Theodora finds new acclaim in Vancouver

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      What makes a major work of music succeed or fail on its debut? It’s a question that’s long perplexed composers. George Frederick Handel thought Theodora his finest oratorio, but the first production in London in 1750 closed after just three performances because of poor attendance.

      It wasn’t due to any lack of artistic lustre. Theodora is one of the summits of Handel’s creative imagination, a mature work with a uniquely dramatic character. The reasons for the box-office flop remain unclear. There was an earthquake in London a week earlier, and many rich patrons may have left town. Or perhaps the story of an apocryphal Christian martyr of the fourth century didn’t appeal to Londoners. Handel’s librettist recorded the composer’s own opinion that “the Jews will not come to it [Theodora] because it is a Christian story; and the ladies will not come…because it is a virtuous one.”

      Countertenor Lawrence Zazzo, one of the five soloists in Early Music Vancouver’s production of Theodora, has other suggestions. “I’m doing a PhD, studying Handel in the 1730s and ’40s,” he says, reached at his home in Cambridge, England. “Sometimes the audiences had trouble with oratorios that were deemed a little too dramatic, like Semele. They considered it a bawdy opera and not sacred enough. You couldn’t say that Theodora isn’t sacred, but it cuts a bit close to the bone—she gets condemned to a house of ill repute for Roman soldiers. It wasn’t a well-known biblical story either, which didn’t help. But you could never account for attendances. Even Messiah wasn’t very successful at first.”

      Theodora may also quite simply have been deemed too long in its original form. In his revisions, Handel reduced its size. And the grand work performed by Zazzo and fellow soloists Nathalie Paulin, Krisztina Szabó, Zachary Wilder, and Matthew Brook—with the Vancouver Cantata Singers and the Pacific Baroque Orchestra under the direction of Alexander Weimann—is not the full version. “That’s fine—the audience will be happy it doesn’t run over three hours,” says Zazzo. “It’s close to being an opera plot transplanted into a Christian setting, and has an incredible scene at the end of Theodora and Didymus [Zazzo’s role] being martyred while they sing this heavenly duet.”

      The dark themes of state repression of minorities, resistance, and sacrifice have a very contemporary resonance. In U.S. director Peter Sellars’s acclaimed 1996 opera production of Theodora at Glyndebourne, England—in which Zazzo performed—the Romans were updated to be materialistic Americans. But despite its glories and relevance the work is still not often heard.

      “The popularity of Messiah has dwarfed the other oratorios, of which there are a great many—Handel wrote only oratorios after 1744. Large-scale choral works are expensive to present, and people play safe—Messiah can always pack them in. But the drama of Theodora really engages people. It’s in the construction of the scenes, like the one in prison, or the very strong scene at the beginning with the Roman emperor Valens. Some of the language is perhaps a bit moralizing, but there’s a place for that at times. It’s paced very well. Theodora’s a fantastically rich piece.”

      Early Music Vancouver’s production of Theodora is at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Saturday (February 14).

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