As one of the leading opera houses in the region, the Frankfurt Opera had been less outgoing than the average German opera house in performing operatic repertory before Mozart. The house has a good reputation for balancing high musical standards with a predilection for Regietheater in the performance of a wide array of operas of the 19th and 20th centuries. Moreover, since its size is acoustically less suited to baroque orchestral forces, it is surprising to find no less than two premieres of Handel’s operas announced for the current season. While Teseo will be played at an alternative location, Giulio Cesare in Egitto, Handel’s most popular opera, is proudly presented with a young established singer in the title role who has made a career on the big Frankfurt stage. The unusual thing about this is that the singer in question is the baritone Michael Nagy, which means that the production harks back to performance standards whose foundations were laid by Oskar Hagen more than eighty years ago in Göttingen. The transposition of roles originally written for castrati or female singers an octave lower so that they could be performed by tenors or baritones was seen as indispensable at a time before the emergence of countertenors, as female singers performing male roles were regarded as disingenuous.
The rapid development of modern historically informed performance practice makes this casting decision seem obsolete, although it is clear right from the start that the Frankfurt performance of Giulio Cesare in Egitto cannot and should not be judged by these standards. The orchestra of the opera house hasn’t played Handel since the 2003/2004 run of Ariodante,nor cooperated with a specialist conductor such as Federico Maria Sardelli since 2007, which is why it would not have been feasible to experiment with historical instruments or ‘authentic’ instrumental techniques. Out of the eight soloists only the countertenor Matthias Rexroth (Tolomeo) might be called a specialist in the repertory. Still, the young, but versatile American conductor Erik Nielsen demonstrated an affinity for Handel’s music that compensated for the lack of experience by most of the performers. His theatrical sensibility helped infuse the performance with a particular dramatic verve, whether in the agile virtuosic arias or the slow pathetic ones. His contribution to the performance included minor interventions in the score such as the arrangement of the continuo line of Sesto’s aria ‘Cara speme’ for two muted violoncellos. Although without historical justification, this added an expressive layer to the aria, drawing the public’s attention to the chamber music quality of Handel’s music. It was also a wise decision not to overdo the overall sound volume in spite of the fact that the auditorium of the Frankfurt Opera is almost too big for an orchestra of six first violins. An overly stark contrast between the orchestral tutti passages and the more intimate settings of arias such as ‘Cara speme’ would have harmed the dramatic expressivity of Handel’s music. A less successful intervention was the ornamentation of the da capo section of the arias, obviously Nielsen’s contribution, as there were no differences between the ways individual singers produced their ornaments, which leads to the conclusion that they had been supplied by the conductor himself. The ornamentation was elaborate, sometimes becoming too remote from Handel’s original melodic line, which would not have been a problem in itself if it had not been applied slightly excessively and somewhat similarly in arias of very different character.
The weakest link among the soloists was luckily the least busy one, a slightly drab Sebastian Geyer in the recitative role of Curio. It remains unclear whether the cutting of some of the arias was carried out for dramaturgical or musical reasons, and although never radical, the reduction of the number of arias sung by a particular character clearly affected the balance of the roles. For example, the vocally confident baritone Simon Bailey (Achilla) kept only the first of his three arias, because rather than falling in battle in the third act as indicated in the original libretto, here his character was shot by Tolomeo in the second. Tanja Ariane Baumgartner’s performance, cast so as to account for the attraction of no less than three male characters to the young widow Cornelia, did not suffer much from the cut of her second, major key aria ‘Cessa omai di sospirare’, as the essence of the character lies in its plaintive tone. Nor did the cutting of Cleopatra’s ‘Venere bella’ do considerable harm to the performance of Brenda Rae. One of the musical highlights of the evening was her deeply moving performance of ‘Se pietà di me non senti’, not quite matched by a slightly too swift and superficial rendition of Cleopatra’s next lament, ‘Piangerò la sorte mia’. On the other hand, despite the precise rendition of the abundant coloraturas of, say, ‘Da tempeste il legno infranto’, the somewhat small-voiced American soprano lacked the qualities required for her to shine in the virtuosic display Handel provided for Francesca Cuzzoni.
Michael Nagy’s abilities to step into Senesino’s shoes are a different matter. A comparison with the recording of the opera with Dietrich Fischer Dieskau in the title role, conducted by Karl Richter, shows that some of the same problems remain after all these years. Unlike Richter, Nielsen never slowed down the tempo for Nagy in the fast arias, but the numerous coloraturas and ornaments, however perfectly suited to a castrato voice, remain somewhat clumsy when sung by a baritone. Despite Nagy’s evident discipline and hard work, ‘Se in fiorito ameno prato’ inevitably sounded strained. Still, in arias such as ‘Empio, dirò tu sei’, ‘Va tacito e nascosto’ and especially the short but taxing ‘Al lampo dell’ armi’, Nagy managed to make the arias his own by infusing them with energetic vigour. Where his performance fell short was in the formidable scena of Cesare’s rescue from the third act. Despite drawing on his experience in opera in order to provide the role with a personal stamp, Nagy failed to offer lyrical subtlety in the tension between accompagnato, arioso and aria that marks the scene. Finally, the most successful soloist performances of the evening were the ones where no cuts to the role had been made, which is by no means a coincidence. Matthias Rexroth (Tolomeo) might not possess the sophisticated timbre of some of his distinguished countertenor colleagues, but he sang Tolomeo’s three arias with the craftsmanship of a knowing musician. The most complete performance belongs to the Irish mezzosoprano Paula Murrihy. Rarely is a production of Giulio Cesare remembered for its Sesto, Lorraine Hunt’s rendition of the role in Peter Sellars’s production being an exception. Handel wrote the role for another able singer, Margherita Durastanti, but the frequent occurrence of the c minor key as well as the insistence on the affect of revenge has contributed to a slightly monochromatic reception of the music. Similarly to Hunt, Murrihy proves with both her singing and acting that it is a dramaturgic necessity to present Sesto in all his suffering as a true victim of war. The young singer has exactly what it takes to strike a balance between the pathetic (‘Cara speme’) and the dramatic register that was admired in Handel’s time. Sound volume, vocal technique, musicianship and expressivity were in perfect harmony with her rendition of the role.
Director Johannes Erath provided two main interpretive frames for his reading of the opera. Although both have some potential, they had difficulty converging and remained too abstruse to create a convincing, rounded theatrical impression. His first point of reference was the problem of the evasiveness of history, which is why he made use of the portrayal of Cleopatra and Caesar in cinema, a thick layer of representation under which the historical figures remain inaccessible. His other approach attempted to project the dramatic action onto the psychological level, letting the protagonists explore their inner obsessions and fantasies. The dreamlike stage sets by Herbert Murauer and the eclectic costumes by Katharina Tasch served the latter purpose particularly well. More than providing a palpable background for Cleopatra’s and Cesare’s fantasies of power and sexuality, the introduction of a figure with a veiled head provided a masterly substitution for a graphic depiction of Pompeo’s severed head at the beginning of the first act, allowing for a continual presence of the father figure both Sesto and Cornelia are so strongly determined by. The clear intertextual evocation of the visual world of René Magritte helped convey this point particularly well. But regardless of several successful directorial touches and the actors’ overall convincing realisation of Erath’s concept, I doubt that this production of Giulio Cesare will be remembered as a significant contribution to the theatrical tradition of the opera. Nevertheless, both musically and theatrically it offered a solid, albeit somewhat average reading of Handel’s masterpiece, while at the same time marking the welcome return of 18th-century opera to the stage of one of Germany’s most renowned opera houses.
Giulio Cesare in Egitto will be performed at the Frankfurt Opera from December 2012 to May 2013.
Production photo © 2012 Wolfgang Runkel for Oper Frankfurt.