Ariodante is dark Handel. Broadly speaking it’s an opera about love and jealousy based on the same text that inspired Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing: cue mistaken identities, costume swaps, general sneaking about in gardens spying on the wrong people in the wrong bedroom windows. But Handel’s treatment is less jolly than Shakespeare’s. Characters deal in intimidation, sexual degradation, gender discrimination, class bullying, vigilante capital punishment. Innocent love is corrupted out of spite. The orchestral writing sparkles and glows — this was Handel at the height of his powers, puffing out his chest for his first mainstage Covent Garden commission — while the vocal lines convey a very real, very raw kind of hurt.
Scottish Opera’s forthcoming production is the latest platform here for the young English director Harry Fehr. Through all the artistic wobbles the company has gone through over the past ten years, Fehr has remained one of its most regular contributors — evidently his clean and fairly conventional approach to storytelling is favoured by the company’s management. He first worked in Glasgow in 2004, a fledging director assisting on Eugene Onegin. In 2006 he took charge of a touring production of La Cenerentola, two years later made his mainstage debut with The Secret Marriage, in 2011 created a stylish war-time setting of Orlando and in 2012 did his best with Craig Armstrong’s The Lady From the Sea. In 2013 he delivered an atmospheric 1970s take on Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Fehr’s regular collaborator is the designer Yannis Thavoris, and what the two have tended to get right is a sense of real time and place. For Orlando that was a WWII hospital in West London; for Dutchman it was Fraserburgh in 1973, complete with greasy spoons, skooshy ketchup bottles and commercial wheelie bins.
So what will they do with Ariodante? Handel based his opera on Orlando Furioso, a renaissance Italian epic poem written 500 years ago by Ludovico Ariosto and set in a place at least nominally identified as Scotland. Ginevra, daughter of the King of Scotland, is to be married to the feudal vassal Ariodante. A duke named Polinesso is in love with Ginevra and determined to pull rank in order to get her. Dalinda is in love with Polinesso and offers herself in place of Ginevra. Here begins the nastiness: Polinesso persuades Dalinda to dress as Ginevra, Ariodante falls for the trick and heads off to kill himself, Ginevra is sentenced to death for infidelity. There is a happy ending of sorts — Dalinda comes clean, Ariodante fudges his suicide attempt and Ginevra is pardoned — but the moral murk lingers long beyond the final curtain.
Ariosto’s imagined Scotland is a barbaric place on the fringes of civilisation where women are executed for extramarital fornication and brutality is an accepted means of law-keeping. For Handel’s audience in 18th century London, stereotypes would have likely been similar. “So yes,” Fehr tells me, “Yannis and I wanted to be specific about where and when the story is happening, like we were with Orlando and Dutchman, because usually I find it helps the characters become human. But that specificity was problematic in Ariodante. This is a community where fornication is punishable by death and trial by combat is a legitimate form of judicial procedure. It would be hard to set a realistic production in any kind of Scotland we recognise today.”
One option for a director set on a fairly literal reading of the libretto would have been to go full-out medieval, which Fehr says he didn’t fancy “for reasons of aesthetic and relatable-ness”. Another option would have been to set the production somewhere that still punishes infidelity by death — and here he becomes more tentative. “You have to be incredibly careful about setting an production in, say, Saudi Arabia. Yannis and I talked about it a lot, and ultimately we felt that wasn’t our story to tell.” He pauses. “Opera can be a very serious art-form, but to superimpose one narrative onto another can end up diminishing both.”
What he means, he clarifies, is that “the issue of disempowered women around the world is rather more important than the story of Ariodante. If you want to consider how women are punished for perceived moral crimes in certain countries, then do so directly. Write a play or an article or a new opera. It’s too big a subject to be grafted onto an existing narrative just for convenience.” He describes a visit he made to a potential Scottish Opera donor to tell her about plans for the production. “She was angry that we have chosen a Christian setting. She said Christian communities don’t behave like that, and that we should be setting it in a Muslim community. She thought I was being weak for not addressing the issue.” He glances up. “I hope we haven’t acted out of fear of picketing on the first night, but I really don't think we have. If somebody wants to write a new opera about women in Saudi Arabia, I would be very interested in directing it.”
So for now, for this particular Ariodante, Fehr and Thavoris have settled on a semi fantasy world. It is Scotland and it’s not Scotland, a neo-puritanical Christian community in which laws are drawn from a very direct interpretation of the bible. “It exists somewhere on a spectrum between mythical and real,” Fehr describes. “Let’s face it: evangelism is on the rise at the moment, maybe not in Scotland but certainly elsewhere in the West. There are American fundamentalist communities whose attitudes I find profoundly distasteful, where the death penalty is still an acceptable part of a judicial system.” When we meet, Fehr says his big decision at that afternoon’s rehearsal will be whether to feature an “emergency exit” sign on a door at the back of the set. Is it too real? Too close to home?
Soprano Sarah Tynan sings the role of Ginevra and describes her character as “definitely and absolutely realistic. She’s no sorcerous, no mythical creature like there are in other Handel operas. The wrongs that are done to her should have stopped in the dark ages but are still being done to women around the world. Maybe we aren’t aware of the moral structures around us until they go wrong. We accept the values we’re brought up with until they break down. That’s the experience we go through with Ginevra.” Tynan describes singing her Act 2 aria Il mio crudel martoro — a slow, heartbroken melody that Handel layers with deeper and deeper emotion on each repetition. “I’ve found myself thinking of my daughter as I singing, and of women around the world who are disempowered, and I feel lucky to be able to stand on a stage and sing freely.”
Ariodante opens on Tuesday at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here