Sex, drugs and baroque roles II

[pallas_athena]

Today I've been mostly practicing my recitative.


Baroque opera is divided rigidly into "recitative" sections-- lightly sung dialogue, in which the action takes place-- and musical numbers (arias, ensembles, choruses), in which the characters react to, and reflect on, the action. For instance, scene one of Giulio Cesare:

Chorus: About how awesome Caesar is.
Aria: Sung by Caesar; also about how awesome Caesar is.
Recit: Caesar has vanquished his rival, Pompey the Great. Pompey's wife and son come to him, pleading for peace. Caesar agrees and offers generous terms. Just then, an Egyptian general enters, bearing a gift from Pharaoh Ptolemy: Pompey's head. Caesar is shocked; Pompey's wife faints; Pompey's son is horrified. Caesar orders the Egyptian general to leave. But wait! He can't leave yet....
Aria: ...because Caesar has to sing for another few minutes about how angry he is, philosophise about how no true king is without mercy, and order him to leave a few more times.
(Here's the fainting-and-horrification part of the recit, leading into mezzo Sarah Conolly singing that last aria. Is she not the butchest thing on earth?)

So the structure of Baroque opera presents a bit of a problem to the modern listener. The story only moves during the recits; when an aria starts, the action stops. Add to this the da capo aria form and we start to have a problem: "Hang on, the action just stopped and now he's going to sing it all over again?"

Clever directors and singers who can act will find ways around this. Handel himself, by the time he wrote Cesare, was starting to play around with the form to make it less static. However, the bottom line is that if you go to a Baroque opera, your desire for story has to be balanced about 50-50 with the desire to hear good music. (And if you're singing in one, you'd damn well better be entertaining.)

Comments

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

"Hang on, the action just stopped and now he's going to sing it all over again?"

My problem with Handel's operas in a nutshell. My partner, however, who is far more musical than I, is ravished by the music of the arias, and kindly doesn't tell me I am an uncultured barbarian.

Where can we get tickets for your performance?

[artnouveauho.livejournal.com]

I'll happily sort them out if you'd like to come! Let me know. (you can email me on lizamezzo AT mac DOT com.

[laughingmagpie.livejournal.com]

I find this insight into opera fascinating. I like the way you teach it too!

[artnouveauho.livejournal.com]

Thank you, lovely!

[library-keeper.livejournal.com]

"The story only moves during the recits; when an aria starts, the action stops."

Not unlike some classic Hollywood musicals, then?

Interestingly enough this has a bearing on a conversation I was having the other day with a friend who is an expert on seventeenth-century masques. The stage directions for masques often give the impression that the action only takes place in between the dances; e.g. Artemis appears, tells the evil spirits 'Begone!', they flee away, and then a dance is performed in which Artemis drives the evil spirits away. My friend pointed out that this made no dramatic sense, and argued that the dance and the action must have been more closely integrated. I wonder if the same might apply to Baroque opera? My friend also suggested, based on her own experience of performing in masque re-enactments, that each group of dancers would want to remain on stage for as long as possible, to make the most of their moment in the spotlight, even if this wasn't what the librettist had in mind, so that the stage direction as printed might not give a very accurate picture of the masque as it was actually performed.