Go for B'roque!

This weekend, Opera McGill presents Handel's opera (well, actually it was kinda, sorta an oratorio) "Semele" in Pollack Hall on March 21, 22, and 23, 2024 here in Montreal, Québec. This marks the 19th baroque opera production during my 17 years at McGill. That's a lot of arias (thousands, actually), hundreds of thousands of ornaments, a lot of period instruments (we collaborate with the Early Music program here), and of course - period tuning!

Allow me to nerd out for a few sentences (if this isn't your thing, skip to the next paragraph!) We are kinda nerds about tuning at the Schulich School of Music. All of our Handel is tuned to 415, basically a half-step down. Last year we performed Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice at 432, basically a quarter-step down (and where I discovered I have perfect pitch, just a little flat), we've done Lully's Thésée way down at like 398 and toyed with doing a Monteverdi opera way, way up to reflect Venice's extremely high pitch, but ultimately settled into 415 again for the instrumentation, although it definitely wasn't well-tempered by any stretch of the imagination. So that's the first thing to know about baroque opera - the A is tuned in a variety of ways, which is so baroque don't cha know!

Why do I love the baroque period? I'm not talking just the music, but the art, sculpture, and architecture of the 17th century. It was all about freedom of expression! The word "baroque" comes from the Portuguese who described imperfectly shaped pearls, later taken up by the French to describe the overly decorated, excessive, and extravagant paintings and sculptures. If the Renaissance was a perfectly shaped, perfectly formed, delicate, precious and civilized pearl, the baroque was the opposite.

Anything baroque is an exercise in expression, defiance, emotion, it is in your face, out of control, demanding our attention. Baroque sculpture was meant to move and be alive with emotion and energy, the art was meant to overwhelm your senses and be 3D, the music was over the top, excessively ornate, an explosion of energy that jolted your insides. Ecstasy materialized in stone flesh and written into notes for audiences to react to viscerally. "My job is to paint it, their job is to understand it", said the sculptor, architect, painter, and stage designer Padre Pozzo.

From Caravaggio's chiaroscuro (light/dark) paintings that were practically out of control emotion on a canvas to Bernini's and Borromini's world-changing churches filled with sculptures, paintings, light and emotion, to the crazy Hawksmoor churches in London that still inspire scenes of imagined theistic satanic rituals, the baroque era shifted how we see art, how it impacts the person looking at it and listening to it. The baroque aesthetic moved across Europe like a pandemic.

Starting in Italy, bien sûr. Well, actually in Trento, Italy which was part of the Austrian empire back in the 16th century. This is the city where the Council of Trent spent numerous decades formulating a plan to combat Martin Luther and those funky, but-oh-so-boring Protestants (who really seemed to hate art, I must say.) Among the council's many edicts was to worship God through art. To kiss the feet of a saint's statue was to worship the actual saint. To not believe this, you would be considered Anathema (a very bad person). And so, artists and sculptors took them at their word. Something shifted in the late 1500s just as the Council of Trent was wrapping up that would change not just the Catholic world, but especially the protestant world up in Germany and the Church of England in merry olde London.

A quick sidebar: Shakespeare moved theatre from the Renaissance into the Baroque world, creating Modernity, from the late 1590s to the early 1600s. At the exact same time - very strange I must say - one could find the Florentine Camerata sitting around a room decrying how polyphony was ruining the youth of Florence so they literally invented Opera. Leave it to Italians to reform the youth through opera. How strange the two massive genres in theatre - Shakespearean plays and Italian operas - sprung up in the late 1590s so far apart from each other.

Something was in the water in Europe - a plague I'm sure - but something else in the creative world was driving innovation into these new, alien worlds never imagined.

First to Rome. Following on the footsteps of the renaissance giants Michelangelo and da Vinci, we had the genius of Borromini cut short by his suicide and the genius of Bernini celebrated through to the end of his life and beyond. Both were instrumental architects and Bernini, of course, one of the greatest sculptors of all time (book a trip to see the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in the Cornaro Chapel of the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome now!) From Bernini's baldacchino over the altar in St. Peter's to Borromini's astounding piazza outside of St. Peter's, the Vatican was forever changed by the baroque, as was all of Rome. From Rome, this frenzy spread.

Interestingly, the baroque assimilated itself into whatever locality it found itself in. Although a Catholic ideal initially, it was adopted by the northern protestants. Where Vivaldi was Italian and Catholic, Bach certainly was not. Yet Bach revelled in these overly ornamented, ornate, non-formal, almost improvised structures. His music makes no sense if seen from the classical era's ideals (in fact, even his children later criticized Papa Bach's works as too excessive).

The baroque was too theatrical, too colorful, its textures just were too much. Things dazzled for dazzlement's sake. And those old dividing lines got blurred - paintings became sculptures, sculpture became architecture, and those forms all swirled into and around the music being written by Scarlatti, Bach, and that guy named Handel.

The year 1685 is an important one. All three of those aforementioned titans were born; Vivaldi and Rameau just a handful of years earlier. So as the 17th century turned into the 18th century, baroque music started to reach its zenith. Who was the most published secular composer during the baroque era? Try and guess...

Barbara Strozzi (1619 - 1677), born in Venice and died in Padua. She composed without patronage or the support of the church. She was also an illegitimate child. Talk about making it the hard way. Check out her music, still performed today!

I started this with an announcement of a Semele performance. Allow me to connect things now, along with a coaching perspective on singing baroque opera (and I'll confine that discussion to Italian baroque opera, as French and German baroque are their own specialties.)

Semele is the perfect example of a baroque piece of theatre. Originally written in English as an oratorio and first performed at Covent Garden in 1744, it's one of Handel's anomalies. Not quite an opera, as it has numerous choruses that interrupt the "action" (in quotes because it must be admitted that not much happens during its three acts), and definitely not an oratorio (a piece about Jupiter making love to a mortal woman who then is burned by his godhead resulting in her ashes giving rise to the god of wine and revelry, Dionysus), this is a piece of theatre that blurs the lines just like so much baroque art and architecture. It is about transformation, illusion, trickery, sex ("Endless Pleasure" is one of its famous arias), told by too many characters - a few on the stage acting as musical filigree. The arias swirl about at a frantic pace sometimes. "I must with speed", or either of Jupiter's or Semele's last act arias are often taken at breathless tempi.

Semele is the mother of the most orgiastic god, she is the mother of madness and intoxication. She is a mortal who tries to love and ascend to the immortal and is burned to death by Jupiter's radiance at the moment of revelation. An ecstasy of sorts, similar to Saint Teresa's being pierced by the angel's arrow immortalized by Bernini. The Pagan blended into the Christian.

So there's no reason to sing this opera (or any by Handel) in some appropriate or correct manner. Read that sentence again, thank you very much.

To really embrace the correct ideal of baroque vocal performance for Italian opera, one needs to throw out the word "correct". Way out the window. With a cannon so it goes miles away from you, never to be uttered again. One need only understand the baroque art, paintings, sculptures, altars, piazzas, churches, painted ceilings, courtyards, and palaces to understand that one must sing these as excessively as possible. A delightful, restrained, precious trill won't do here. Go for b'roque!

It's where freedom of expression arrives. Where revolutions follow. There's no Egalité, no Declaration of Independence, no taking down the aristocracy, without the baroque mentality to express emotions, to make the immortal mortal, to be in your face with towering, insane, vocal gymnastics that should make the audiences swoon. And not just high notes or warp nine fioratura sung on wild melismas that are the vocal embodiment of all those millions of baroque cherubs on the edge of all those works of art. It's also the purity of a simple line sung with extreme legato, extreme text painting, or with extreme ranges of forte and piano dynamics.

If one is worried about taste, one is in the wrong era.

If you're new to baroque arias, worried about ornamenting in some wrong way, or simply overwhelmed by the sheer amount of arias to choose from. Welcome! You've entered into a land filled with freedom. You're in a safe space to play, to try, to become just a little more familiar with an ideal based upon being too large, too small, too dark, too bright, and too emotional for words. Baroque opera performance practice created the 19th century ideals of ornamenting bel canto music with its florid cadenzas, exquisite messa di voce, and all that stuff ("stuff" spoken in a Miranda voice). Baroque opera foresaw jazz by centuries, with its emphasis on improvisation and experimentation and non-linear forms. Embrace the rule-breaking notions of the baroque and you'll free yourself, maybe you'll even find greater vocal colors and expressions to use in other arias by Mozart, Donizetti, or Kaminsky!

In our chaotic world, filled with DJ mashups, AI illusions, an overwhelming display of streaming movies, shows, operas, concerts, coffee shop art, a news cycle that is apocalyptic, and the subsequent addiction to death scrolling (all demanding our attention 24/7), we find ourselves in another baroque era. It's misshapen and eccentric and scary and joyous and and and and and...

So grab a Handel aria, watch some documentaries about Bernini or Wren or Rubens, put on a Vivaldi concerto, then take a deep breath, dance, create, ornament, and go mad!