Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion

1. Speak about Ysaye's career as a concert violinist and a com­poser. What compositions did he write?

101

2. Give the distinguishing features of his style of performance. In what lies the explanation of the tremendous impact of Ysaye's playing?

3. How do you understand Ysaye's statement: "You must phrase as you breathe"?

4. What do you know about Ysaye's tours of Russia, his pro­grammes? What were the reviews likе?

5. What do you know about the Queen Elizabeth Competitions? When was the competition founded and what was it origi­nally called? How often does the competition take place? Which outstanding Soviet violinists won prizes in this compe­tition?

6. Divide the text into logical parts, give a title to each of them and summarize the text in writing.

The world of opera handel in performance

To mark the Handel tercentenary SIR CHARLES MACKERRAS, eminent practitioner of Handel on stage, discusses the practical problems of performing his operas in conversation with HAROLD ROSENTHAL.

HAROLD ROSENTHAL: How were you first attracted to Han­del opera?

CHARLES MACKERRAS: The way that so many people with English musical backgrounds were - through the oratorios, and then through the instrumental music. Only much later did it become clear to me that Handelian opera séria could be viable as a dramatic en­tertainment rather than just as music. I'd conducted a great deal of Handel but I'd never worked on an opera on stage before doing Julius Caesar for the ENO.*

H.R.: Did you have doubts as to whether Handel opera was fea­sible in dramatic terms?

C.M.: I'd never thought that it could be staged until I'd seen performances in which they did Handel as I imagine the composer himself thought of it - without trying to send it up, or do it as if it were a play within a play, or change the order of the sequences, or generally dramatise it in a way different from that which the com­poser intended. The operas are of course intensely naive: the good people very, very good and the bad people very, very bad. But Han­del, being a greater composer than all the other opera composers of the time, manages through his music to portray deeper characters than the librettists ever imagined, just as Mozart did two generations later.

H.R.: Are the conventions readily acceptable to an audience in the 1980s, or do you have to compromise?

C.M.: I don't see that they are any more difficult to accept than any other form of non-realistic opera. The exaggerated good, the ex-

102

aggerated evil of the characters and the way they react are no more unacceptable than many of the characters in a Verdi or Donizetti opera: it all depends oh the way it's put over as to whether it's dramatically effective or not. If you have theatrical animals perform­ing the various roles it will be a dramatic entity, if you have mere puppets just singing the notes and not acting out the words, then it will not impinge upon the audience as drama.

H.R.: How do you get singers today who, after all, have not been brought up in the Handel tradition unless they happen to be British oratorio singers, to acquire Handelian discipline, and how do they react to this kind of formal music?

C.M.: There are now large numbers of English and English-speaking singers who take very readily to the Handelian style and to the style of the "aria" opera.* You said "the discipline" - I think the discipline is something they have to do for themselves. The arias are tremendously taxing whether or not you add ornamentations - they are difficult enough to sing as written. People who try to reconstruct the original performance conditions know that the singers used to improvise freely, particularly in da-capo arias,* and they tend to write out ornaments that often don't sound natural. You've got to have a singer who is adept at ornamentation and able to make it sound as though it is improvised, even though it is not. Perfor­mances of Handel in the early 18th century or of Mozart in the late 18th century were much more informal affairs than they are now, the singers would frequently talk to people in the audience, particu­larly aristocrats - they had much more personal contact and were less concerned with building character than they are today. It's difficult dealing with the "aria" opera today, because modern producers ex­pect singers to perform the same actions exactly in every perfor­mance, while the musicians tend to lay down exactly what kind of ornaments will be sung, what appoggiatura* on which note, and the singers perform them the same way every time. It wasn't done that way in Handel's time.

H.R.: Do you believe in performing the scores in full, or are there times when they should be cut?

C.M.: Many of the long operas can be cut. In festival perfor­mances, of course, there is a stronger case for doing them complete than in a run of performances in a repertory house. (...)

H.R.: I don't know whether you heard Handel performances in the immediate post-war period in Germany, but in your experience how does the German Handelian tradition differ from our own?

C.M.: Where does one start? It is so different. Not to speak of production, but just musically... The idea has always been that the opera-seria style needed an interpretation.

H.R.: With a capital "I"?

C.M.: Yes, and in inverted commas. It needed bringing up to date to make it acceptable. All those words in inverted commas! Ac­ceptable to audiences. The whole opera-seria style, even as applied

103

by Mozart to works like Idomeneo, Remember the version that Richard Strauss did of Idomeneo: he thought that it needed to be altered, bearbeitet* in order to make it acceptable to a modern audi­ence.

H.R.: As also with Gluck - Strauss and Gluck. C.M.: Exactly, and Wagner too. They saw that whole style of opera through the style of their own music and their own period. The big difference today is that we are at least trying to imagine how Handel might have seen his own works and how audiences might have reacted to them, and to create similar circumstances in which we can try and make our audiences see the drama in Han­del's operas as people in the 18th century also felt the greatness of his music. That's the difference between performances of ancient music in the first half of the 20th century and the second. In the first half they were constantly trying to make works such as Han­del's acceptable; they realised that the music was great and felt they had to change it about. In the second half we're trying to see the music as it might have been seen by its composer and the people of his time. There's still plenty of scope. There are many different styles of performing Handel's music all of which claim to be either authentic or in the spirit of the period, and the same is true of the production side. Producers claim that they are interpreting Handel in a way that he might have approved of, getting down to the roots of the music and the drama. Each generation produces a new kind of so-called authentic interpretation. The word "authentic" is bandied about too much these days, I think. What does it mean? There are endless varieties of authenticity. I myself, although I take my role very seriously as a person who tries to create the atmosphere of original performances, to delve into the minds of Handel and Mozart, I'm terribly wary of using the word "authentic" because, just as in fads in medicine, in three years' time there'll be a new authentic way of doing the music. We strive to get nearer and nearer to the sound that Mozart and Handel would have heard, but often I feel that when we get near to it we don't really like it. I've recently heard several performances of Mozart operas by various people, all of them claiming to be more or less authentic, and I must say that although I'm a stickler for authenticity myself, I didn't like the sound that was produced. So just as there are infinite varieties of interpreting the works of the great masters in an unauthentic way, then even within the framework of so-called authenticity there is still a virtually infinite variety of interpretation. That is one of the fascinating things about the great masterpieces: they still emerge as masterpieces however you perform them.

H.R: I'm very glad you're wary about using the word "authenticity". What is authentic in one age is not considered au­thentic in another. What Beecham might have considered an authen­tic version, for example, we don't today.

C.M.: They used the word in a very different sense. I don't

104

think Beecham cared about authenticity - it's a relatively new con­cept. So is "interpretation". People didn't talk about interpretation 100 years ago. They performed the music as best they could with their own virtuosity. They didn't interpret music as a modern con­ductor does. The old conductor was just a time-beater. The differ­ence between a good and a bad conductor was whether he set the right tempo, whether he could train an orchestra to play the work correctly. Nowadays we take it for granted that the music is played correctly and we expect interpretation into the bargain. A very new thing!

H.R.: Have you ever heard Toscanini's definition of tradition? "Some fool's memory of the last bad performance."

C.M.: Yes, that marries up with Mahler's "Tradition is slovenli­ness." It's a similar concept, isn't it?

From: Opera, 1985 Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion

1. What points about the production of Handel's operas are dis­cussed in the interview?

2. What is Mackerras' view on Handel's music and the librettos?

3. How does Mackerras characterize great Handelian singers? What special vocal training and qualities do Handelian operas require from the singers?

4. What problems confront the present-day producer in staging Handel's operas? How have Handel's operas been made ac­ceptable to the present day public? How has the problem of authentic performance been tackled?

5. Which of Handel's operas have been staged in the Soviet Un­ion? Have you heard any of them, live or recorded? Express your opinion. Do you think Handel's operas suitable for staging nowadays?

6. What are your views on authenticity of performance? Do you share Mackerras' view? How would you answer those ques­tions which were put to Mackerras?