Kathy Wittman

The Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) used to appear every two years in late spring, with a dazzling array of stars from an international collection of musicians from that pre-classical world. But triumph breeds appetite, and the organization now presents its programs throughout the year. They include performances, recitals, workshops, classes, and in many non-Hub locales. In New York, you can often catch them at the Morgan Library, and they have been known to turn up in Great Barrington, Troy, and Caramoor. The only commonalities are the early date of the music and the high class of the performers.

The event I always await with happiest anticipation still comes around every two years: a grand opera, sometimes familiar (Handel’s Cesare; Monteverdi’s Poppea) but more often unknown, often quite new to these shores (Lully, Rameau, Cavalli, Steffani), obscure items that provide a window into a forgotten scene of the baroque age. A few years ago, BEMF gave us Conradi’s Die Schöne und Getreue Ariadne, a surprise to (I daresay) most of the baroque specialists hereabouts, once a triumph at Hamburg’s Theater am Gänsemarkt, in those days (the 1690s) the largest opera house north of the Alps.

This year, the stated theme being “Love and Power” (when is that not the theme of a grand opera?), the showpiece was a slightly later hit, 1705, from the same theater, Reinhard Keiser’s Die römische Unruhe, oder die edelmühtige Octavia (that is: Roman Revolt, or the Noble-Minded Octavia), a political soap opera set in the turbulent reign of Rome’s wickedest sovereign, Nero, and his unhappy first wife. There’s scarce mention here of Agrippina, his mother, and no mention of Poppea, his second wife—both of whom (like Octavia) the real Nero murdered. They have operas of their own, after all.

BEMF’s operas are presented at the Cutler Emerson Majestic Theater on Tremont Street, just downhill from Boson Common, its fruity efflorescence the perfect setting for gaudy baroque theatricality: sizable but not vast—vast opera houses came in with Wagner and electric lighting; baroque song and dance get lost in them.

Alexander McCargar’s sets and Anna Kjellsdotter’s costumes are gaudy and grand, the special effects witty, the movement of the performers (even the non-dancers) evidencing classes on baroque stage movement. You feel you have wandered into the court of some minor nabob of the Holy Roman Empire, on a night when the Family is off hunting something or other, so you can wear less than your dressiest clothes but hear the singers spouting for royal ears.

Reinhard Keiser managed the Hamburg opera house for some years after Conradi and before Telemann took over, but he got into financial trouble and had to take it on the lam. While he was hiding out at the court of Saxe-Weissenfels (a comedown from wealthy Hamburg), a teenage prodigy named Händel took a shot or two at opera. We possess the youngster’s debut, Almira, but his second, Nero, is lost. That’s too bad; it was a hit. But Nero’s success had another effect: it galvanized Keiser to return and put a new work of his own on the stage.

This opera had roughly the same plot as Nero, but to differentiate the two—and show that he could do mad tyrants with the best—Keiser dubbed it Octavia. Octavia commences with Nero, blissfully wedded, celebrating the construction of the Colosseum, the largest bronze statue ever devised in the Roman Empire—we see only its giant feet and ankles; the rest is concealed by lowering clouds. Nero receives the deposed king and queen of Armenia, come to have their crowns restored by imperial gift. (This gives Marc Molomot as Davus, the low comedy character found in all early German operas, a chance to sing: “If you want a crowning favor, you must go to the Kaiser”—a pun on Keiser, get it?)

Kathy Wittman

Nero takes one look at Queen Ormoena, and the plot is off and running. To be fair, she is a bit of a minx with no strong objections to being wooed by an emperor. By the time things conclude, with everyone pardoned and paired off, no matter what villainies they’ve concocted, there’s been a political conspiracy, a faked suicide, plenty of dazzling singing and exotic excuses for dancing, plus a ghostly apparition.

Having fallen in love with the queen of Armenia, Nero orders his empress to commit suicide. She fakes it, on the advice of Stoic philosopher Seneca (bass Christian Immler), and returns disguised as a ghost. Credulous Nero has a bit of mad scene here (we all know how that tradition blossomed) and is then so relieved to find she is not a ghost and he is not guilty of her death that there is a joyous reunion.

But serious drama and serious character were not the intent of these operas. Special effects, variant melodies and spectacular singing got you through the big night. The plot—if it is not an error to speak of a “plot”—compares badly with L’Incoronazione di Poppea’s handling of roughly the same material in Venice sixty years earlier. The events of Poppea emerge from character as their singing has revealed itself to us. Octavia is more gimcrack, events simply as excuses for showy arias—which is, in fact, the way opera was trending. (Monteverdi’s stage works had not reached Germany by this time and, indeed, were forgotten in Italy.)

BEMF was obliged to cut some two hours of music from Keiser’s score, but the surviving three and a half hours give ten grade-A singers opportunities to ornament his graceful melodies to demonstrate this emotion or that. They were all good, but one understood the need for the reforms of Metastasio, who cut subplots to focus opera on a more central drama.

Kathy Wittman

Keiser’s libretto, by Barthold Feind, rambles among minor characters, some of them ambitious but most of them amorous. This offers them opportunities to display their prowess. It is impressive that the Theater am Gänsemarkt had so many talented vocalists at its disposal, not so surprising that BEMF can assign these parts so ably.

The gaudiest role is that of Nero, a bass rather than the male alto of Italian tradition. In Italy, of course, the higher the rank, the loftier the voice, but Germany did not have castrati at this time. The only male alto in Octavia is Tiridate, the King of Armenia, and it is not clear what sort of singer—male or female—sang it originally. Today, of course, countertenors have no trouble with it, and it was one of them, Michael Skarke, who sang it in Boston.

Nero, Douglas Ray Williams, possesses an authoritatively deep and distinctive but gravelly voice—I heard the Friday performance; friends who had heard him sing it on the Wednesday assured me he was better then. He held our attention during the attempted assassination (we were rooting for the guys with the knives) but came into his own in his Mad Scene, terrified of the ghost of his murdered consort and singing of remorse. This did not seem quite as psychological, as self-questing as later mad scenes by later composers—for a bass, one thinks of Rossini’s Assur over a century further on, but Keiser’s style and acting were impressive.

Suicide is an opportunity for any prima donna, and Octavia makes the most of it. But an admiring senator stays her hand. To my regret, the Octavia, Emöke Baráth, was a particular sufferer from cuts in the score as performed. Her arias were often reduced from ABA (the second A section intended for individualized ornament) to mere AB and seemed to lack the punch a title character deserves. They seemed abrupt, undermining her emotional responses. I fell in love with Baráth’s heroic vocal quality in the 2019 BEMF production of Steffani’s Orlando Generoso, and was particularly eager to hear her again. As Octavia, her cool, dark soprano made a superb contrast with the high sopranos cast as Ormoena, Livia, and Clelia.

In a baroque opera, there are few if any duets, trios, quartets, concertati—no one had figured out how to work them into the dramatic fabric. It was a pleasure to hear such things in Stradella’s San Giovanni Battista at Catapult Opera, but that was a staged oratorio. In secular operas of the time, such vocal blendings did not occur.

Kathy Wittman

So we had an evening of many solos, and the singers were expected to be able to sing brilliantly and also with emotional variety. The Armenian beauty, Ormoena, was sung by Boston’s local favorite, Amanda Forsythe. Her serenely high soprano rejoices in immaculate trills but proved also deliciously seductive in her flirtations with the amorous emperor.

Hannah De Priest, as Livia, a flighty imperial cousin, had exquisite difficulty making up her mind which man she desired and in one of her arias flirted with two at once—or with anyone other than whichever man was currently at her feet. Sherezade Panthaki has a fierce, forthright soprano (fine for heroic queens, I imagine), but was obliged as Clelia to confine her ardors to lusting after the visiting Armenian—and not getting him.

Aaron Sheehan sang Piso, a senator driven to attempt assassination. Tenors are seldom given parts of great emotional range in baroque opera, but Sheehan impressed me with his serene line, his warm emotional commitment, the delicacy of his sound. He is known for his work in the baroque repertory, but his is an instrument and style I hope to hear in Gluck and Mozart roles someday. You know: modern music. Jason McStoots sang an elegantly amorous chamberlain and Richard Pittsinger a sturdy general.

One staging quirk got on my nerves: most of the arias are solos and were intended to be performed as soliloquies, the singer confiding her or his feelings to no one else. But the singers in Boston were all assigned speechless confidantes, posturing and emoting, distracting us from the singers. The program informed us they were members of the Young Artists Training Program, acquiring stage experience and perhaps understudying the singers, but I found their constant presence intrusive.

Spicing up the action are ballets in the style of that courtly era (tiny little steps in tiny little shoes), devised (and often danced) by Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière. In one of them, fishermen cavorted with their catches in netted costumes to enliven a nautical party. In another, three gravediggers were terrified by three ghoul-eyed specters, preparing us for the ensuing scene of Nero’s vision of his late empress.

The orchestra was impressively large for the era—Octavia may have been one of the first operas to make full use of (valveless) horns, but also a sizable complement of oboes and bassoons joined the strings and provided many subtle effects. They were led, as always, by Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs. 

Kathy Wittman

In the Italian south at that time, when grand serious operas filled an evening, it was the custom to lighten the heavy event between the acts (and give the singers time to breathe) by presenting an “intermezzo,” a short comic opera of two or three scenes (one for each intermission), starring local singers of less grandezza, though sometimes the buffo singers were the local celebrities, as beloved as any star.

I was unaware that these entertainments were another tradition Hamburg imported, but BEMF this year presented a three-part intermezzo, Pimpinone, on its alternate nights, and spiced up the proceedings with “tragic relief”—a solo soprano cantata between the scenes of intermezzo. Solo cantatas suitable for receptions and parties of all sorts were another handsome addition to any composer’s takings, and helpful to get a singer’s name around for her (or his) virtuoso performance before the rulers of society.

Pimpinone’s 3 scenes were, accordingly, interposed by two halves of a cantata on the suitably tragic mythical tale of Ino, one of those Theban princesses, Oedipus’s aunts, who incurred the wrath of Saturnia (i.e. Juno) and, pursued by a mad husband, threw herself into the sea … where Neptune transformed her into a foamy goddess, Leucothea.

This double-bill, semi-staged and semi-danced, made a less grand but no less magical evening. And being without scenery other than the handsome wood paneling of Jordan Hall, the program can easily be taken on the road, as it will be next weekend at Great Barrington and at Caramoor.

The submissive and flirtatious Vespetta—a little wasp? Or a little motor scooter?—was sung by Danielle Reutter-Harrah, with a self-propelled waspish charm. The wealthy old bachelor she cajoles into hiring her—and we know just where that relationship will go—was sung by Christian Immler, forgetting all the Stoic wisdom of Seneca, that he’d sung in Octavia the night before, and falling into flirtatious traps. His deep and lyrical basso made light work of his ornamental self-satisfaction, then turned morose as his bargain was more than he’d bargained for. He was like a tom cat licking his injured paws. And Vespetta had changed from servant girl duds to a grand golden gown with queen bee additions. Near-happy endings are predictable and satisfying, and Telemann’s melodies are always a joy.

Ino was in the capable throat of Amanda Forsythe, her grief and determination and ultimate joy in her transformation elegantly touched by silvery coloratura. This was made more stageworthy by the sacrifice of her baby from a cliff into the waves (a nautical deity caught it neatly) and then her own leap to follow. Telemann’s tunes were almost tragic to begin with, triumphant at the last.

Gilbert Blin (who directed Octavia) and Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière are credited with the staging—and Lacoursière, who choreographed Octavia, appears in both shows as various mimed characters, from Neptune himself to mute servants of both sexes. She is constantly on the move, encouraging all the rest, joining forces merrily without singing a syllable. Her attitudes remind us how classic an art is mime.