The Abandoned Woman

Most of Handel’s women suffer the fate of abandonment by those they love. With his cantata Lucrezia as a starting point, this concert explores the idea of abandonment – from the pain of rejection and loss to the fire and passion underlying dances of abandonment – fandangos, sarabands and tangos. With Sydney’s premier lutenist Tommie Andersson and the wonderfully expressive soprano Hester Hannah in music by Handel, Ferrari, Piazzola and Yates.

Hester Hannah soprano, Tommie Andersson lute, theorbo, baroque guitar, Angus Ryan cello, Diana Weston harpsichord

Benedetto Ferrari (1603-1681)Amanti io vi so dire from ‘Musiche Varie’, Libro III (1641), S. 22-27

Franscesco Geminiani (1678 or 1680-1762) Sonata IV from Sei Sonate

Stephen Yates Fandangle Indeed

Robert de Visée (1655-1732/33) Sarabande Chaconne des Scaramouches, Trivelins et Arlequins arranged by Visée from Lully’s music for Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.

Giovanni Battista Marella Suite for guitar and harpsichord

Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) Nightclub 1960, from Histoire du Tangofor flute and guitar arranged for harpsichord and cello

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) Lucrezia

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Lucrezia, wife of a Roman emperor, is raped for her beauty and goodness. She rages against her misfortune and suffers agonies of distress and remorse. The torment is too great and she takes her own life. Handel’s Lucrezia tells this tale of outrage and abandonment in a cantata known by the subject’s name. She is the ‘abandoned woman’, synonymous with the female voice of all Handel’s continuo cantatas. Written in 1706, it is one of his earliest ‘Italian’ cantatas, at a time when Handel was coming to grips with his compositional style.

The male and female voices and personae in Handel’s cantatas are strikingly different. Those with male subjects follow a set pattern of two, perhaps three recitative/arias. The arias are in ‘da capo’ form meaning the first part is repeated. They are controlled in style and express emotions indirectly through the evocation of nature – storms, lightning etc. Sentiments tend to be external – glory, ambition, heroism.

Those with female protagonists, on the other hand, are much looser in form and content. The women, universally rejected, abandoned and hard done by, express despair and anguish. Their utterance is disjointed and fragmented. Handel achieves this effect musically by silences, unpredictable shifts of harmony and melody, dissonance and a breaking-up of form. In Lucrezia, the aria peters out, breaks into recitative (spoken song), tries again in a completely different way, can’t sustain it, and finally ends in a flurry of violent repetition. There is often no clear beginning or end between sections.

For Handel, the ‘female’ cantata is the vehicle whereby he can be most expressive and most heart-felt. So much so, he maintained this technique throughout much of his subsequent opera composition.

Stephen Yates’ Fandangle Indeed (1994, rev. 1997, 2002) is based on an anonymous 32-bar fandango, transcribed by Richard Taine in 1772-3. He quotes Casanova (Madrid 1768) as to its character: …the Fandango becomes the most seductive, the most voluptuous dance on earth. Men and women make only three steps and shiver at the sound of the castanets.’ Here is abandonment of a different kind – that of dance, and the consuming nature of sexual allure.

Originally written for guitar and flute, Piazzolla’s Night-club 1960 is the third of four pieces outlining the history of the tango. In increasing order of respectability they are: Bordel 1900, Café 1930, Night-club 1960 and Concert d’aujourd’hui. One of Argentina’s most noteworthy composers, Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) made the tango his signature style, elevating the dance of the back-streets of Buenos Aires to an art-form. Melding jazz influences and standard Western practices (including baroque) with all-pervading tango rhythm, it wasn’t until the famed Nadia Boulanger in Paris spotted his unique slant did his trajectory become clear. Night-club 1960 shows influences of other dance forms – the bossa nova – prevalent after the war when tangos could be heard in night-clubs everywhere.

Normally associated with a serious character, even sombre, the saraband (here represented in the course of the suites by de Visée and Geminiani in its more sombre form) started out with a very different demeanour. Following the course of the menuet and the courante, the sarabande was gay and lively in the early seventeenth century. Later it became slower in tempo and intense and serious in affect. Thought to come originally from Latin America and Spain it was associated with guitar (and castanet) accompaniment. The passionate nature of its Latin origins is hinted at by teasing hesitations and variations. But more importantly, by the description of a solo sarabande given by Pomey:

…he danced with a totally charming grace, with a serious and circumspect air, with an equal and slow rhythm, and with such a noble, beautiful, free and easy carriage that he had all the majesty of a king…

Sometimes he would glide imperceptibly, with no apparent movement of his feet and legs, and seemed to slide rather than step. Sometimes…he would remain suspended, immobile, and half leaning to the side with one foot in the air; and then, compensating for the rhythmic unit that had gone by, with another more precipitous unit he would almost fly, so rapid was his motion…

…(he) began to express the emotions of his soul through the motions of his body, and reveal them in his face, his eyes, his steps and all his actions… sometimes languid and passionate…..sometimes more moderate…