Morning:
14°c
I do not much care for the thousand operas of George Frideric Handel, musical tub-thumper to King George I, but I submit to him from time to time to discover if I like them any better. Tempted last week by the ENO's own praise of its production of the old boy's Partenope, I put myself to the quinquennial test again. "Glorious arias and wonderful ensembles," this worthy institution said of it, "high-spirited, a comic masterpiece and an outstanding cast" - though when first performed no one said such things of it. Even before Handel wrote the music in 1730, the libretto was damned as "some he-she thing or other" likely to cause instant scandal - now it simply amuses and confuses us.
Set in Bloomsbury between the wars instead of Handel's ancient Naples, it has - thank the Lord - only six characters. Of these, four are male, one a woman and one a woman masquerading as a man, their names Emilio, Arsace, Armindo, Ormonte, Partenope and Eurimene/Rosmira (all suitable for motor cars or face creams). Arsace, a man, is sung by a woman; Armindo, a boy, is sung by a counter-tenor sounding much like a woman, and Eurimene, looking like a man, is sung by the woman that she is - one diverted into a frantic lesbian passion for Partenope, who has her eye fixed firmly on Armindo. Armindo, who plays the part of hapless youth with voice unbroken still, is also being eyed by Ormonte, a bearded baritone.
Their invented names seem oddly out-of-place; I'd have been happier had the librettist given them the names of the Bloomsberries whom they so closely resemble even physically - Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant (the boy), Lytton Strachey (the beard), Ottoline Morrell (Partenope) and Radclyffe Hall - for their sexual shenanigans are familiar to all who know anything of the Bloomsbury Group. All six have, ad nauseam, revisited Brideshead, so expert are they at the languid air; all six know Poirot, Charlie Chaplin and the Punch cartoons that in the Twenties mocked the torpid manners of the beau-monde; all six know how to smoke a cigarette and mix a gin and bitters; and all six have graduated from the Dame Dench Academy of Attitudes. But their director, though scrupulous with the details of his chosen period and witty with them, seems utterly alien to Handel in his notion of comedy.
The "he-she thing" must have been acceptable in Handel's day, if risky, but the innuendos of the banana as phallus, some pretty fierce sexual groping, Emilio's nipple-stroking, the lavatory mid-stage with the old song of ladies locked in it rejigged, and an Andrex paper joke lacking only the labrador puppy, all suggest that Jonathan Ross might have been holding the director's hand. There were "glorious arias and wonderful ensembles" enough to bring me round to Handel without this adolescent prurience.
