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!

Handel (more or less) invented the oratorio with Deborah and Athalia in 1733, or perhaps it was Esther in 1732; some might even want to hold out for 1739 and Saul. Of course, there were oratorios before, some even composed by Handel himself; but no fair claim can be made on behalf of any real predecessor to the great dramatic English-language works created by Handel and his literary collaborators (Biblical or mundane) before 1732. This array of masterpieces (and every one of them is to one degree or another worthy of that designation) that Handel created between 1732 and 1750 is marked by the unprecedented integration of the chorus into the heart of the drama; by the expansion of the size, flexibility, and subtlety of orchestral engagement in the drama; and by the development of a kind of solo vocal style that is peculiarly well suited to the English language (owing no small debt to Purcell in that respect) and to what one might call the personality of the English nation. Freed, albeit involuntarily, from the constraints of staging, and from the egos of the Italian superstars with whom he famously collaborated and collided - although some of those superstars passed over into oratorio with him - at least for a time Handel explored, in oratorio, new means and venues of musical expression beyond what had previously even been imagined.

Because of its dramatic strengths, some consider Athalia, composed four months after Deborah, to be Handel's first real English oratorio. Based on scripture and Racine's play, Athalia is a tightly constructed work, propelled by a powerful narrative continuity and vivid characterizations, and adorned with musical riches aplenty. Handel's ability to read between the lines of the libretto led him to find redeeming qualities even in monstrous Athalia, daughter of Jezebel, and this musical redemption of individuals, indeed of whole pagan peoples, was to become a defining characteristic of the whole genre. Handel learned how to subvert the limitations of his librettists without the poor wordsmiths' ever realizing it.

Others like to cite Esther, from the previous year, as prototype. It, along with Acis and Galatea, represented Handel's first attempt to reclaim the declining Italian opera audience to his support. That audience was abandoning him and the medium itself in London in great numbers. Esther, which is properly dubbed an oratorio, and Acis, a Masque or Pastoral (or even Serenata, which is what Handel called it) after the manner of an oratorio, were both originally single-act entertainments of chamber dimensions (composed around 1718), intended for private performance at Cannons, the home of Handel's patron, the future Duke of Chandos. In 1732, to offset the decline in his operatic fortunes, Handel expanded both works in ways that, in some aspects, defy rational analysis today. Esther was puffed up from six scenes to three acts. A number of movements from previously composed works were interleaved into it, creating a certain confusion of continuity and scale, and thereby rather substantially disfiguring what had originally been a more balanced work.

Which brings us, after an overlong prelude, to tonight's entertainment, Deborah, my choice for pride of place as Handel's first purpose-built masterpiece in the new medium. A fully conceived whole, not an inflated version of an earlier work, Deborah was intended from the beginning as a three-act entertainment for presentation in London, and was presented there very much as you will hear it tonight. (I say "very much" with trepidation, for at least three reasons: One, The overture question which I will discuss below; Two, In Handel's first performance, the role of Sisera was sung by a female alto, although Handel subsequently assigned the role to his favorite oratorio tenor, John Beard, an option which I think makes even more sense now than then; and Three, Handel himself conducted the first performance! Ours will, with luck and humility of spirit, replicate that one in earnest devotion to the score but without further presumptions.)

Revived a number of times during his lifetime, Deborah has been a bit of a hard sell ever since Handel's death. Even today, as interest in Handel's large-scale dramatic works grows in this country and Europe, Deborah is still little performed. Why? The first and most obvious reason is extra-musical. At the end of a century that has witnessed more than its share of gratuitous violence in both war and what passes for peace (violence, one might add, which is committed as often as not in the name of a Higher Good!) a dramatic work whose climax celebrates what looks to be a particularly gruesome political assassination might naturally have difficulty attracting a sympathetic audience.

The story, based on the fourth and fifth chapters of the Book of Judges, was adapted for Handel hurriedly by Samuel Humphreys, who was also the librettist for the 1732 version of Esther and whom Winton Dean describes forthrightly as "a literary hack and no more." Deborah, like Acis and Esther, was created and brought to performance in great haste in an attempt to address the financial losses of another unsuccessful opera season. During January and February 1733, Humphreys was under intense pressure from Handel to provide the words. The autograph score, in multiple hands, suggests that Handel's copyist(s) sat at his side literally taking over the filling in of the score as soon as Handel's intentions were made clear; copying into the score movements from preexisting works (for there are a large number of borrowings in Deborah) once Handel had indicated the new word underlay and other adjustments. Finished on February 21, Deborah was first performed at the King's Theatre twenty-four days later, on March 17, 1733, with a sterling cast headed by the soprano Anna Strada (the only member of Handel's Italian company who did not defect later that same year to the Opera of the Nobility), Celeste Gismondi (soprano, singing Jael), the great Senesino (alto castrato, as Barak), and others.

The events in Deborah take place over the course of a single day. In Part One, the Israelites, who have been captives of the Canaanites for twenty years, are told by the prophetess Deborah that Sisera, the Canaanite commander, will die at the hand of a woman. In the Bible the assumption is that Deborah herself will be that woman, but Humphreys ignores that assumption (thereby weakening the third act denouement) and has Deborah name Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, for that honor at Jael's first appearance in the oratorio. Barak, who is Deborah's chosen commander (not, alas, her love interest, which is too bad — Handel loves love interests), receives support from the people and from his aged father, Abinoam. The rest of the act is taken up with preparations for the coming battle, interrupted by the appearance of a Herald from the Canaanite camp proposing "an interview" between the two sides. In Part Two, a parley between the two sides takes place, is broken off; battle preparations continue. Part Three begins with the triumphant return of the victorious Israelites with the captive priests of Baal in tow. Deborah sings of the blessings of peace. Abinoam weeps tears of joy at the victory achieved by his son Barak. Jael, whose husband had been an ally of the enemy commander, now explains her repudiation of that alliance; how, after the battle, she lured Sisera into her tent, plied him with (among other things) "a bottle of milk" and, after he fell asleep, executed him. This act of high patriotism (?) is enthusiastically acclaimed, and the oratorio ends on a note of general rejoicing.

But what about the perception of Jael's act today? In Handel's time? In its Biblical context? Was hers the heroic act of a noble patriot, an act which brought the closure — unprecedented in context and the gender of the executant, but not in outcome — that Barak had been unable to achieve in the field? Or was it, as some see it, no more than a repugnant political assassination? Perhaps an insane act committed by a woman driven mad with patriotic zeal? Perhaps Handel, in the music he has given Jael, gives a clue to his opinion about her and her actions. There is no evidence that Handel's audiences were unduly discomfited. While we may agree on the quality of the music surrounding these events, I suspect that we will be far from agreeing on the questions posed by them.

As noted above, Handel recycled a good deal of earlier music for Deborah. Sources include the Coronation anthems, Brockes Passion, Chandos Anthems, the Birthday Ode for Queen Caroline, the early Dixit Dominus from Handel's Italian years, and others. But unlike the borrowings in Esther, these borrowed items were part of the overall original conception of the oratorio, and not simply tacked on to an existing work. Deborah may lack the dramatic thrust and complexity of some of the later oratorios, but it is musically coherent, even with its many borrowings, and virtually all the music for soloists and chorus is first rate. The chorus's place is central, enacting two different roles — Israelites and the Priests of Baal — a technique Handel was to exploit to even greater effect in later oratorios. Only Samson, with its twenty-two choral movements, compares in number to Deborah's nineteen; and the variety of scale of the choruses in Deborah is enormous.

A problem has always existed concerning an overture for the oratorio. No one knows what was played as an overture at the first performance, if indeed one was played at all. The overture printed in the standard Chrysander score is a four-movement affair derived from questionable decisions related to a revival in the 1750s. However, a Hamburg conducting score contains the bass line of a D major overture inserted at the beginning which turns out to fit the overture of the Occasional Oratorio and a minuet associated with the Music for the Royal Fireworks. Handel scholar Anthony Hicks believes that this music was composed by Handel for the Deborah revival of 1744, and then extracted later for the creation of the two works named above, which were brought out two and five years later, respectively. In any event, it makes for a splendid overture. Our thanks go to Robert King and his King's Consort, who have recorded Deborah, and who have kindly provided us with the orchestral materials used in this performance.

It is hard for modern audiences to understand how shocking/exciting the experience of hearing a new oratorio must have been for Handel's audiences. Great solo singing was not novel; it was taken for granted in a world center like London. However, grand choruses accompanied by sizable orchestras were unprecedented in the theater. Opera choruses, few and far between in any event, were sung generally only by the principal soloists, one on a part. In his English oratorios, Handel expanded the sonic and dramatic scale, creating a truly new kind of theatrical experience. Lady Irwin expressed the astonishment of it all when she wrote about the hundred or so performers who participated in Deborah, "'Tis excessive noisy, a vast number of instruments and voices, who all perform at a time."

It continues to be a tremendous honor to be able to bring these great Handelian treasures before the discriminating audiences of this sophisticated city. I am lucky indeed to be surrounded by such gifted and dedicated colleagues as we continue to explore the thrills, mysteries, and profundities of that still vastly underrated master — George Frideric Handel.

- Donald Teeters

The Boston Cecilia performed this piece at New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall in Boston on November 20, 1998.

© 2004 Donald Teeters. All rights reserved.

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