Buxton Opera Festival: Jephtha by G.F. Handel

Last year it was Handel’s Saul which first drew me up here to Buxton. It was, I thought,  an awful production – a ghastly failure of an attempt to stage an Oratorio as Opera. Therefore to some extent that informed my expectations for this year’s offering of Jephtha.

The last of Handel’s major works, composed when Handel was losing his sight and perhaps feeling the tug of mortality pulling him from life’s anchor, Jephtha is Handel’s last word on Oratorio. But what a last word this masterwork is…full of experiment with Oratorio form and full of music of interior intensity unmatched by anything before.

Jephtha is given a preponderance of intense music that ranges across the usual canvass of the godly man acting on behalf of God’s chosen people and by process saving them by God’s saving grace. But there is so much more to  Jephtha. This is a complex a man tortured from the outset by intense certainties that unbalance his relations with his family, with his nation and ultimately with God. Like Coriolanus – this is the flawed hero. And like Coriolanus it is his flaws that impel dramatic action. His solemn promise if granted victory to sacrifice to Jehovah the first living creature who crosses his path proves bitterly over-hasty.

His daughter, Iphis, elated with news of her father’s victory heads out to meet him attended by a chorus of virgins. This might seem musically just another opportunity to revisit musically his own previous triumphs for Handel who wrote See the conquering hero comes for this very similar moment in Judas Maccabeus. Jephtha sees his daughter and immediately the tone is triumph is buried in personal anguish. This troubled guilt imposes itself over the remainder of the oratorio drawing from Handel’s genius an extraordinary range of music…bewilderment, anger, despair, acceptance to the sweetest arias Waft her angels through the skies.

Harry Christophers conducted this Jephtha brilliantly and the orchestra responded with some brilliant playing full of colour and vibrant rhythm. The chorus sang as beautifully – wonderful, rich, intelligently and well modulated – as I’ve ever heard. The soloists were a little uneven but provided some great singing with intense feeling – though like everyone they were hampered by the egregious concept.

And here – like Hamlet – we come to the rub – the concept.

I was quite hopeful when I saw an empty stage with black with four chairs that we were not going down memory lane into some ghastly staging. How wrong I was. The principals appear as four singers as it were in the overture and fuss about their seats, bow to the audience, chat to one another – we are in the interior world of an oratorio within an oratorio. If this sounds silly – it was. Jephtha takes his socks and shoes off several times. Paper is torn from a faux libretto that has no part to play in what follows beyond providing Jephtha will this empty rhetorical gesture.  There is the symphony when he pulls nylon tight over his head and pulls faces. The chorus first appear in black costumes with black ruffs but then appear later in clinging, cheap black leotards and silly skirts. It didn’t flatter; it doesn’t deceive.

These are a string of emoting clichés looking for a dramatic resting place.

The first part ends with a the chorus walking back and forth –  also with nylon masks over their faces –  pretending to fall over chairs. When the music stops they stumble on until the curtain comes down on their humiliation. It might serve as a metaphor for the entire proceeding.

It’s grossly unfair on those who have paid good money – and equally unfair to the cast – to be insulted with half-baked indulgences from those who ought to know better. This is no more experimental theatre what Dr Mengele did was experimental science.

The second part was better but the play-acting got sillier. The best moments – like the still chorus at the end – came when the singers were allowed to stand still and let the music tell its own story. Stillness also allows professional singers to inhabit a character and through that vocalisation they may then act. Giving them redundant business distracts them from acting and distracts the audience from participation in the unfolding drama of the story. When Iphis was left with her head resting on a lectern turned toward the audience I felt I had genuinely reached one of the low-lights of staged drama –  theatre of the absurd.