Oratorio Night at the ABS Summer Bach Festival

Unless I am mistaken, every Summer Bach Festival presented by the American Bach Soloists (ABS) that I have attended included a full-evening dramatic offering towards the end of the Festival. (There were also two performances of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 232 setting of the Latin text of the Mass ordinary in B minor, but that tradition was elided this year, possible due to pandemic constraints.) Last night’s offering was George Frideric Handel’s HWV 61 Belshazzar, a landmark in Handel’s shift from opera to oratorio.

Rembrandt’s painting of Belshazzar seeing the writing on the wall, to be read vertically from right to left (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Handel composed this work in 1744, working with a libretto text by Charles Jennens, best known for having compiled the Biblical passages for Handel’s best-known oratorio, his HWV 56 Messiah. Jennens’ primary source was the book of Daniel, whose “keystone” episode involves the writing on the wall by a disembodied hand. (Situated in the middle of the second of the compositions three acts, this really is the “keystone” in the architecture of the overall score.) However, as title character’s go, the role of Belshazzar, sung by tenor Matthew Hill, is often upstaged by stronger personalities.

The duet of Belshazzar (Matthew Hill) and Nitocris (Maya Kherani) in Act I of Handel's Belshazzar (courtesy of Michael Strickland)

The strongest of these is probably Nitocris, the Queen Mother, sung by soprano Maya Kherani. Nitocris knows all about her son’s many flaws. She knows that fate will not be kind to him, even before everyone gets the message from the disembodied hand. Handel, on the other hand, seemed very kind to Élisabeth Duparc, who first sang the role of Nitocris, composing several coloratura airs for her that were clearly calculated show-stoppers. Kherani rose to the many challenges she encountered in Handel’s score, becoming the primary “magnet” for audience attention. While Nitocris never appears in the Old Testament, her place in history was affirmed by the Histories of Herodotus.

The Biblical characters that do appear are the title character, the prophet Daniel (mezzo Sarah Coit), and Cyrus, the Prince of Persia (countertenor Eric Jurenas). The other major character is the Assyrian Nobleman Gobrias (bass-baritone Mischa Bouvier), who has formed an alliance with Cyrus. Compared with many of Handel’s operas, HWV 61 provides a relatively straightforward cast with well-defined motives in service of a straightforward narrative. Indeed, the expressiveness of Handel’s music serves those motives so well that the handwriting episode, while central in the structure, is relegated to a recitativo accompagnato (a recitative with instrumental accompaniment).

In other words the most familiar part of the narrative is secondary to the personalities impacted by that episode. After all, through his experiences in composing opera, Handel had become an expert in writing music that disclosed key personality traits. It is those traits, rather than the disembodied hand, that motivate the overall narrative of HWV 61. Last night those in the audience had the benefit of appreciating a cast of vocalists, all of whom knew how to deliver vivid accounts of the characters involved in the entire narrative.