This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Good to see Covent Garden, that vast maw for the disposal of public funds, finally stepping up to its attendant duties as mass entertainer with the amusing spectacle of the flouncy functionary being “beaten off” on camera by the queer dance-artist with the naughty flag; then zillions of column-inches prompted by the joint’s discovery that the evil pariah Russian diva Anna Netrebko was actually 150 per cent employable after all.
But all good things must end, and the place returned to its area of lesser competency — putting on shows — in September with the usual variable outcomes, though Netrebko’s return in Tosca was top old-skool fun as the stately 50-something soprano impersonated Puccini’s skittish teenybopper religious wack/sex kitten.
More interestingly, between now and Christmas the place is dishing up two whole Handel operas, Giustino of 1737 and the fabulous Ariodante of two years earlier — and neither is being staged as the kind of school-leaver provocation we’re used to here, being directed instead by grown-ups: Joe Hill-Gibbins, and Jetske Mijnssen for Ariodante — already seen to general approval in Strasbourg.
Plus the amazing 31-year-old mezzo Emily D’Angelo in the title role whacking stuff like “Dopo notte” out of the park, a one-woman fightback against the plague of piping, hocketing counter-tenors currently infesting these mothy old warhorses.
And that’s not all. The Wexford Festival has dug up GFH’s last opera, Deidamia, which fizzled out after three performances amidst general opera-nausea in 1741 and is still generally disparaged — though it turns out that even second-string jobs like this and Giustino are pretty fab if you let them out of the box: basically these things were forgotten for 250 years, and it’s really not so long since even stuff like Julius Caesar and Alcina was thought unperformable.
JC, by the way, is still on tour out west with Somerset Opera, jovially re-wrought as a Jilly Cooper-style horny rivalry played out against the background of a West Country village cricket match, with Cleo as one very hot tea lady from Stogumber.
Eno revives its jaunty Partenope — a semi-comedy, with some actual laughs — japily staged by Christopher Alden in 2008, and at Opera North in Leeds there’s a new production of Susanna (1749), one of the English “oratorios” Handel started pinging out after his opera company had finally gone tits up — in fact a genuine opera, just with an annoying angel popping up at the end to palliate the English who by now had decided to try out pretending to be mawkishly religiose as a dry run for the full-on 19th century horror.
And a few one-offs: Rinaldo, G-Fred’s 1711 London debut, by The English Concert, the hallo-birdies Acis and Galatea at Temple Church, Solomon at the Queen Elizabeth Hall … This sudden Handelian waterboarding is proof of an accelerating change in operatic culture.
The rather momentous fact is that “opera” (though still thoroughly a museum piece, don’t panic) is in truth no longer what it has been for the last couple of centuries, whilst it was being enshrined as Europe’s shoddy artistic religion, with all those naff palaces stalked by neurasthenic, tightly-wrapped ladies and their lavishly whiskered, whoremongering beaux.
What it meant then, and until about yesterday, was “Romantic opera”: look at the names inscribed round the dome of those old crimson-and-gold puddings — Donizetti, Rossini, Weber, Auber, Verdi, Gounod for God’s sake … whereas now, those names might be Handel, Mozart, Janácek, Britten (and Wagner might be done somewhere else entirely … ).
This hollowing-out of the repertoire bears some examination, the revelation of Handel not as the rugger-bugger idiot brother of J.S. Bach with his Firework trumpets and drums and the knees-up Passion of Messiah, but as his equal and opposite, a composer creating in his operas an apotheosis of life and humans whilst Bach delved into God and death.
We must go into all this properly some time. But there is something deeply satisfactory in the way Handel deploys music of extreme rationality to deal with the craziness of human conduct; the utter precision of his musical style and the detail of his human portraits, carried out through maximally sensual and emotional music, creates a dramatic ethos a long way from the hysterical sobbings of a hundred years later — and can make even the godlike Mozart seem a little mimsy.
The drama is pleasingly alien, with hardly a nod to “real life”: the characters give us lengthy disquisitions on how they feel, the scanty words telling us much less than the voice itself, the vocal line, the detail and development of melody, harmony and orchestration over ten-minute arias that burrow down towards the exact truth of these urgent matters — distress, joy, jealousy, loneliness, love, hope.
These old dramas, made thrilling through the amazing variety Handel finds in the “High Baroque” idiom — which on the face of it hardly has the expressive capacity of Richard Strauss, or even of Mozart — do feel far more real and grown-up than the adolescent meltdowns of the 19th century, a relief from the sheer exhaustion brought on by the southern-European excesses of Trovatore and Tosca. And as noted above, for those who insist on their fix of teen trauma and light relief, there’s always Wagner.
