Too hot to Handel?

When the distinguished Handel scholar, Winton Dean, published his book Handel's Operas 1704-1726 in 1987, its opening sentence was enough to give Handel fans pause and everybody else apoplexy. Twenty years in the making, the book stretched to 700 pages and contained a mind-boggling quantity of minutely detailed research into the scores of 17 of Handel's 40 operas. It was clear that Dean knew what he was on about: still, when he declared that "Handel ranks with Monteverdi, Mozart and Verdi among the supreme masters of opera", many of his readers might have been forgiven for wondering what, exactly, he was on.

Just a few years earlier, as Dean himself was shrewd enough to point out, such a statement would have been laughed out of court. In the early years of this century, Handel opera was regarded as unstageable, and music histories routinely summed up Handel's career as an opera composer in a single snooty paragraph before rushing to lavish pages of praise on his choral works.

But in the late 1990s, opera-goers no longer turn a hair at the prospect of Handel on stage - almost every mainstream European opera company now includes at least one Handel opera in its repertory - while record companies are positively tripping over each other to issue, not just mouth-watering new recordings of complete operas, but recital discs by a new generation of superstar Handel specialists. Why the turnaround? Shifts in artistic taste are notoriously difficult to pin down and almost impossible to explain, but it seems certain that, in Handel's case at least, familiarity has bred content, and that the current fashion for "rediscovering" Handel is actually a voyage of discovery.

Conversely, the prejudice of previous generations was based, as Dean bluntly states, on "sheer ignorance". As late as 1979, Eric Blom was able to begin a chapter on Handel in his student textbook Some Great Composers by pointing out that, asked to list those works of Handel with which they were most familiar, most people would begin with Messiah, add the Largo, (few of those naming it, mind you, could have added the information that it was an aria from the opera Serse) and begin to flounder almost at once. To the majority of music-lovers, Handel opera was simply a closed book.

Unfortunately for everybody, it was a closed book which had been filed under "far too long/desperately dull/silly plots". It was, apparently, easy for anyone accustomed to the heightened dramatic temperatures and fluid dramatic structures of late 19th-century romantic opera to accept without question the verdict of musical history that 18th-century opera seria was stilted, phoney and of absolutely no interest to anybody. Early attempts at revivals only made things worse for, convinced that the operas were too long, directors made wholesale cuts, butchering arias and - as often as not - reducing a complex but coherent plot to a jumble of nonsense.

"We are told that Handel's operas are so long that no modern audience would be prepared to swallow them whole," says Winton Dean, adding dryly that "on the very few occasions when one of them has been staged in full with a proper regard to style, that has not been the audience's reaction." A critic from the Toronto Sun, sent to review a recent production of the aforementioned Serse by the Canadian Opera Company, would undoubtedly agree; having expressed some trepidation at the prospect of three-and-a-half hours in the company of an opera he had scarcely heard of, let alone heard, he concluded that it was "an experience not unlike being lowered into a warm, scented bath".

It is no coincidence that the current craze for Handel has followed hard on the heels of a 20-year vogue for "authentic" performance of 17th and 18th-century music, as practised by period-instrument ensembles under the direction of such pioneering conductors as William Christie, Roger Norrington and Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Initially tagged as the musical equivalent of brown rice and sandals, the period movement has captured the public imagination to such an extent that it has pretty much become the norm, extending what is generally thought of as "mainstream" repertoire back a couple of hundred years and prompting a radical change in the interpretation and performance of music up to, and including, Mozart.

In the case of Handel opera, this has meant a shift from stodgy, banner-and-breastplate stagings to nippy, well-acted, brilliantly sung shows, driven by the music's innate emotion and loopy comedy. Irish audiences, often insulated from the latest developments on the world stage, have been well served in the Handel field by Opera Theatre Company's acclaimed touring productions of Flavio, Tamerlano and Amadigi; and can now look forward to a brand-new staging of Rodelinda - a tale of marital fidelity in the face of horrendous trap-setting and political intrigue which, having premiered in London within 12 months of the premieres of Giulio Cesare and Tamerlano, is considered to be one of Handel's finest scores.

OF course no staging, no matter how clever, can disguise dodgy theatrical material - so what about those charges of "dull" and "daft"? On the face of it, opera plots don't come much dafter than that of Handel's Rinaldo, in which, towards the end of Act One, the hero's wife is carried off by "a black cloud". But if the spectacle of a Crusader knight staring glumly into a muddy sky doesn't strike you as the stuff of great tragedy, then you've clearly never heard the aria Cara Sposa, by means of which Handel turns Rinaldo's ridiculous predicament into an overwhelmingly moving artistic experience. In the hands of a genius, even the most stultifying straitjacket of genre can become a garment of fluid beauty.

It is, of course, possible that much of the traditional huffing and puffing about Handel was a smokescreen to conceal a deeper socio-sexual unease. The world of Handel opera is about as far removed from the effortless ma- chismo of 19th-century verismo opera as it's possible to get. To begin with, you can't discuss Handel without confronting the existence of the castrati: male singers who were castrated at puberty and who would have sung the majority of the heroic roles in Handel's day.

As a topic of conversation in polite society, castration is distressing enough - add the overtones of sexual ambiguity which results from the modern practice of substituting a woman dressed as a man (mezzo-soprano) or a man with an impossibly high voice (countertenor) and you can see why, for members of a less "in your face" generation, Messiah might have been a more palatable alternative.

But for young, upwardly mobile opera audiences, accustomed to fitting performances of Giulio Cesare between Quentin Tarantino's latest film and a quiet night in with a bottle of wine and Eddie Izzard on the telly, the mild androgyny of Alcina, Almira and the rest is child's play. And for music-lovers tired of Nessun Dorma and sick to death of the "three tenors", the arrival of a batch of countertenor superstars who can deliver the Largo - aka Ombra Mai Fu from Serse - in three brisk minutes is, frankly, a godsend. It's hard to say whether the current divos of the opera world, countertenors David Daniels and Andreas Scholl, have emerged as a result of Handel's popularity, or whether the highly marketable rivalry between the coppery sexuality of the former and the latter's choirboy ethereality has contributed to the continuing rise in Handel's theatrical fortunes, but one thing is clear - Handel is here to stay.

Opera Theatre Company's production of Rodelinda, directed by James Conway and designed by Neil Irish and Simon Corder, with Laurence Cummings conducting the London Baroque Sinfonia period instrument ensemble, continues in Limerick tonight, followed by Galway (May 6th), Sligo (May 8th), Mullingar (May 10th), Dublin (May 13th and 14th), Wexford (May 16th) and Coleraine (May 21st). Rodelinda will be sung by soprano Helen Williams, with countertenor Jonathan Peter Kenny as her husband, Bertarido, and tenor Nicholas Sears as bad guy, Grimoaldo.