HANDEL’S OPERAS IN THE CONTEXT OF CONTEMPORARY DIRECTING: ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF FILM COMPOSITION PRINCIPLES IN OPERA PERFORMANCES

Abstract

The article was inspired by the authors’ reviews of modern productions of Handel’s Baroque operas in 2019, presented in the three German cities: Halle, Bad Lauchstädt and Bernburg. Halle, where Georg Friedrich Handel (1685–1759) was born, is also a venue of the annual International Handel Festival, dedicated to the works of the great Saxon and his contemporaries. The concept of the festival in 2019, Sensitive, heroic, sublime: Handel’s women, was devoted to studying the female images embodied in his operas. In considering the scientific and artistic concept, the authors concluded that the directors’ understanding of these operas has expanded through the integration into musical drama of the compositional principles of film editing and the expressive means of modern, primarily screen arts. To study this phenomenon, we turned to the scientific tools developed in Russia by the two Soviet researchers who have become seminal in their field. One of them was the psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who, exploring the spiritual world of the protagonists in fine literature, revealed their psychological contradictions, expressed in the conflict of the narrative and the plot. Another The other, Sergei Eisenstein, was well-versed in Vygotsky’s manuscript of his study, Psychology of Art, and, influenced by some of these ideas, created his own “psychology of art”, which is set out in his works of various years. The core of this concept was “the transition from the Expressive Movement to the image of the art work… as a process of interaction of layers of consciousness” [1, p. 188], which allowed for multiple entries into the artistic image (one of the authors has applied this method of analysis in a work devoted to the integration of the principles of painting and cinema: [2, pp. 63–86]). Some features of the cinematograph also support such entries, and the first among equals here is the principle of intellectual editing developed by Eisenstein. In his montage theory, other types of editing—linear, parallel, associative—have been generalized and developed into a large-scale system for exploring the psychology of heroes in art. The essence of these processes, identified in the article, made it possible for the authors to discern the phenomenon of building the meaning in the Halle directors’ interpretations of Handel’s operas, which arises from the merger of the two seemingly irreconcilable and conflicting layers of consciousness: Baroque and eclectic modern, which emerged at the turn of the last century.