Naxos to release Cecilia's recording of "The Construction of Boston."
The CD of Composer in Residence Scott Wheeler's opera will be released during 2008. The libretto, as well as program notes from the April 2007 concert performance, are available now.

"Teeters and his classy cast and players offered the first truly satisfying performance I’ve heard... If I ever forget what a superb programmer he's been over his 39 years of directing Boston Cecilia, remind me of this concert."

-Lloyd Schwartz, The Boston Phoenix, Apr. 5, 2007. Read the review!

Introducing New Music: Recent and Right Now, presenting the music of up-and-coming composers, in collaboration with Scott Wheeler. Annual series debuts in June 2008!

By any means of measurement, the decade from 1741 to 1751 was an extraordinary one in the life of George Frideric Handel and, indeed, in the history of music. Early in his London years, some thirty years earlier, he took up and conquered the world of Italian opera, a highly structured form which was spawned in the sunny south, transported throughout Europe, and embraced for a time in the English capital by the social elite. Even working in far-from-sunny London, Handel possessed all the necessary tools to exploit the medium to his expressive purposes and to overcome, where necessary, its limitations. His characters became real people; their music revealed more about themselves and their situations than was thought possible within this highly stylized medium. In that respect, Mozart would seem to be his inevitable and only imaginable love-child.

But, by the mid-1730s, fashionable London had — not surprisingly considering the intrinsic foreignness of the enterprise — lost enthusiasm for Italian opera and its tempestuous goings on, and began to look elsewhere for musical pleasure. Handel reluctantly found it expedient to turn away from his beloved Italian operatic interests and explore another form of musico/dramatic enterprise, a both tragic and fortuitous decision. The word tragic probably overstates it, but maybe not by much if one considers what further operatic wonders Handel might have created had he spent fifteen or so additional years expanding opera's narrative and emotional range of expression. He was already challenging the dramatic limitations of its formal rigidity — the da capo aria, for instance — with imaginative alternate solutions. And his choice was indeed fortuitous in that the unprecedented world of music drama that he virtually invented — oratorio, sung in English, largely biblically based, but often directly relevant to current national political events — afforded excellent opportunities for attracting a new, less fickle middle class audience. As a formal structure, however, it was new only in the degree to which Handel synthesized it into something of unprecedented scale.

Oratorio, being unstaged, did not face the physical limitations of opera's stage and pit. The role of the chorus, practically irrelevant in opera, was immeasurably increased, expanding their dramatic effectiveness through identification as participants or commentators as in Greek drama. Likewise, the orchestra could grow in size, offering new opportunities for color, power, and subtle underlining of narrative. The real plus in Handel's moving into oratorio, though, was the more or less obligatory use of the Bible as source book for stories, a use sanctioned by tradition, which proved to be popular with the English audiences. In an age of widespread biblical literacy, success in this medium would seem to depend on Handel's finding competent librettists who could convert the familiar Old Testament characters into believable living, breathing people. Blather and prolixity were the enemy. Coherent story telling via concise dialogue was essential. Most of Handel's literary collaborators, it must be admitted (the Bible and Milton, of course, aside) were undistinguished poets, but the best ones — Charles Jennens was the most skillful one — had the ability to give Handel situations and characters that he could work with, albeit not without occasional frustrations, even tantrums on all sides. Most of all, what he needed from them were lively images, be they from nature — idyllic settings, the sun and moon, the seasons, etc. — or personal relationships. When he got them — from Milton, in L'Allegro ed il Penseroso is a supreme example — the music was always sublime. But even working with pompous or pedantic texts, Handel could overcome a slogging librettist's dross by simply writing better music than it deserved. He usually knew how to deflate the over-blown or humanize the didactic.

After this lengthy overture, we turn to 1741, mentioned above, and the decade of wonders that followed. Beginning that year, Handel created a staggering string of masterpieces that only today are finding the audience and the critical appreciation that they deserve. Leading off with Samson and continuing with Messiah, Semele, Joseph and his Brethren, Hercules, Belshazzar, Judas Maccabaeus, Alexander Balus, Joshua, Solomon, Susanna, Theodora, and Jephtha, it is a taut chain without a weak link. And the variety of themes is stunning: great psychological/philosophical dramas in which characters (or peoples) face unspeakable choices and/or dilemmas; great celebratory spectacles which could so easily have been turned into tub-thumpers, but weren't; an unstaged, erotically charged opera that audiences even today find a bit shocking; an unsettling story of an innocent woman falsely accused by spiteful men; and, of course, the most important musical account of the life of Christ ever composed, which was described, by the way, by its text compiler as "a fine entertainment!"

I am pleased that my colleagues and I in The Boston Cecilia have been privileged over the past twenty-three years to present all of the works listed above, save three, in uncut performances for Boston audiences. Those three, Alexander Balus, Susanna, and Theodora, will we hope not have to wait too long to join the list.

In 1749, at a time when his health and eyesight were beginning gradually to fail, Handel was asked to provide elaborate incidental music for a large-scale play with music to be produced at Covent Garden. The play, Alceste (based on Euripides' Alcestis), was patterned after the style of Purcell's operas (Fairy Queen, King Arthur, et al.), that is, essentially a spoken drama with extended interludes of instrumental and sung music, with dance. Handel completed his compositional task, but the production never came to fruition. Never one to let good notes go to waste, Handel, in the summer of 1750, set to work converting most of the Alceste music into The Choice of Hercules, the one-act work being performed tonight. The original text source was Greek, but was published in English in a collection by Joseph Spence in 1747, and likely adapted by Thomas Morell for Handel's use. It was first performed at Covent Garden in March 1750 as a companion piece to Alexander's Feast. It is of more than passing interest that this abundantly good-natured work whose tongue is occasionally well-planted in its cheek was composed less than six months before Jephtha, Handel's final oratorio. It was during the composition of that work that Handel's eyesight failed just at the moment when he was setting the prophetic words, "How dark, O Lord, are Thy decrees." Although there were intermittent improvements, the decline in his vision was irreversible, and two years later he was completely blind.

It must be said that at no time does The Choice of Hercules betray the failing general health and vision of the sixty-five year-old Handel. Indeed, the prospect of the handsome, youthful, soon-to-be godlike Hercules receiving seductive instruction from two mature women of experience seems to have seduced Handel himself into putting together a lively entertainment that one might assume dates from a much earlier period in his career. And even though most of the music was composed for different words and to different purposes, Handel, the magician, made the translation a convincing and beguiling one.

Winton Dean's description of the plot in his Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques is excellent. "(It is) a simple allegory. Hercules, a youth at the start of his career, is approached by Pleasure and Virtue — one should perhaps call them Idleness and Duty — with their respective trains. Pleasure offers him a characteristic eighteenth-century bower of bliss, 'numerous sparkling rills,' feasting, music, rich odours, cool fountains, shady groves, a bed of flowers, and discreetly voiced opportunities for amorous enjoyment. Virtue rebukes Pleasure in the peremptory tones of a Parnassian governess. ('This manly youth's exalted mind, Above thy grov'ling taste refin'd, Shall listen to my awful voice') and bids him assert his heavenly race, 'level pride's high-plumed crest, And bravely succour the distrest.' Hercules, not at first enamoured of this prospect, is won over by the promise of immortality, 'among the Gods a God,' and sets himself with Virtue and her train to 'mount the steep ascent.'"

The chorus is a partisan of first one and then the other of the ladies, but they seem to have a slight prejudice in favor of Pleasure. Even though Virtue carries the day, Handel's own feelings might be revealed in the fact the final chorus ends firmly in the key of G minor.

- Donald Teeters

The Boston Cecilia performs this piece at New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall in Boston on November 5, 2005.

Read notes on other pieces performed in the same concert:

Handel's Coronation Anthems
Handel's solo cantata, Qualor Crudele

© 2004 Donald Teeters. All rights reserved.

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