Handel Susanna - Barbican

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programme note George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) Susanna, HWV 66 (1748) An oratorio in three acts Libretto after the Apocrypha Handel had ridden the crest of a nationalist wave with his ‘victory’ oratorios of 1746–7, The Occasional Oratorio, Judas Maccabaeus (prompted by ‘Butcher’ Cumberland’s brutal quelling of the Jacobite forces at Culloden), Alexander Balus and Joshua. Having given the English something ‘to hit them on the drum of the ear’, as he wryly put it, Handel turned decisively from this bellicose vein in his next pair of oratorios, Solomon and Susanna, composed in the spring and summer of 1748 in readiness for the 1749 Lenten season. Both works seem to share the same, anonymous, librettist, and celebrate justice, marriage and the delights of the countryside. Yet in other respects they could hardly be more different. Solomon, with its hieratic double choruses and sumptuous orchestration, glorifies kingship and an idealised golden age. Susanna, scored for a chamber orchestra of oboes, bassoons and strings (plus trumpets in the celebratory music at the end of Act 3) is an intimate drama on the favourite 18th-century ‘sentimental’ theme of wronged innocence, with occasional shades of the newly fashionable ballad opera. After Susanna’s premiere at Covent Garden on 10 February 1749, the Countess of Shaftesbury – one of Handel’s most faithful supporters – wrote to another passionate Handelian James Harris: ‘I … believe it will insinuate itself so much into my approbation as most of Handel’s performances do, as it is in the light operatic style’, adding, ‘I think I never saw a fuller house.’ After three performances the composer deposited the handsome sum of £550 (roughly equivalent to £70,000 today) in his bank account. But Handel’s wider middle-class public did not apparently share the Countess’s enthusiasm. Susanna was taken off after one further performance, and only revived, in a mangled and truncated version, during the last weeks of Handel’s life. Even in an age 4 when the composer has never had it so good, it remains one of the least known of his oratorios. Perhaps the ‘light operatic style’ cultivated in parts of this Biblical detective story drawn from the Apocrypha has fazed audiences expecting epic Handelian fare. Though set against the background of Jewish exile in Babylon, Susanna is in essence a drama of English village life, with, as Winton Dean puts it in his classic study of Handel’s oratorios, something of ‘the charm of a Chaucer tale’. But Dean surely goes too far in calling Susanna ‘a comic opera’ and the lascivious, ultimately evil Elders merely ‘caricatures of the naughty old men to be found in any English village’. True, there is a touch of humour in Handel’s treatment of the Elders. But the oratorio’s central themes – of spotless innocence versus senile lechery, attempted rape, perjury and Susanna’s narrowly averted judicial murder – are anything but comic. The angular, edgy fugue of the overture, fruitfully recycling motifs from John Blow’s 1684 St Cecilia Ode, immediately establishes a serious tone. Its mood is then intensified in the sombrely magnificent choral chaconne ‘How long, oh Lord’ on a four-bar descending ground bass – traditional Baroque symbol of mourning (compare, say, Dido’s Lament). While some commentators, Dean included, have found this Aeschylean opening chorus incongruous in the light of the marital idyll that follows, Handel surely intended it as a harbinger of the grave issues at stake in the work. He balances it with the equally momentous chorus, in three sections, at the end of Act 1. While the antics of the infatuated Elders are ridiculous, the potentially appalling consequences of their actions unleash a minatory thunderbolt, culminating in a tremendous double fugue that sets a falling chromatic
line against a lashing countersubject inspired by the words ‘Wrath divine outstrips the wind’. Described in the Apocrypha as ‘a very fair woman, and one that feared the Lord,’ Susanna – a role written for Giulia Frasi, favoured prima donna of Handel’s later years – is one of the composer’s most sensitive and touching creations, whose developing portrait is the prime agent of unity in an oratorio of wide-ranging musical styles. Her sweetness, piety and unclouded happiness are beautifully evoked in her first two arias – the dulcet ‘Would custom bid the melting fair’, with its tender violin echoes and blissful lingering on the word ‘mine’, and the tripping, galant ‘Without the swain’s assiduous care’ – and in her blithe duet with her husband Joacim. Yet even before the entry of the Elders, her husband’s imminent absence prompts a strange sense of foreboding. Her accompanied recitative and noble B minor aria ‘Bending to the throne of glory’, movingly suggest a strength and steadfastness that make her first cousin to the Christian martyr Theodora, heroine of Handel’s next oratorio. Susanna’s characterisation deepens further in Acts 2 and 3. In ‘Crystal streams’, the sounds and scents of a sultry summer’s afternoon, and her longing for Joacim (bowdlerised, like so much else in the oratorio, in the Novello vocal score), provoke a ravishing aria of drowsy sensuality. After her rejection of the Elders, she attains tragic stature in ‘If guiltless blood’, music of mingled stoicism and, in the rapt major-key central section (briefly interrupted by the Second Elder’s demand for her death), spiritual radiance. Susanna’s kinship with Theodora is again underlined in her sublime Act 3 air ‘Faith displays her rosy wing’, whose key, F minor, programme note and abrupt dynamic contrasts suggest an inner anguish at odds with the serene faith of the words. Finally, Handel gives her a bravura aria, ‘Guilt trembling’, celebrating the triumph of virtue and her heroism in the face of death – and allowing La Frasi to impress the Covent Garden public with her agile coloratura technique. Handel’s portrayal of the two Elders, Judges of the exiled Jewish community ‘waxen old in wickedness’, is equally vivid. The self-dramatising First Elder announces himself in an over-the-top accompanied recitative, like a parody of an opera seria scena, and then launches into a wheedlingly sentimental minuet-ballad ‘Ye verdant hills’. His second aria, ‘When the trumpet’, is in mock-martial vein, with priapic flourishes from the violins. He is initially more consciencestricken than his companion-in-lechery; yet his hypocritical grief at Susanna’s imminent death, ‘Round thy urn’, is the most morally repulsive moment in the oratorio. The Second Elder is all incontinent bluster, his two arias characterised by gruff unisons, splenetic coloratura and absurd vocal leaps. Like his closest Handelian predecessor, the cyclops Polyphemus in Acis and Galatea, he is at once comicgrotesque and formidable. The Elders’ contrasted characters are brilliantly delineated in the dramatic trio that forms the climax of Act 2, ‘Away, ye tempt me both in vain’. As Susanna hurls defiance, the First Elder entreats in simpering chromaticisms, while the Second threatens violence in peremptory scales doubled by cellos and basses. If the other characters are more generic, each has memorable music. Of Joacim’s three arias in Act 1, ‘When first I saw my lovely maid’ is a lilting, quintessentially English pastoral, while ‘The parent bird’ features gently twittering 5
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Handel Susanna - Barbican

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