Books & Poetry

The conductor of the opera company with which I’m involved, Il Complesso Barocco, is called Alan Curtis. He’s one of the grandfathers of the ancient music phenomenon. We were at dinner one night and we found ourselves confessing to each other that our favourite composer was Handel. We live in a world where the two gods of music are Bach and Mozart. People of high culture – or who have high-cultural pretensions – swoon when either of those names is dropped. Alan and I felt almost guilty for revealing that the composer who moved us most profoundly and consistently was Handel. We became the two guilty Christians in the amphitheatre watching the other Christians being torn apart by the lions. But because of this identification with Handel we felt spurred to invest our time and energy in the pursuit of recording his operas, which is something we’ve done for the last eight or nine years.

I say ‘we’ in the most idealised sense. It’s Alan who does all the work – chooses the cast and puts the whole thing together. I’m the person he talks to and is advised and consoled by. I’ve come to listen to a lot of Handel’s music, as well as read and think a lot about him. He’s a Londoner by accident in the way that I’m a Venetian by accident. He chose the best place for him because of historical and cultural events.

He ended up writing, performing and conducting operas in a foreign language for an English audience, and became one of the celebs of the time. He showed his genius when ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ put paid to opera seria [courtly, stylised Italian opera]. Like any entrepreneur, he just said, ‘Okay, why don’t I write oratorios? They’re in English, people will like them. Rather than have gods and goddesses and mythological figures trooping across the stage, why not open up the Bible and pull characters out of that?’ He fell on his feet that way.

He was a passionate Londoner. He lived at 25 Brook Street. He knew the city well and in a sense became English. There’s a phrase in his ‘Messiah’ where you can hear this. It’s when you hear: ‘I know that my redeemer liveth.’ Now, I don’t know that – I don’t know it at all. But for the amount of time it takes me to listen to the ‘Messiah’ in English, with the music perfectly suited to that language, I know that my redeemer liveth! It convinces me! There’s a wonderful essay by Auden, I think, in which he talks about the difficulty he had translating Strauss operas into English, and he points out a lot of things that people who love opera probably don’t think about. With opera, when you’re translating, you have to get the right rhythm. The words have to fall in the same accentual pattern in the new language as they did in the old language. That’s enormously difficult. So Handel, speaking English as his second language… well, he was such a genius that he could do it.

The London Handel Festival runs until April 24; for further information, visit www.london-handel-festival.com

The Handel House Museum, 25 Brook Street, Mayfair, London W1K 4HB (020 7495 1685/www.handelhouse.org)