Like everyone else, I have not heard a live opera for a number of months. By chance, the very last opera I saw in person—in February, at the Metropolitan Opera House—was Handel’s Agrippina. Starring the brilliant Joyce DiDonato as the eponymous empress, and conducted with attention and grace by the Handel expert Harry Bicket, this four-hour marathon turned out to be surprisingly hilarious as well as musically thrilling. Comedy in Handel productions can easily fall flat (I once had to walk out of a West Edge Opera production of Agrippina, it was so annoyingly over-the-top), so I was especially aware of how beautifully DiDonato and the rest of the fine cast were triumphing over difficult material.
I say “by chance,” but it is not so odd that my last opera should have been a Handel work, because whenever I am in the vicinity of a live Handel production, I make every effort to see it. He is, I would say, my favorite opera composer. The only other competitor for the title is Rossini, but whereas Rossini caters solely to my upbeat, comedy-
loving side (I can’t abide his few serious works), Handel appeals to me across the board. His operas are not always easy to stage, and there were large swaths of the twentieth century when, I gather, nothing much of interest was done with them. But once a few canny directors managed to locate the deep psychological material buried in most of his pieces, and once they had enough countertenors to choose from (it had been a dying breed for a long time), we began to see good productions in profusion. The late lamented New York City Opera, for one, always knew how to put on a good Handel show, and so did the San Francisco Opera, under the brief but immensely satisfying directorship of Pamela Rosenberg.
It was an Alcina brought to us by Rosenberg, in fact—a collaboration with the Stuttgart Opera, from which she had lately departed—that first alerted me to the virtues of Handel. This Alcina appeared on our shores toward the end of 2002, and though I had been to the San Francisco Opera a number of times before that, this was the first time I remember feeling overwhelmed by the production. I couldn’t get enough of it (even though, like most Handel operas, it lasted about four hours), and when I went back for a second time, I took a friend, the poet Thom Gunn, who loved the performance too. It happened to be an opera Thom knew practically by heart, because he often listened to his favorite recording of it, the historically inaccurate Joan Sutherland version from 1959, which employs a tenor as the hero in place of the designated mezzo-soprano or countertenor. This soon became my favorite recording as well. I have listened to it with pleasure over the years, and now, in the last few months, I have been playing it repeatedly to myself.
When you listen to a Handel opera in its recorded version, there are obvious losses, particularly in terms of sound quality and depth of character portrayal. Unless you are a lot more alert than I, you don’t really bother to keep up with what is happening in the plot; it all just becomes a single musical fabric containing swatches of different voices, sometimes in solo form and sometimes joined together. This has the advantage, I’ve found, of eliminating the prolonged anticipatory sensation a live Handel production often produces, where you wait and wait for those voices to join together and they don’t do it until the very end of each act. For those of us trained on Mozart or Rossini or Verdi operas, the delay can seem willfully suspenseful, even intentionally perverse. Why not put these lovely voices together, if you have them? Would it kill you, Mr. Handel, to give us at least a duet?
But when I’m sitting in my reading chair next to my trusty Bose speaker, with the encapsulated sound of the voices coming out in the background as I consume that day’s or that week’s selected novel, I don’t mind this at all. I am aware of the familiar music, and it moves me as much as it ever does, but I am not waiting for it. It comes out at its own pace, and that in itself is reassuring, soothing. It is there whenever I want it, and I can hear it over and over again, as often as I like. I am not in danger of missing my favorite bits. I am not at risk of looking at the supertitles when something fascinating is happening onstage. I don’t even care, frankly, what the words mean, when I am listening in this state. I just want to hear their sounds, their cadences, in relation to the rise and fall of the music.
People who don’t like Handel complain that the music is too repetitive, to which I always say: Yes! That is what is so great about it. If you like what you are getting, you can rest assured that you will get it again, a dozen or even a hundred times. Every Handel opera is a sibling of every other opera he wrote, with recognizable family traits, and that, too, is a plus for the true addict. I’m not implying these works are identical: I would never confuse Alcina, say, with Agrippina or Ariodante. But there are sequences of notes that come back time after time, and luckily for me, they are sequences that go straight to my auditory pleasure centers. Something in me is hardwired to love Handel.
After Alcina, my second-favorite opera to play to myself is Giulio Cesare—not the whole thing, just the last two discs in the four-disc version I own (which is the Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau/Tatyana Troyanos recording). I don’t know how or when I realized that the second and third acts, the ones contained on CD 3 and CD 4, were the ones I loved best, but since then I have only occasionally sat through the whole thing from the beginning. Instead, I skip straight to the best part —not of the plot (I have no idea what is going on at that point), but of the music itself. It is in those two acts that I encounter the most moving combinations of voice and music, the ones I am hardwired to appreciate. And so, like a hamster on his cage-run, I seek them out again and again.
Perhaps right about now you are saying to yourself: But this is no way to listen to music—what a philistine she is. Well, you are of course entitled to your opinion. But I am not arguing for this as a way of interpreting or even fully appreciating Handel. When I am out at a live opera (if I am ever, inshallah, allowed to attend a live performance again), I will resume my critical function, sifting through what is taking place on the stage in relation to the orchestral and vocal music. At home, though, I don’t have to do that. I have no critical function to perform whatsoever. I am just a recipient of pure pleasure. And since I am the one who defines what pleases me, I can listen to my Handel CDs in whatever order and in whatever way I want.
Sometimes I alternate my two favorites with Acis and Galatea. Again, the one I listen to is not the historically accurate recording conducted by John Eliot Gardiner on period instruments (though I do own that one), but the livelier, warmer, Mozart-orchestrated version that, like my Alcina, features Joan Sutherland. And, as with my Alcina, which I love in part because of my enduring affection for Thom Gunn (which has long survived his 2004 death and will last, I hope, to my own), I love this Acis and Galatea because of its source. Mark Morris recommended it to me when he was using it to choreograph and direct his own production of the opera, and something of my gratitude for that—as for every other piece of music his dances have introduced me to—suffuses my listening at home.
Old memories invade the other Handel recordings I have, too. When I listen to part or all of my Samson recording (a period-accurate one produced by The Sixteen under the directorship of Harry Christopher), I think back to the time I heard Mark Pad-more perform this lengthy work with Philharmonia Baroque in a Berkeley church. As it happens, Padmore is also one of the singers in The Sixteen’s 2002 version, and you can recognize his distinctive voice even in a relatively small part. By the time I saw his live performance in Berkeley in 2005, he had ascended to the title role. His Samson was so compelling, I remember, that he singlehandedly kept my little party of four glued to our seats for the entire oratorio, even though we had initially planned to cut out halfway through for dinner.
And then there’s Ariodante, which I don’t actually own but have borrowed from Classical Archives as part of my personal playlist. I downloaded it just before attending a marvelous production of the opera at the Drottningholm Palace Theater (the one I reviewed in these pages last December), and I have listened to it once or twice since then. But it has not yet become one of my regular standbys. Perhaps I am afraid to get too attached to it, in case I let my Classical Archives subscription lapse, which would cause the recording to disappear from my iPhone. Or perhaps I already have too many Handel favorites queued up ahead of it. There’s only so much listening you can do at home, and in the current circumstances I find that I end up playing the same few things over and over. Just as repetition is an alluring feature of his operas as a whole, familiarity—or something like familiarity, though it also partakes each time of revelation—is what makes me want to hear them now.
Wendy Lesser edits The Threepenny Review. Her latest book, Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery, came out in May from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
