A Note from the Conductor

Preparing Tamerlano
By William Lacey

A lot of my preparation for Tamerlano began long before the rehearsal period. Director Chas Rader-Shieber and I started by figuring out our musical cuts, since Tamerlano is a very long opera. If we played every note, a 7:30 performance would end close to midnight. That would not go down too well today in a city full of busy professionals! Uncut Handel performances work best at festivals, where many audience members are on holiday and can sleep in the next morning. Chas and I tried to cut the score down without losing its shape and balance, bearing in mind the special qualities of our cast members.

Next, I set to work on the orchestra parts, since Handel's scores are quite skeletal and he often doesn't specify which instruments are meant to play. Handel conducted his own operas, working over and over again with the same musicians and singers. He wasn't writing the operas down for posterity; he was writing them down for tomorrow night's performance at the King's Theatre in London, where he hoped to have a big success and make money. Like Duke Ellington, Handel knew he could hand out hastily written shorthand scores and his team would know what to do with them. Nearly three centuries later, the conductor must try to figure out what Handel would have wanted. For Tamerlano, I wrote in the bowings for the strings, the dynamics (Handel gives us the odd piano and forte, but not often), the phrasings and the trills (18th-century musicians instinctively knew when to play them), and I decided exactly who should play when. For example, in the first violin part, Handel sometimes writes "tutti," which probably means all violins and oboes and maybe flutes-sometimes it's really just guesswork. Generally I've gone for a "big house" scoring, with 14 violins and some extra woodwind doubling, since the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is much bigger than the King's Theatre, and I don't want the people in the back to miss out.

The orchestra's continuo group has the same function as the rhythm section of a rock band (rhythm guitar, bass guitar, drums) or jazz combo (piano, acoustic bass, drums), providing a "continuous" underlay of rhythm and harmony. I'm disappointed if I attend a Handel opera and the recitatives are accompanied by just one harpsichord and one cello. Since the average Handel opera contains 30 minutes of recitative, it can be very monotonous. We know from contemporary descriptions that Handel used two harpsichords and one or two theorbos, so our continuo group consists of two harpsichords (I play one of them during the recitatives; the other harpsichordist joins in when we need a fuller sound and in the arias while I'm busy conducting), two theorbos (doubling on lute and baroque guitar) and one cello. Looking only at Handel's bass and vocal lines, the five of us fill in the harmonies using our experience, intuition and improvisational skills. For me, it's a liberating throwback to my student days as a jazz pianist!

The theorbo is the giraffe of the lute family. Its enormous neck intrigues opera-goers, who regularly come down to the orchestra pit during intermission to ask what it is. It has a wide range of sounds: the bass notes create a doom-laden tolling, useful at moments of high drama; plucked delicately, the sound is extremely charming and amorous. It can also be strummed for an exciting accompaniment to fast, bravura arias (especially in combination with a baroque guitar).

Tamerlano, probably the most tragic of Handel's operas, has a distinctively dark tinta. It has an unusually high proportion of minor-key numbers and slow numbers, but as ever with Handel there's a huge variety of musical character, and every act ends with a truly memorable scene. Act I concludes with one of the most elaborate arias in the piece, Andronico's glorious "Benche mi sprezzi." Act II ends with a most unusual sequence, the famous throne scene, which involves the longest recitative of Handel's career (nearly ten minutes, with only continuo accompaniment until the strings burst in after about six minutes). The tension finally explodes in a short and wild trio. Then Bajazet sings a touching short arioso to his daughter, who is then left alone to lament her situation in a beautiful aria. Most striking of all is the end of Act III, one of the most remarkable passages in 18th-century opera. To convey the conflicting emotions that Bajazet experiences in the last ten minutes of his life, Handel completely abandoned conventional form and wrote a free piece of music drama that is effectively a long accompanied recitative with a short, heartbreaking arioso ("Figlia mia") at its center. The scene ends with Bajazet stuttering his final words, gasping for breath, as the orchestra describes his fading heartbeat with slowly receding repeated notes. It is an amazingly vivid and inspired piece of work, which anticipates the later innovations of Gluck, Berlioz and Wagner.