especially with the help of festival producers in the mix, although the enormous expense, relatively speaking, made period opera much less common than chamber music. In general, however, the arts today have become more centralized, and small is no longer beautiful. Where universities once in effect funded dozens of groups through their concert series, today they are more likely to put their money into their “own” group, creating not help, but well-funded competition, for small start-ups run by artists.

Opera, postmodern target

As documented in Haynes’s book, the HIP world has overcome much resistance in the purely concert sphere, but it must be remembered that the purely concert sphere was itself the target in the Culture Wars of the last century and was already troubled when HIP demanded a seat at the ever-smaller table. Whether it was the lack of education in the classics (with Sesame Street teaching kids that jazz was the only true American music), or the Pew Foundation zeroing out the Philadelphia Orchestra for a year, or progressive forces determining that public radio was more suited to public affairs than to classical music, there were headwinds everywhere. Ultimately, the resistance to the HIP field in the concert world, including vocal music, was always from the rear guard: violinists and singers with continuous vibrato, pianists playing Bach in dubious ways, and flutists romanticizing their Bach sonatas were actually rather easy targets. As Haynes wrote, can you really defend being ahistorical in your playing, if not anti-historical?

In 1985, there was a “Battle of the Bands” concert at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center where the British Academy of Ancient Music played the same pieces as the members of the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society. Notably, the differences were almost insignificant: the pitch level was not the same to be sure, but otherwise the New York modern players had changed everything about their interpretations so as not to appear hidebound to old “traditions.” Their tempos were pretty much the same, they actually added more ornaments than the London crew, and to be sure they were much better dressed! But Christopher Hogwood clearly bested his counterpart in his speech, explanations, and general culture. It was pretty clear by the end of the evening who had won this test.

The resistance to period stagings of Baroque opera, on the other hand, came not from the past but from the ascendant postmodern world. Interestingly, postmodernism and “multiculturalism” did not champion modern music against the standard repertoire (modern music claimed the same heritage and anyhow had never developed much of an audience). These forces were simply out to devalue classical music in the culture as a whole. Their method was to proclaim classical music irrelevant, a tired holdover from the best-forgotten time of Dead White Males, to define “world music” as essentially everything except Western classical music. In opera this approach had a predictable effect. To concede that it might be a good idea to acknowledge the priority of the libretto, where “the words are mistress to the music,” would spell doom for postmodern fun and games. The right to ignore or to go against the libretto had to be defended at all costs. Here was where the Culture Wars were really fought in the musical field.

The “standard” opera world in our time was long ago taken over for the most part by postmodern interpreters. In their stagings, many contemporary directors are quick to dismiss original plots and meanings. Often the visual images and the goings-on in the staging have nothing to do with the libretto, or even contradict it—or mock it when it is too illustrative of old-fashioned morality. Giving offense, in the now-antiquated sense of épater les bourgeois, is taken to extremes: in one infamous European production of Mozart’s Entfürung aus dem Serail, two realistic-looking detached human breasts were brought out on a tray to start the show.

We should not be surprised when Baroque opera is staged like this in modern houses. In the recent Santa Fe Opera Radamisto, the conquering general was a beautiful soprano deliberately made up to look like Sidney Greenstreet in Casablanca with a vest, a fez, and what looked like a lot of padding around the middle. For every witty aperçu, such as Peter Sellars’s solution to the question of motivation for characters leaving the stage after their arias in Giulio Cesare (they went into the Cairo Hilton bar, labeled “The Oasis”), there are dozens of tedious or tendentious “ideas.” Even the period instrument Castor et Pollux, with Harnoncourt leading, featured atom bomb victims in the third act.

When the complaint is made that this isn’t what Baroque opera is about, the answer is always something like, “Why should we do Handel or Rameau the old-fashioned way, as they’ve always been done.” (The answer is that they have in fact rarely been done that way in our lifetime.)

Opera, ultimate goal

Nonetheless, by the 1980s enough period instrument opera with meaningful and beautiful stagings was taking place to make it seem as if the HIP field might actually emerge triumphant here as well. This would have been significant, because the vibrancy of Baroque

opera in the 1980s was based on an understanding that the pinnacle of Baroque and Classical music had always been the opera. From the beginnings of the Baroque, it was the opera that represented the very best that composers, to say nothing of poets, painters, dancers, and choreographers, had to offer. With the exception of obligatory church music, opera was the predominant form in the Baroque. The word itself conjures up the importance of the endeavor. In essence, the realization of historical performance in opera was necessarily the ultimate goal of the HIP movement.

In the early 1980s, after a number of outstanding concert performances, a string of large, important of Baroque opera productions happened in rapid order. John Eliot Gardiner, newly

appointed music director of the Opéra de Lyon, brought large-scale Rameau works there and to the closely associated Festival d’Art lyrique et de musique d’Aix-en-Provence. The summer of 1982 saw the staged premiere of Les Boréades (which had been cancelled in 1764 when Rameau died during the rehearsal period) followed by additional performances at the Opéra de Lyon during the regular season. In the summer of 1983, it was a grand presentation of Hippolyte et Aricie, with Jessye Norman as Phèdre,Jose van Dam as Thésée, John Aler as Hippolyte, and Rachel Yakar as Aricie, again repeated the following season in Lyon. These were all done with the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, each with large forces, and dancers from the New York Baroque Dance Company. Les Boréades was staged by Jean-Louis Martinoty, who would be appointed director of the Paris Opera a few years later, and Hippolyte was both designed and directed by Pier-Luigi Pizzi, a very important figure in the opera world.

In 1986, the Société Lyonnaise, a premiere French banking concern, sponsored Scylla et Glaucus, the only opera by Lyon’s own Jean-Marie Leclair. This is a marvelous work, and Gardiner’s recording is exemplary, perhaps the best Baroque opera recording. (If you don’t

think you like French Baroque opera, listen to the first chorus, “Reine de la Nature,” with sumptuous forces present as they should be, for all 2'00'' of its splendor.) Accidentally, Scylla et Glaucus received the closest thing to an actual “period” staging produced in a major venue. When the commissioned designs and plans arrived from a well-known team, the direction of the Opéra de Lyon thought they were uninspired and rejected them. With only months to go before opening night, Gardiner was asked to help. He turned to Philippe Lenaël, of the Théâtre du nombre d’or, a theater company that specialized in performing the French classical repertory in period dress with Baroque gesture, and to Catherine Turocy and her New York Baroque Dance Company. The result was a production that won the Prix Edmond Rostand for best opera of the year in France. It was impossible to get a ticket. (Amazingly, because the fashionable director and designer were no longer involved, the festivals of Aix and Edinburgh, which had co-sponsored the production, cancelled this successful show. Losing their investment was apparently less important than not conceding that opera done this way was valid!)

Meanwhile in America, the 1985 “Baroque Year” featured two very important Handel opera performances. At the Boston Early Music Festval, Nicholas McGegan conducted and directed a period staging of Handel’s Teseo with Judith Nelson, Drew Minter, Stephen Rickards, Nancy Armstrong, Christine Armistead, and sopranist Randall Wong, with sets

and costumes in period style by Scott Blake and Bonnie Kruger. (Almost from the beginning, the primacy of the opera was implicitly acknowledged by BEMF, and this understanding continues.) That May, the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, invited Concert Royal to perform Handel’s Ariodante, with Judith Malafronte, Julianne Baird, Ann Monoyios, Jeffrey Thomas, Wilbur Pauley, and Cynthia Miller, with stage direction in period style by Catherine Turocy, who also brought the NY Baroque Dance Company. In 1986, the

E. Nakamichi Baroque Festival in Los Angeles invited these same groups for Les Fêtes d’Hébé of Rameau, a production that involved 13 dancers, as well as Howard Crook and Ann Monoyios in the lead roles. These two were then called by William Christie for the opening night of Lully’s Atys at the Paris Opera in 1987, although the French cast did the recording. (This production, so rare at the time that many people went to Paris just to

see it, has of course lived on in several revivals.) With Atys, the music of Lully was truly brought to life, as Christie restored his tempos from the plodding norm of the time to something exciting and vibrant.

Cultural push-back

Given this flurry of activity, one might have thought that this level of achievement

would only continue to blossom. Alas, this was not to be. Although there was more in Aix-en-Provence, with Gardiner leading a period-instrument Figaro and Malgloire doing Lully’s Psyché, and several productions with Christie, eventually they abandoned this endeavor. A number of seemingly unrelated trends combined elsewhere to slow things down. One might cite less funding, “multiculturalism,” and push-back from the “straight” world of music and opera, which saw its very underpinnings threatened: if Bach and Handel should only be played on period instruments, as many were happy to proclaim, with Mozart and Haydn next up, and then Beethoven and Schubert, where would this end!

When Richard Taruskin knocked down the straw man of “authenticity” on the front page of The New York Times Sunday Arts section (“Spin Doctors of Early Music,” July 29, 1990), it was a welcome balm to all those who disapproved of or felt threatened by HIP. If the field could be questioned as intellectually and artistically deficient by one of its own practitioners, it seemed safer for the mainstream to question the entire HIP endeavor. After Taruskin, in America at least, a lot of significant funding for HIP began to dry up. Among other examples,

the pioneering Mellon Foundation grant program for early music orchestras was transformed into a fairly routine chamber orchestra initiative.

In the universities, alas, defunding of classical music also proceeded apace. In the late 1980s and ’90s, student council groups were given more and more actual control of budgets for such things as concert series, and when these series weren’t canceled outright, they were most often given over to rock music and trendy multicultural events like Cambodian

dance. These choices were quite interesting in their own right, but often seemed to serve as vehicles for a politically correct, “anything-but-Western-classical” agenda.

At the same time, the haven of public radio—where anyone traveling anywhere in the United States could turn to the bottom part of the FM dial and be refreshed with classical music—was also under attack. A determined group of culture warriors set out to reclaim this turf

from classical music and turn it over to news and political talk radio. Statistics compiled by a hired consultant purported to prove that the key to the future was to eliminate classical music from public radio and replace it with topical talk shows. “Citizens of the world” is how the ideal listeners of public radio were described, as opposed to classical music lovers, who were portrayed as “using classical music to escape from the problems of the world.” Public radio activists were described as “a community of listeners that transcends geographic boundaries, a national, now international, community of shared interests, values, and beliefs.” They were compared with “classical monks,” who “use the station for gratification of their private, internal needs.”

This kind of “research” assumed what it was out to prove, of course, but the activists won the day, with major liberal foundations like Pew and MacArthur, it is said, quietly writing checks to make up for the loss of listeners. Today, public radio is a slick, essentially commercial enterprise paying some of its announcers in excess of $300,000 per year, but ironically, as its literate and educated audience ages, it suffers the exact same demographic fate as classical music. The Liberal Affluent Boomers aren’t all that different demographically from the demeaned classical audience.

The conventions of the Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio used to be a hotbed of activity, with record companies, performers, and public radio music people crowding the premises. By its 42nd annual convention in Florida in 2004, the activity had virtually dried up.

Dave Glerum, music director of WMFE in Orlando, had been coming to the convention for 25 years. “Believe it,” he said. “This was once like a major trade show. You had 30 record labels here, giving records away, all kinds of free stuff. Artists would perform during the day, every night, promoting their records. There were throngs of people all weekend long. By Sunday, when you left, you still wouldn’t have met 80 percent of the attendees. That’s how many people there were. And now it’s… well….” The AMPPR home page, never updated after

March 2013, still asks “Are you ready for Public Radio’s music month?”

The postmodern arts world seems to have carried the day. No opportunity was lost to devalue the world of classical art. In the 1980s, Gian-Carlo Menotti, artistic director at Spoleto USA, was having trouble making his one million dollar budget, and thus responded to the idea of a postmodern annex with a dismissive, “sure, if you can find the money.” Nigel Redden, formerly of the NEA, raised his own million for this endeavor in very short order, and “installations” and other such excrescences of postmodern theory popped up all over Charleston like mushrooms after a rainstorm.

The shock of 9/11 brought yet another downturn, as relatively affluent people already hit by the dot-com crash put away their Visa cards for a year or so. A noted operatic agent reported that he lost a quarter of his business that day, as everyone was provided with an excuse

“to pull in their horns.” We all know about the travails of various symphony orchestras, which seem to be getting ever more serious with the most recent financial troubles. Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts in fiscal 2014 is $146 million, virtually the same as in

1979, with no adjustment for inflation! To expect that more public funding for the arts will suddenly appear, when budgets everywhere are being strained by huge unfunded pension liabilities that are causing cities to cashier policemen, is sheer madness. Only the amazing devotion of the HIP audience and its private patrons (see “Donors ex machina,” EMAg, Spring 2014) and its economic flexibility, insulates it from the troubles of more traditional orchestras. Therein lies our hope.

Despite this mixed history, we should consider how our field can persist, even flourish, now that there are new generations who are not particularly interested in bashing dead white males and when the most extreme postmodernists are starting to seem like the aging hippies

on South Park. I would like to propose the following, which are mostly not expensive or difficult.

Keep the faith. Study history and the treatises and let them inform our actions. One of the more questionable observations by Haynes was his assertion that “an obsession with the period intentions of the composer” is typical of traditional conservatory musicians. On the

contrary, students were very often told not to waste a precious hour on history or theory that could be spent practicing. The baby steps away from this ethic made by Albert Fuller and the first early music denizens of the Juilliard 40 years ago were truly revolutionary. It is crucial that the amazingly talented players in the new historical performance programs retain the ability to question how best to make the music come off the page despite the lack of any unbroken tradition.

Don’t sell HIP short. We have done amazing things, and can do amazing things still. For someone dedicated to historical stagings of Baroque opera, however, it was painful to see a photo of a modern staging on the cover of the Winter 2006 EMAg. It is heartbreaking that Nicholas McGegan’s amazing run at the Göttingen Handel Festival is over, worrisome that so many lovely Baroque dancers are underemployed, and poignant when producers ask for two dancers to do a whole opera. Fight for more support for things that matter.

Don’t kid ourselves. EMA paid for a poll in 2005 aimed at demonstrating wide support for early music, with literally millions of people nationwide indicating a personal involvement with the field. This was heartening news, until one actually looked at the questions asked. Anyone who ever sang Mozart or Beethoven in any form in church, for instance, was counted as having a personal involvement. In reality, if we add up the number of subscribers to HIP

series nationwide, the figure might be in the low tens of thousands. Adding single ticket buyers might add a slightly larger number to the total, and adding students would maybe add another ten thousand. Only by counting listeners to recordings and classical radio, where

HIP has always competed successfully with the standard repertoire, could the EMA poll come close to the numbers reported. Of course, it is precisely these venues that have been so radically reduced.

Avoid false friends. This ranges from not heeding self-serving “scholarship” (true scholarship goes where the facts lead and does not lead the facts to its preferred outcome), to questioning the postmodern directors who have staged productions in distinctly non-period

fashion. We must acknowledge that the political friends of the arts have included such unlikely names as Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Nelson Rockefeller. It mattered not that every theater person in the UK voted for the Labour Party; the slashing of arts funding was inevitable, and Labour closed theater companies all over anyway.

Avoid the “opera as music with costumes” fallacy. An attitude regarding opera and opera-ballet as just bigger concerts where too much money is spent on non-musical items is destructive to the entire field. Haynes pointed out that in the 19th century the idea of “absolute music” became widespread and that “autonomous music, music unadulterated, was thus by definition instrumental, free at last of singers.” As if buying into this Romantic notion completely, his entire book contains only a half-dozen fleeting references to opera, the most important musical form in HIP!

Keep making it happen. There is a world of difference between anybody who’s ever organized a concert and paid the artists, and everybody else. Especially in these trying financial times, any artists who are willing to put ideas and aesthetics ahead of their careers and finances from time to time in order to create special moments should be highly commended, and treasured.

Opera, the pinnacle

Someone blogged recently that John Eliot Gardener’s legacy “will be in how modern orchestras have changed,” but because of his pioneering work in Baroque opera, he’s much more important than that. The HIP leaders in the ’80s had a great awareness of and love

for singing, vocal arts, and drama. Today, this is not so true. Most often, only instrumental music is actually HIP, and we get, for instance, this recent Indes Galantes in Toulouse:

During the overture, first one, then two and then a whole host of naked bodies appear

against luxuriant vegetation, wiggling their bottoms in a display of athletic, jerky

choreography. In this Garden of Eden, corruption arrives not in the form of a serpent but

as an assembly representing today’s dubious elites: prelates munching crisps, football

players, and a rap star. (Financial Times)

This kind of thing did not happen when Gardiner was on the podium. Hogwood withdrew when it happened to him. We should pursue the period dream of HIP and not sell out to this kind of thing, for what has resulted in the end is that HIP has now quite little power and influence. Every new endeavor looking at the big picture is to be highly commended. If we aren’t free to pursue with integrity what was the pinnacle of artistic expression in the Baroque period—opera—the strength to resist degradation of the rest of HIP will be hard to find. With no meaning, HIP is just another sound.

Originally published in Early Music America Magazine, Summer 2014.