As you may know, Bob’s theme for this year is “Discover the Drama.” Of course every live theatrical performance has a dramatic element, and since The Collegiate Chorale so frequently performs opera in concert, we are more accustomed to appearing as dramatic actors-- to playing a role-- than most choruses. Even by these standards, though, the upcoming season--including one oratorio, one liturgical piece, one cantata based on a Broadway show, and the North American premiere of a Handel opera-- is overflowing with opportunities for us to stretch ourselves dramatically and seize the opportunity to exercise our acting chops. This is clearly with case with our first piece, Mendelssohn’s Elijah. If ever an oratorio could be seen as a Cecile B. DeMille epic, overflowing with spectacle, charged emotion, and theatrical artifice, this is the one. Mendelssohn conceived of the piece almost as an opera. When he approached his friend Pastor Julius Schubring to ask his help with the libretto, he was very specific on this point. Schubring thought the emphasis of the piece should be moral; it should concentrate on the uplifting messages to be derived from the story of Elijah. But Mendelssohn told him, “The dramatic element should predominate. The personages should act and speak as if they were living beings.” (In the end, Mendelssohn wrote much of the libretto himself in order keep the dramatic emphasis in the foreground where he wanted it.)
The chorus plays a more fully realized dramatic role in Elijah than in many of the full-fledged operas we’ve sung. Often in an opera, we fill the role of the classical chorus in a Greek play-- as peasants, villagers, courtiers, handmaids, or whatever, we’re observers who comment on the actions of the principal characters. In Elijah we don’t just watch; we are, as suppliants, antagonists, fanatics, or comrades, a strong force interacting with the main character. The oratorio is structured as the conflict between a larger-than-life strong central figure, opposed to the people in the society around him, and the forces of heaven at his back. As Mendelssohn famously remarked: “I imagined Elijah as a real prophet through and through, of the kind we could really do with today: Strong, zealous and yes, even bad-tempered, angry and brooding-- in contrast to the riff-raff, whether of the court or of the people, and indeed at odds with almost the whole world-- and yet borne aloft as if on angels’ wings.” The Collegiate Chorale gets to portray both the riff-raff he fights, and the angelic forces that support him. With the mighty Bryn Terfel for us to play against, we should be able to scorch the paint right off the walls of Carnegie Hall!
In our next piece, Bloch’s Sacred Service, the dramatic element is perhaps not so immediately obvious. The piece is, after all, basically a setting of the Hebrew sections of the Sabbath morning service as it appears in the Union Prayer Book of the American Reform synagogue. But Bloch’s piece is-- like the Verdi Requiem or the Beethoven Missa Solemnis-- a setting of the liturgy that transforms it into a theatrical and emotional event, and like these pieces it fits more comfortably in a theatre than in a house of worship.
Bloch said of the piece, “It is a whole drama in itself. . . . For fifty minutes I hope it will bring to the souls, minds and hearts of the people, a little more confidence, make them a little more kind and indulgent than they were and bring them peace.” And as he describes it, the piece does sound rather like a morality play with the chorus, as protagonist, taking a journey from daily life through a state of heightened awareness and then, transformed, back to mundane reality. The piece begins, Bloch says, as, “a kind of ‘Pastorale’—in the desert perhaps—The Temple of God in ‘Nature,’” then develops into “a dialogue between God and Man, the chorus discovering the law of the atom, the stars, the whole universe, the One, He our God.” Then in the end, “after the orchestra and chorus give this message of faith, hope and courage, we must send people back to their routine of living, cooking, laundry and so on. Thus, the priest gives a benediction, the chorus answers, ‘Amen,’ and they leave.”
Next we will give the New York premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s and Alan Jay Lerner’s A White House Cantata, demonstrating how sometimes a piece’s essential dramatic excellence can be best served by a concert performance rather than a full staging. This cantata started life as a legendary Broadway flop called 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which ran for only seven performances in 1976. The musical dramatized historical events involving United States presidents from Washington to Theodore Roosevelt, with a play-within-a-play structure in which the actors stepped out of their roles to comment on events. While clever, the book was extremely convoluted and, by all accounts, just didn’t work. But everyone agreed the score was magnificent, and it has been salvaged in this cantata whose simplified structure allows all the wit and drama of Bernstein’s music and Lerner’s lyrics to shine. Among other things, we present a scene from the War of 1812 in which a group of British soldiers invade the White House and, after a little too much Madeira, launch into the old English drinking song “To Anacreon in Heav’n”—a melody which would very shortly be co-opted to become the tune of the American national anthem.
Our final concert, Handel’s Jupiter in Argos, is the most obviously dramatic of our presentations, since it is an actual opera. Yet in some ways, it is the least dramatic of the lot. It is a “pasticcio opera,” which means Handel made it up by inserting arias already used in other operas--with a few new pieces added--into a previously existing libretto for an opera by another composer. It is a rather light-hearted story of Jupiter’s pursuit of two women, Calisto and Iside, in which--unlike most stories of Jupiter’s exploits--both women manage to keep their virtue. Because of its structure, the work can be seen more as an opportunity to present a series of brilliant and intense pieces, rather than as a systematically developed drama. By the time it was written in 1739, the vogue for Handel’s arias was fading, while his oratorios were increasingly successful. With ten choruses, Jupiter in Argos gives the chorus more to sing than any other Handel opera, and some people have speculated was meant to capitalize on the success of the oratorios, with their many virtuoso choruses, by making the piece less opera-like and more oratorio-like.
Perhaps the real drama here is in the circumstances of our presenting the work. Handel originally wrote the opera for the London season of 1739, to capitalize on the arrival of a family of well-known Italian singers. Presented twice, it was not a success and was quickly cancelled. Some people question whether it was even staged or was just given in a concert version. In any case, it soon disappeared, and no printed score survived. Until recently, we knew the history of the opera, and most of the music, but we didn’t have a complete picture of how it all fit together. Two arias were missing, as well as most of the recitatives. It wasn’t until the discovery of a copy of the printed libretto (and the missing two arias, which turned out to be not by Handel but by Francesco Araia) that it became possible for musicologist John H. Roberts to fully reconstruct the opera for the first time since its original production, assembling all the pieces and re-creating the recitatives. The piece received its modern premiere less than a year ago, at the Handel Festival in Göttingen. When Bob heard about it, he instantly followed up with the people responsible for reconstructing the lost work, and as a result, The Collegiate Chorale now has the rare privilege of presenting a new Handel opera for the first time ever in North America.
--Janet Pascal, Chorale Member and Chorale Music Librarian
