Last week I went to a performance of Handel's opera Poro, re dell'Indie at the London Handel Festival. I was braced for a long evening. I like Handel, and I like Handel operas, but they rarely clock in at less than three hours. Add an interval or two, and perhaps a less than scintillating performance, and that three hours can stretch to fill all eternity. So when I heard that it was cut - by at least 45 minutes! - I found myself grinning wildly.
It got me thinking about Anthony Neilson's instruction to potential playwrights to find out how long they could sit on their theatre's seats without, as he put it, their arses starting to sing, and take that as a time limit. It's not an injunction that seems to have been followed by many opera composers, it's true, especially those writing before 1900; but you can still bet that Handel wouldn't have written three-hour operas if his audiences had been expected to sit tight and quiet, in dark concentration, the way we do now. But is Neilson's suggestion one that those who stage Handel opera now should take seriously?
It's not as if we always know whether Handel considered there to be a definitive version of any of his operas: he himself would chop and change arias depending on which singers were available to him for each performance. Proposing to cut Handel is hardly the same as proposing to cut Wagner (and that's a whole other post). But why do I feel just a little bit guilty and ungrateful for being so very pleased that Poro was cut?
Whatever orderings of his scores Handel sanctioned, one thing they all have in common is that long, long duration. Perhaps it follows that, in otherwise stylistically authentic performances that claim to respect Handel's wishes, we should maintain that. After all, it's only then that we get to hear all the music - and why would we want someone else to choose what we heard and what we missed? When I was a teenager I sang every year in Bach's St Matthew Passion, and the conductor, who loved the work as a whole just as much as I do, would routinely cut what I'd realised (from my recording) was my very favourite bass aria, to save time.
And, while it might make sense to cut when presenting Handel's operas to a wider audience (and you may feel that recent productions of Orlando at Covent Garden or Agrippina at ENO might have benefited from a bit more pruning), the London Handel Festival is a specialised event with a largely specialised audience, who know what they are in for. Some will even have brought cushions. Perhaps, then, the LHF and similar events are even under an obligation to present an opera such as Poro uncut - as a matter of record, if you like - especially when a work has been chosen precisely because of its rarity.
Or has our love of the concept of authentic performance left us feeling that cuts are a little bit naughty when we all secretly love them because they enable us to get out of the theatre before last orders? Should cuts be part and parcel of presenting Handel today, or are they for wimps?
