James Bowman pronounces: Most Handel operas have stupid plots

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

3 March

I'm not sure (maybe, now, he, too, isn't sure) why he had to share this opinion to introduce a duet from, I think, the last Act of Riccardo Primo, but, he excepted only Giulio Cesare and Ariodante.

Which, I believe, is a little hard on:

Acis and Galatea (about a poster for which he made another joke) - why shouldn't a jealous giant, in love with one, kill the other?

Teseo, because Medea is such a great, wild and torn character, and the things that she does are of legendary status, and what is wrong with the Theseus story?

Likewise Alcestis, for why should not Ruggiero, very much modelled on Odysseus and his wanderings, be unwittingly enslaved by enchantments - a paradigm for love, after all?


And so one could go on - I don't disagree with Bowman that the music is great, but where is the evidence that the libretto / story is so unworthy that Handel must have composed with an eye to the money, not the power of the piece*?

For, if the da capo arias really did have such little merit in terms of a story not worth advancing, I really do find it hard to believe that Handel's audience would, throughout his opera career, have been so often duped. Whereas I honestly believe that word of mouth and personal recommendation, then as now, are so much a part of whether a run closes early that the success that he enjoyed should give us pause in the face of Bowman's dimissal:

Really, when Bowman himself boasted of how many Handel roles he has played, isn't he, not Handel, the cynical one, if he thinks them so much trash...?


End-notes

* Is the opinon, one wonders, based on anything better than having seen the highly unflattering portrait of the composer in Farinelli (il Castrato) (1994)?

(The film gives, by contrast, much evidence of the beauty of the music and of Farinell's (imagined) voice, against the background of hard-nosed competition and ruthless business deals, the depiction (whether or not invention) of the latter of which may easily influence for the worse against our notion of Handel the man.)


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