With its ornate garden and rococo theatre, Schwetzingen Castle, originally the summer residence of the Electoral Palatinate, has been an ideal setting for the Schwetzingen Festival in the early summer for the past sixty years. Still, the garden is no less picturesque when covered in snow and the charming theatre’s acoustics, particularly well suited to the performance of 17th and 18th-century music, are quite underused over the year. Fortunately, these thoughts had also occurred to the cultural authorities of nearby Heidelberg, and in 2005 the ‘Winter in Schwetzingen‘ festival, which presents both opera and a series of concerts by ensembles specialising in historically informed performance practice, was initiated by the city’s principal musical and theatrical institution, the Theater und Orchester Heidelberg. Under its auspices, the festival takes place every year from December to February. As in the last year, when Alessandro Scarlatti’s Marco Attilio Regolo was performed, the theme of the festival was Naples and the famous Neapolitan School. Considering the broad influence composers from the Italian south exerted on European musical life in the 18th century, it doesn’t come as a surprise that this year’s premiere of Nicola Porpora’s Polifemo saw its original first performance in London in 1734.
Porpora, one of the best singing teachers of his day, whose pupils included not only the castrato stars Farinelli and Caffarelli, but also the young Haydn, was engaged in 1733 by the Opera of the Nobility, an operatic undertaking under the patronage of the Prince of Wales, in order to challenge Handel’s operatic supremacy in London. Years of hard competition followed, and the end often justified the means, so that many of Handel’s long-time collaborators, including his biggest stars, the castrato Senesino and the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni, switched sides and sang for the Opera of the Nobility. As is often the case, there were no winners in this operatic battle, and although Porpora’s London operatic debut, Arianna in Naxo, was a fantastic success, Handel held his own, eventually leading both companies into bankruptcy. Polifemo formed part of this extended rivalry between Porpora and Handel, marking the London debut of Farinelli (Aci) along with the star cast of ex-Handel singers Cuzzoni (Galatea), Senesino (Ulisse) and Montagnana (Polifemo). The libretto by Paolo Rolli, another of Handel’s collaborators, is a conflation of two principal mythological stories. Whereas the first one is known mainly from the Odyssey and involves the blinding of the Cyclops by Odysseus, the second one, based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses,exists in no less than two adaptations by Handel himself. Therefore, comparisons between the two composers impose themselves not just because they were rivals, literally fighting for the same audience, but also due to thematic reasons, despite the fact that Handel’s serenata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo and the masque Acis and Galatea belong to completely different genres than Porpora’s opera seria.
Handel’s music has been subjected to expansive scholarly investigation for more than a century, but the music of the contemporaries he came into direct contact with during his time in Britain is slightly less known or performed. Therefore, the Schwetzingen performance of Polifemo, to my knowledge the only one since the first modern performance at the Tuscan city of Bibbiena in 2005, is also of great musicological importance. With the vast experience one has nowadays with Handel operas on the modern stage, we can finally imagine how London audiences might have reacted to Porpora’s operas as a musical alternative to Handel’s. Identical in terms of genre, but varying the conventions of dramma per musica to a lesser degree than Handel’s, Porpora’s opere serie bring a touch of stylistic novelty that is so typical of 18th-century Naples, although Porpora, only one year Handel’s junior, was less inclined to veer off to the style gallant than his younger colleagues Vinci and Hasse. Porpora’s writing for the voice is even more virtuosic than Handel’s, and his arias more easily typified into binary categories of the rapid concertante and the slow pathetic aria, the latter often in a minor key but impatient to modulate to the mediant and display its tragically coloured ritornello in the somewhat sentimental melancholy of the major mode. Still, despite less structural and formal variety, Porpora’s opera, at least in the performance by conductor Wolfgang Katschner and director Clara Kalus, didn’t suffer from comparison with the music of his more distinguished rival and one can easily understand why the London audience could enjoy both. For not only did Handel possibly have a hand in Porpora infusing his London operas with more dramatic verve in a display of numerous recitativi accompagnati, but impulses and influences often went both ways.
Similarly to both of Handel’s treatments of the myth, Porpora’s Polifemo makes us sympathise with the title character although or maybe precisely because he is portrayed with comic overtones, but as a very human character all the same. Despite never naming his penchant for cannibalism, Rolli’s libretto suggests that the other characters, who find themselves in Polifemo’s realm are risking their lives, so that his blinding by Odysseus is not only a ‘just punishment’ for having dared to raise himself above Jupiter, but also makes room for some moralising gloating on the part of the other characters. Naturally, this was where young director Clara Kalus twisted her directorial interpretation of the opera. In order to raise the dramatic stakes, it was Galatea who blinded Polifemo at the instigation of Ulisse and Calipso rather than Ulisse himself. The acting skills of the young Israeli soprano Rinnat Moriah were successfully put to the test in her character’s ambivalent reaction to the deified Aci in harmony with the sublime character of the only well known aria of the opera, ‘Alto Giove’, following his transformation into a stream in an intervention of Jupiter after the jealous Polifemo had crushed him with a rock. It was also Galatea who interrupted the endless coloratura streams of Aci’s aria ‘Senti il fato’, interpreted by Kalus as pompous laughter. This was a directorial intervention into the score that deprived us of the final display of pyrotechnics written for Farinelli, but was crucial to the reading of the story, as well as the poking of the blind Polifemo by giant hands, carried out by the other soloists during a sinfonia introduced between the scenes. But these reinterpretations were reduced to the third act, in a production that both in Kalus’s directorial reading as well as in its visual identity (costumes and scenery by Sebastian Hamak) remained a discrete, not too lavish attempt to present a formerly unknown opera to a new audience, winning them over in turn by the merits of the work itself. Kalus was originally supposed to be the assistant director of Karoline Gruber but had to step in for her older colleague on account of illness, which makes it difficult to tell the inputs of the two directors apart. The Schwetzingen production nevertheless shows Kalus as an able theatrical craftswoman who understands how opera seria ticks and her future productions will rightly generate great expectations.
The same respectful admiration for Porpora’s music left its stamp on the musical execution of the work lead by baroque specialist and founder of the Lautten Compagney Berlin, Wolfgang Katschner. The Philharmonisches Orchester Heidelberg, the city’s regular opera and symphonic orchestra, is far from being ideally suited to the performance of a repertoire as specific as Porpora, but years spent at the ‘Winter in Schwetzingen‘ have obviously paid off in that, under the baton of an able conductor, the orchestra managed to overcome some of its technical shortcomings. Katschner’s conducting was less than perfect in that sometimes it lacked subtlety, and the instruments, especially the string section, occasionally suffered from imprecision, but together they nevertheless managed to convey a unified vision of the score and to present it to an audience in a favourable light, contributing to a popularisation of Porpora in the noblest sense of the word.
The practice of cutting needs to be addressed here, and as in the Frankfurt performance of Handel’s Giulio Cesare, it was influenced by the casting. Almost no arias were cut completely, the only exception being Galatea’s second aria from Act II, scene 4, as this love scene with Aci originally comprises three arias and one duet, so that the cut can be partly justified by compression. The same motivation probably lies behind the anachronistic practice of cutting the da capo sections of some arias, all of which occurred in the first two acts. These were generally performed in swifter tempos, the single interval of the production occurring before the third act, only to lay greater musical and theatrical emphasis on it. This act not only breaks the binary formal mould of opera seria by a series of short arias for the drunken and blinded Polifemo, but also contains the most beautiful numbers of the opera. And although I would have personally preferred to hear all arias in their complete form, I can understand to some extent that Katschner felt the need to cut in order to win over the audience for Porpora’s music without exceeding the average duration of an opera performance.
Interestingly enough, this type of cut occurred only once in the parts of the primo uomo (Aci) and the prima donna (Galatea), as well as the seconda donna (Calipso), but twice in the role of the secondo uomo (Ulisse). Although a more heroic role in terms of the plot, the latter was sung by Austrian countertenor Jakob Huppmann, who has a lot of potential in terms of the capacities of his voice and his musical temperament, but lacks somewhat in experience, which should account for the odd rhythmical insecurity in his singing, as well as for the aforementioned cutting of the two ornamental da capo sections. The German countertenor Terry Wey has somewhat more stage experience, and he measured up more convincingly to the high demands of the role of Aci, although one should in neither case judge these young singers by the high (and imaginary) standards of Senesino and Farinelli, or in the case of the role of Aci, by those of some more distinguished countertenors like Philippe Jaroussky, who performs arias such as ‘Alto Giove’ and ‘Senti il fato’ with even more magnificence. The same considerations apply to Tijana Grujic’s contribution (Calipso), a talented young Serbian mezzosoprano with an already wide repertory, and to the promising Irina Simmes in the small role of Nerea. Rinnat Moriah’s lyric soprano is an understandable casting choice for a Cuzzoni role, and although the singer displayed some wonderful musicianship in the slow arias, especially in the wonderful ‘Smanie d’affanno’ and the preceding subtly orchestrated accompagnato ‘Aci, amato mio bene’, in which she finds out about Aci’s death, her voice occasionally lacked forcefulness. Finally, Haris Andrianos portrayed Polifemo with a musical vigour and convincingness that rounded off the performance of this operatic rarity in the most satisfying manner. The youthful energy behind the production infused the performance with a level of earnest unpretentiousness that could in the long run pave the way for Porpora’s inclusion in the established operatic scene.
Polifemo will be performed at the Rokokotheater Schloss Schwetzingen in December 2012 and January 2013.
Production photo © Florian Merdes for the Theater und Orchester Heidelberg.