HGO brings Barrie Kosky’s eye-popping ‘Saul’ to town
George Frideric Handel was one of the most prolific composers of his era — not that anyone today would necessarily know that.
“I think part of the problem with Handel’s music today is ‘Messiah’ because it is so frequently performed,” says Betsy Cook Weber, director of the Houston Symphony Chorus. “I think conductors and management and music directors feel like, ‘Well, we do Handel. We’ve done Handel.’ And so we don’t get to hear enough.
“I’m so eager to hear, and to see, HGO’s production of
‘Saul,’ ” she adds. “But (his) other oratorios and operas are just fantastic, and I don’t think they get their due.”
Houston audiences can enjoy something of a Handel renaissance this fall, however.
Besides the Houston Symphony’s annual “Messiah” performance in December, this Friday Houston Grand Opera opens “Saul,” Australian director Barrie Kosky’s audacious adaptation of Handel’s 1739 oratorio based on the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel. Baroque specialists Ars Lyrica weigh in with “Handel in Love” on Nov. 23 at the Hobby Center as well.
Handel was born and began his musical education in Halle, a midsize city in the eastern part of modern-day Germany, before training in Italy for roughly five years. By the premiere of “Saul,” he had been living and working in London for nearly three decades and become one of the country’s preeminent composers. “Messiah” followed three years later, sealing (and perhaps distorting) his legacy forever after.
“Nobody can ever really remember if he’s English or German, but you also have all these operas in Italian, so it’s very funny how mixed he really is,” notes HGO dramaturg Jeremy Johnson.
Handel was also an “entrepreneur,” Weber says.
“He was making money off of his product, so he wasn’t just composing in isolation,” she says. “He wanted people to like his music, and I think that’s reflected in it. It’s very accessible immediately to even the casual listener, but there’s so much depth to it that it’s very appealing to those of us who just work in the business day in and day out.”
‘Huge arcs of drama’
His commercial instincts helped guide Handel toward “Saul.”
English society at the time was divided by a great religious debate between traditionalists and the Deists, who believed that God created the universe but did not take an active role in human affairs. One of the few things both sides agreed on was their mutual distaste for art from Catholic countries, and ticket sales from the Italian operas Handel had been writing began to decline. Productions based around biblical texts crept into vogue.
“In London, there were certainly wealthier members of the nobility who supported Handel and enjoyed his concerts, but primarily the theaters were commercial,” Johnson says. “If you didn’t sell tickets, you had to find something else to do, so that’s exactly what he did.”
As an oratorio, “Saul” alternates arias with brilliant choruses and instrumental passages featuring trombones, drums (which initially had to be borrowed from the Tower of London), and a bell-like instrument known as a carillon. Charles Jennens, who also wrote the text for “Messiah,” included stage directions in his libretto — “Saul throws a spear at David,” for example — but to the best of Johnson’s knowledge, he says, directors with the wherewithal to follow through on those directions are a relatively recent phenomenon.
Between the slaying of Goliath in the opera’s opening scene; David’s intimate friendship with Saul’s son Jonathan; and the title character’s jealousy-fueled descent into madness — including an R-rated encounter with the Witch of Endor — “Saul” doesn’t lack for dramatic moments. Kosky picked up on this right away.
“When people say that Handel’s oratorios shouldn’t be staged, it drives me mad,” the director told Theatre Times magazine in 2016. “They are so full of theater and drama, that you can’t for one moment tell me he wasn’t seeing pictures in his head. The themes are so much bigger than the operas; there are no sub-plots, just huge arcs of drama.”
His 2015 staging certainly made a splash at Glyndebourne, the annual opera festival outside London. The Guardian was bowled over by its “riotous collection of wigs and costumes
that cheerfully muddle the 18th and 21st centuries,” reviewer Andrew Clements wrote. The reception was so intense the production returned for an encore two years later; HGO will be the first company to do Kosky’s “Saul” in the States.
“I think it’s a really special thing that Glyndebourne and Houston have looked at this piece and said, ‘Hey, this is worth putting onstage,’ ” Johnson says. “Because it certainly is.
“I mean, the music is amazing,” he adds. “And the plot is dramatic. It has just as much drama as any other quote-unquote ‘opera’ you’ll ever see. It’s great that these creative minds like Barrie Kosky are pushing those boundaries and making us (companies) wonder, ‘What else can we do?’ ”
In the shadow of ‘Messiah’
“Saul” was an instant success and was performed regularly well into the 19th century, but even it and a handful of Handel’s better-known works — the oratorios “Samson” and “Judas Maccabaeus,” for example, or the orchestral pieces “Water Music” and “Music for the Royal Fireworks” — eventually fell under the shadow of “Messiah.”
“If you ask any person on the street to name a Handel oratorio besides ‘Messiah,’ they would probably come up blank,” Weber says. “I think ‘Messiah’ has become a pillar for us — first because it’s great music, of course.
“Secondly,” she adds, “because the subject matter is of great interest to not only I think Christians but to the (portion) of humanity who asks the question, ‘Why?’ ”
“Messiah” premiered in April 1742 and was originally associated more with Easter. But, Johnson says, “there’s just so many famous pieces that are repeated at Eastertime that it kind of became almost too much music all at the same time, all these different oratorios.
“The Bach ‘Passions’ were all done at Easter, so for practical purposes people moved the ‘Messiah,’” he adds, “because it did have references to the Nativity at the beginning.”
Furthermore, offers Weber,
“if you want to do special music at Christmastime you’re kind of hard-put to find great music, so I think that’s why it has just become the common piece that people perform.”
That said, “Messiah” is fully capable of moving audiences at any time of year. In July, Weber accompanied the Houston Symphony Chamber Singers to Poland, where she conducted two performances of the oratorio at “two big churches that were absolutely packed with people,” she recalls.
The music director of the accompanying orchestra suggested moving the “Hallelujah” chorus to the end of the piece. Weber’s singers did it twice, so the audience could sing along the second time.
“I looked out at those people (and) they were crying, they were so moved, and holding up their hands,” she says. “It was really something. I think ‘Messiah’ deserves to be performed all year long, but I’m happy that it’s found a place in the Christmas season.”
Which, by the way, is almost here.
By Weber’s count, the Houston Symphony has been performing “Messiah” “at least for the past 50 years.” Earlier this month, at the first rehearsal for this December’s performance, she asked people who had sung it before to raise their hands; bear in mind symphony policy now allows chorus members to choose which concerts they sing.
“We had people who had sung it at least 30 and 40 times,” she says. “They don’t have to sign up for that, so clearly they are not tired of it either.”
And how is it sounding so far? “It’s gonna be fantastic,” Weber says. “It’s a really good chorus. I was elated.”