Staging oratorios

[Baroque Mongoose]

I wasn't quite sure where to put this, so if one of the moderators thinks it might fit more neatly elsewhere, please feel free to move it. Opera seemed to be about the closest thing to oratorio.

I'm just wondering what you good people think about the subject of staging oratorios, rather than performing them in the more traditional manner with fairly static soloists in evening dress. (By this I do mean out-and-out oratorios like Handel's Messiah, not the more operatic-style oratorios which have a narrative plot and action which could fairly obviously be staged.) I ask because I have seen various excerpts from a staged Messiah which, frankly, rather bewildered me. The singing was lovely, but the action on the stage didn't seem to have anything to do with what was being sung, and I found it much more distracting than helpful.

So... do you love this sort of thing? Hate it? Have you ever been involved in a performance like this? I'm fascinated, but very much going .

[Zeitblom]

I've always thought trying to stage Messiah was bound to end in tears, because it simply isn't a dramatic work - its content is purely reflective and I should have thought unstageable. Moreover, I'm not sure I really want to hear an opera house chorus in this work.

I have seen reasonably successful stagings of both Samson and Semele, which are proper pieces of drama (the former at the ROH with the great Jon Vickers as Samson giving a performance of Total Eclipse that was unforgettable for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with Handelian style). These pieces can work when staged - the opera seria conventions that Handel followed mean that the drama never really moves at a swift pace in Handel's operas so the gulf between opera and oratorio can be quite small.

One of the reasons for Handel writing Samson as an oratorio was that the laws of the time forbade the representation of Biblical subjects on the stage, so Handel, who recognised the dramatic potential of the Old Testament, was forced to write concert works.

[mamascarlatti]

I have the staged Messiah that you mention on DVD. While it is not entirely successful, the staging makes more sense if you watch it from the beginning and follow the story through. (starting with a funeral for a suicide and flashing back to the story of the three brothers of the suicide victim).

I suppose one of the advantages of this kind of approach is that it really makes you think about the words and their relationship with the music, rather than entirely focussing on the music, which is what I have a tendency to do with the more contemplative "religious" oratorios.

[Scott Good]

Like anything, staging can work, or might be a distraction - depends on the text and treatment. I don't have any strong opinions.

But sometimes, wearing evening dress is for me, a distraction from the text. One example I remember isn't an oratorio, but is a concert work with singer - The Wound Dresser of John Adams, and text by Walt Whitman for Baritone and orchestra. The text describes a field doctor on the front lines of a war, dressing wounds so to speak. But, if the baritone is in evening duds, I find a cognitive dissonance between what I am hearing and what I am seeing. It seems so distant - almost mocking - to the subject material.

But that's just me.

S

[Baroque Mongoose]

That makes sense to me. I've seen a performance of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo which was staged, but nonetheless Orpheus was in evening dress, as were one or two of the other characters. (However, Charon - who was very scary! - was dressed like some form of Dickensian mill owner, and Pluto walked onto the stage in a pair of black boxer shorts and was then dressed by his attendants. After having seen the Underpants of the Underworld, I confess I found it difficult to take him seriously, though he did have a wonderful voice.)

I have trouble with Greek demigods in evening dress, I must admit.