Handel's Operas in the Context of Modern Stage Direction: on the Question of Implementing the Cinematography Composition Principles in an Opera Play

Abstract

The article is based on the authors' attending modern performances of Baroque operas by Georg Friedrich Handel (1685-1759) in 2019, in the theaters of three German cities: Halle, Bad Lauchstädt and Bernburg. The first, which is the composer’s birthplace, annually hosts the international Handel music festival, dedicated to the study of the great Saxon’s and his contemporaries’ works. The concept of the festival in 2019 was related to the study of female characters represented in Handel’s operas: "Handel's women – sensitive, heroic, sublime".

Comprehending the considered scientific and artistic concept, the authors come to the conclusion that the possibilities of directors’ interpretations of ancient operas have significantly expanded due to the incorporation of composition principles of cinematographic editing and expressive means of modern, primarily screen arts into both musical and stage dramaturgy. To study this phenomenon, we used a scientific apparatus developed in Russian science by Lev Vygotskij, who, exploring the fiction literature protagonist’s spiritual world, revealed his psychological contradictions, expressed as the conflict between plot and story, and by Sergey Eizenshteyn, who, knowing well Vygotskij’s manuscript of "Psychology of art" and influenced by his ideas, created his own "psychology of art", presented on the pages of his works from various years.

In this article, revealing the essence of processes mentioned above gave its authors an opportunity to see, in the interpretations of Handel's operas by German directors, a "building of meaning" phenomenon, produced by merging of the two seemingly irreconcilably conflicted layers of consciousness: the Baroque – and the modern, that has developed over the last century.