Clori, Tirsi & Fileno: Program Notes

SYNOPSIS
Characters: Clori, a shepherdess; Tirsi and Fileno, shepherds

In this comic love triangle, both Tirsi and Fileno woo Clori, but she only knows how to love the one she’s with. In Act I, Clori accepts Fileno’s proposal. In Act 2, she agrees to marry Tirsi. Far from fighting over such a fickle female, the boys prefer their friendship to the impossibility of trusting Clori; they agree to let her call the shots. Since Clori is no more convinced to choose than she was originally, the story traces a circle, ending up exactly where it started!

NOTES
Welcome to Clori, Tirsi and Fileno, Tempesta di Mare’s first foray into staged opera, and the first time modern Philadelphia has had staged baroque opera performed by a local standing baroque orchestra.

Clori is the third of Handel’s youthful operatic miniatures that we have performed in as many seasons. The first was the one-act, two-character drama Apollo & Daphne, which we performed studio-style (i.e., acted without sets), and the second was the extended solo scena, Agrippina condotta a morire. These pieces are classified in the Handel catalogues as “dramatic cantatas,” but that quaint sounding label is misleading when you consider the theatrical design of these works.

These “dramatic cantatas” have all the best elements of baroque opera – a good story told through memorable songs – without the three-hour-plus running time that comes about largely through incidental subplots in the full-length works. In Handel’s Tamerlano, for instance, do we truly care whether Bajezet’s daughter Asteria and her suitor Andronico can still live happily ever after so long as the Mongol conqueror Tamerlano has Byzantine ruler Bajezet in chains? Stripped of the formal baggage that can slow down the pace of conventional baroque operas, these early miniatures are a perfect illustration of when less is more.

If Apollo & Daphne found Handel in a poignant mood and Agrippina condotta found him wondering about matricide, then Clori, Tirsi and Fileno finds our same composer at a lighthearted moment. This is a story about dating, set in classical Arcadia, with a nymph and two shepherds. Tirsi and Fileno are two friends who love the same girl. Clori plays the boys off one another for her own advantage, and in so doing tests their friendship.

The overture sets the tone of play with its fast section, reminiscent of Mendelssohn and Beethoven’s scherzos with their light, scampering rhythms. If the idea that something playful was afoot didn’t make itself clear with the fast section, the overture’s ending without the normal return to a final slow section should seal the deal. Handel reused this overture at least twice, once as the overture to the opera Oreste and also in an arrangement for solo keyboard in his seventh suite for harpsichord.

Handel crafted all the arias of Clori, Tirsi and Fileno with the same da capo structure, the most popular form for vocal music during Handel’s time. Da capo is an Italian term that means “from the top.” Da capo arias are composed in two parts, an opening A section that is musically complete, so it begins and ends in the same key, then a more adventurous but shorter B section that elaborates on ideas in the A section. At the conclusion of the B section, the A section gets restated, thus the term “Da capo.”

The point of the arias in baroque opera is to get a glimpse of a character’s interior state. In general, an aria freezes the movement of the plot for this emotional exploration. The beauty of the da capo form is that the emotion of the A section’s return is heightened because of the journey through the B section. Consider the following text as illustration, a paraphrase of Fileno’s second aria. A = “I am like that sailor who can’t feel safe at sea;” and B = “Until I’m back on land my mind will not be free.” So, when the A returns, you get, “...I am like that sailor who can’t feel safe at sea!” Improvised ornaments, i.e., musical decorations like trills and runs, embroider the return to the A section, further raising the emotion.

Most of the action advances during the recitatives. These vocal dialogues and soliloquies are a musical form of declamation accompanied by just a few instruments, usually a harpsichord and/or lute plus a cello. By Handel’s time, recitatives have very little that’s tuneful in a memorable sort of way. Their function is simply to advance the plot through music.

Our original plan was to set this story with Tirsi and Fileno as roommates in a Center City Philadelphia apartment and Clori as their visiting friend. But the language of Lawrence Rosenwald’s English verse translation so vividly captured both the pastoral tone of the original Italian as well as its eighteenth-century feel that we had to do this as a period piece. We hope you will enjoy the baroque theatrical gesture in this production. Gesture can be described as an acting method that uses heightened body language to convey characters’ states of mind and feelings beyond the footlights.

On a personal note, these three Handel works have been a real journey of discovery. We can only compare the experience to looking at the younger photos of people you’ve known since their adulthood. One day you stumble upon these images of the young person and end up seeing both the older person and this young stranger who’s eerily familiar.

Handel is a composer most of us first met through the Messiah, which he wrote when he was 56. If you’re a symphony-goer, then you likely also heard one or more of his Water Music suites, written in his 30’s, or the Music for the Royal Fireworks, composed when he was 64. After you have taken in this operatic miniature, take a moment to reflect on the image that Clori, Tirsi and Fileno gives us: that of a 22-year old making a lasting name for himself in the world.

Richard Stone and Gwyn Roberts
Philadelphia 2005

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
My chief goal was to keep the surprisingly intricate and demanding form of the Italian original, notably its rhythms and its rhymes. My second goal was to maintain most of the original’s decorum of diction; accordingly, though I made no rigorous attempt to simulate the English of the 18th century, I did work hard not to introduce conspicuous anachronisms. Finally, I needed to have the translation be singable, i.e., not to torment singers with unvocalizable consonant clusters and neutral vowels. Given these three constraints, I sometimes found it less important to hold to the exact sense of the Italian, and the sense was in fact ruthlessly sacrificed, when that sacrifice was necessary to keep to any of these other goals.

My thanks to Dessa Crawford, who did some valuable work on an earlier version of the translation; to Drew Minter, for some very helpful suggestions made as he and the singers began to work with the translation; and above all to Richard Stone, whose meticulous look at every line of the translation benefited it greatly, and in addition led to wonderfully stimulating and productive conversations.

Lawrence Rosenwald
Wellesley, Massachusetts, 2005