Mikhail Fikhtengolts. On the delights of Handel

Looking at my senior colleagues traveling around Salzburg and Bayreuth in the summer, at first I was somehow embarrassed to write about the Göttingen Handel Festival - a chamber (a week long), little-known festival, where, having passed the session early, I was going for the second time in a row. And the second time I was convinced that there was nothing to be embarrassed about, because, having visited Göttingen once, I realized that it would not be limited to a one-time visit. The program of the current, 80th, festival sounded more than tempting: the opera “Rodelinda” and the oratorio “Messiah” and a lot of different things. Having paid tribute to Handel, we must also pay tribute to the city where his music is heard.

Göttingen is a typical German university town, but not typical. Its residents are prone to peculiar everyday escapades, the reason for which is not always easy to understand. Well, why, for example, on the main shopping street Weender next to the Church of St. James, they set up a barber shop in the open air, where, without blinking an eye, they will shave you “under the knee” for only 5DM? Or - why put a poor Russian student, your humble servant, in a certain Werner-Schule, which turned out to be a school for young nuns?

The same eccentricities happen with the Handel Festival. Handel himself had never been to Göttingen, well, maybe he was passing through once or twice, wandering from London to Hanover and back in the 1710s. And yet, it is here that the cradle of the Handelian Renaissance is located. A fan of the composer's work, Oskar Hagen, staged a production of one of his best operas, Rodelinda, in Göttingen in 1920. True, it was staged with bills, under the piano, and in general, the whole event was started exclusively for his wife Tira Hagen, who sang the main role. But this modest event, as it turned out later, provoked the Handel hysteria that, without exaggeration, now affects the whole world. Proof of this are five (!) Handel festivals, the same number of Handel societies, kilograms of recordings of operas and oratorios, hundreds of scientific works.

The Göttingen Festival is always up to date with all events, but has remained aloof from the hustle and bustle of vanities and has been nurturing its chamber and intimate atmosphere for years. Meanwhile, there were names here that would make any Baroque lover's mouth water at the mention of them - Emma Kirkby, Michael Chance, Christophe Rousset, Lynn Dawson, Derek Lee Regin, Reinhard Goebel, etc. And most importantly, these living legends never hide in the salons of six hundred sarcophagi, but walk freely along narrow streets and are in every possible way ready for informal communication. The town is small, and there are many chances to see a star, get an autograph, take a photo for memory (this is for the sentimental) or just talk about life and Handel. All this is done with great pleasure by local old women, as well as their contemporaries, citizens of Great Britain and the USA, of whom there are many here.

English speech is heard at the festival almost more often than German - and all because it has been run by the British for 20 years. At first it was the well-known John Eliot Gardiner, now one of the pillars of world authenticism, and in 1980 just a lanky, promising Briton with glasses. As one of the festival directors hinted to me in no uncertain terms, it was in Göttingen that Gardiner made his name. When he realized this, he retreated, handing over the reins to his compatriot Nicholas McGegan.

McGegan is the opposite of Gardiner, small, densely built, although also promising, and also wears glasses. Together, they say, they looked very comical, almost like Pat and Patashon. For some reason, McGegan was not always loved in Europe, and he left his historical homeland for America, where he is now thriving. At Göttingen, he significantly changed the style of Handel's feasts, giving each festival a theme and equipping the opera singers with baroque costumes made exactly from 18th-century designs. Last year, when “Ariadne on Crete” was performed in such a baroque form, for a long time I could not recover from the absolutely unearthly beauty of the stage decoration and the ease with which McGegan managed for four hours without a director (the director, of course, was , but his role in a real baroque opera is purely episodic). And when the sweet-voiced Ariadne-Sophie Daneman began to sing, the audience entered a state of trance from which they no longer wanted to leave.

This year, the organizers nevertheless decided on a modern production of Handel’s opera “Rodelinda” (the one with which it all began) - probably, in the year of the 80th anniversary, they wanted something unusual. Cologne director Igor Folwill freed the medieval Italian horror story (plot: hereditary squabbles over the crown of Milan and Genoa) from any historical context, focusing his attention and the attention of the public on human feelings as old as the world - love, revenge, hatred. It turned out very well - the emotional duels of the characters looked very dynamic and beautiful, organically fitting into the empty space of the stage, not burdened with historical realities. Folville - a true gentleman - did not abuse the music and plot, looking for a non-existent second bottom in them and sullying the score with numerous rearrangements and cuts, and modestly took second place after McGegan. McGegan was in bliss at the conductor's stand - sitting in the front row (oh, how they treat the press in Germany!), I witnessed the almost physical pleasure that the conductor receives from his work. Of course, with such singers any work turns into pleasure! For example, Rodelinda is a Canadian Domenique Labelle with a voice of fantastic beauty and lightness, a Handelian singer from God. Or Edwiga's seconda donna, a vengeful intriguer played by the Pole Ewa Wolak, the owner of a thick, “velvety” contralto.

Everyone's favorite was the young British countertenor Robin Blaze, who came to us for the last “December Evenings” - a wonderful guy, with a naive smile and a bright mezzo-soprano, delivering coloraturas as pure as a tear. Everyone seems to have already agreed that a countertenor is the best analogue of a castrato, capable of singing in a beautiful female voice without losing his masculine nature; but the very fact that an adult unshaven man sings somewhere in the first octave still gives me awe. Everyone in Göttingen had to experience a similar state more than once - either in the oratorio “Israel in Egypt” Michael Chance will confidentially whisper about the frogs that have filled Egypt, or the marvelous timbre of Andreas Scholl will lead you to a state of bliss in “Messiah”. And such delight - every year.

There are two things worth coming to Göttingen for: Handel's music and the singers. Nicholas McGegan selects them himself. At night, the delightful authenticist Nancy Argenta sings here, and during the day, the diligent German Fräulein Constanze Backes, with an infallibly clear voice and the sinful eyes of a temptress, sings here. Of course, on the CD from the Göttingen Festival (and there are plenty of them on sale in Moscow) you cannot see either the baroque vicious eyes of Constanze, or even more so the elegant stubble of Robin Blaze, but there is Handel there. Although true lovers of the delights of the Baroque do not care about the kilometers that need to be traveled to Göttingen to see everything with their own eyes.