An Unconventional Approach to HWV 56

Last month Unitel Edition released a video of what is probably one of the most unconventional approaches to George Frideric Handel’s best-known oratorios, his HWV 56 Messiah. Sadly, it appears as if the distribution of this recording in the United States is limited, if it exists at all. Amazon.com seems unaware of it domestically, as is the case with other American distributors. The best one can do is to turn to the German branch of Amazon, which has Web pages for both the Blu-ray and DVD releases of the album. The video is the documentation of a performance that took place at the Haus für Mozart (Mozart house) during Mozartwoche (Mozart week) in Salzburg this past January.

Both the music and the performance departed significantly from the usual expectations. While the musical presentation was historically informed, it was not based on Handel’s history, so to speak. Rather, conductor Mark Minkowski chose to present the re-orchestration of the score that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart prepared on a commission by Baron Gottfried van Swieten in 1789. This involved richer instrumentation including flutes and clarinets in the wind section and trombones and horns in the brass. Those changes are most evident in “The trumpet shall sound,” in which the trumpet has to share the solo work with a horn. (The vocal performance is in the German translation of the original English text by Christoph Daniel Ebeling and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. However, I have heard enough performances in English to have the original text in the back of my head, even without the benefit of subtitles!)

The more radical departure, however, comes from the staging by Robert Wilson. This is not the first time that this oratorio has been staged. Its Wikipedia page currently has a photograph of a production presented by the English National Opera in 2009. However, Wilson has a reputation for unconventional imagery and action, which is probably best known in his staging of Philip Glass’ first opera Einstein on the Beach. My own “first contact” with Wilson’s work preceded Einstein when, in 1969, my first assignment for Dance Magazine involved reviewing The King of Spain performed by Wilson’s own company, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds.

That experience conditioned me indelibly to approach any Wilson project with absolutely no preconceptions. Suffice it to say that one would be hard-pressed to find any aspect of his staging of Messiah that reflects on what is being sung at the time. The good news is that many of Wilson’s devices serve up a sense of humor that is best characterized as wistful. If most of The King of Spain left me perplexed, I could still laugh at the appearances of the eighteen-foot tall pussycat that crosses the stage towards the end of the production. (Only the legs are visible.)

That sort of humor shows up in Messiah to best advantage with a Christmas tree that dances during tenor Richard Croft’s account of “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion.” While dancer Alexis Fousekis brings the tree to life, so to speak, Croft is dancing a soft-shoe with Max Harris, identified as “Old Man” in the program. That “Old Man” might be one of the Prophets of the Old Testament, one of the Saints of the New Testament, or, for all I know, a coy nod to  Edward Gorey.

This is followed by soprano Elena Tsallagova’s account of “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd.” In this case the staging gives the text of Isaiah a wide berth, charting an alternative course into the heart of the 23rd Psalm. First we get “my cup runneth over” as she pours more water into a glass than it can hold. She then repeats the ritual, this time pouring the water on her head (“thou anointest my head with oil”)! The result is imaginatively subversive farce that takes down both Isaiah and David with a single blow! (It also explains why Tsallagova requires a wardrobe change before the beginning of the second part of the oratorio.)

Before I used this site primarily to write about music, I would occasionally vent frustrations with other targets. One of my major sources of personal aggravation was the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. I figured that this orgy of economic excess was best framed by the “Spanish peasant’s proverb” that worked its way into Philip Barry’s script for The Philadelphia Story:

With the Rich and Mighty always a little Patience.

There are times that I think that Wilson is playing games with “the Rich and Mighty” that find his offerings fashionable, even if they are cryptic unto an extreme. Nevertheless, where the rest of us are concerned, “a little Patience” goes a long way when it comes to enjoying (rather than just enduring) the provocative extremes of Wilson’s approaches to staging.