Love Handel

Handel’s Rinaldo has not been highly regarded even by his most ardent admirers. I have never understood why — even less so after the recent performance at the Barbican, with stunning forces, including the English Concert, under the inspiring direction of Harry Bicket.

Certainly the plot is absurd, with a last-minute mass conversion of Muslims to Christianity in order to bring things to a happy conclusion. But there are only six main characters in complicated relationships with one another, turning on their love and hatred like a switch, and going through the usual hoops; that is what Handel operas are. The penny has dropped with me, almost too late, that it is a complete mistake to look for characterisation in Handel. Strong emotions are expressed, and he is a master of putting them into music, but who is experiencing and expressing them is a matter of indifference. Can any admirer of Handel swear that — with the exception of a tiny handful of his works, such as Giulio Cesare — he gives a damn about the outcome of his operas. Who ends up happy and who distraught or dead? Think of the anxieties and relief we feel during the operas of Monteverdi or Mozart or Wagner or Puccini, and there is no comparison. Once that’s granted, Handel is expressive on a grand scale, and in Rinaldo as much as in almost any of his operas. It has the advantage, too, of not having a merely expository first act, as so many of his operas do. Absorbing from the start, it achieves an even higher level in Act Two, before the mild longueurs of Act Three.