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Cori Ellison (CE): French Baroque opera is new to Glyndebourne and to many opera fans, but by now most opera-goers are acquainted with Handel's stage works. So it might be helpful to compare French and Italian Baroque opera. For instance, why is dance so much more integral to French Baroque opera than to Italian?

William Christie (WC): It's a tradition in this operatic form called tragédie lyrique that was invented by Jean-Baptiste Lully, Rameau's predecessor, back in the 1670s, and which followed a very particular series of conventions. One of the most important conventions was that at the end of each of the obligatory five acts, and sometimes even in the middle of an act, there was always a divertissement, an incidental danced entertainment that might be to some extent linked to the main plot. And that was very much a part of French theatrical tradition in the middle of the 17th century.

CE: Lully, who was actually Italian by birth, had essentially been charged by Louis XIV with creating a French operatic form, and in order to ensure the acceptance of opera by the sceptical French, he very cleverly folded in two French obsessions, dance and classic theatre. Does that also account somewhat for the importance of the chorus in French Baroque opera?

WC: Yes, the importance of the chorus is again about the French insistence on big dramatic scale. This is far different from Italian music drama of the same period, which relies heavily on five or six or seven very fancy vocal soloists who do all the work. There's a question, too,

of filling the stage. In French tragédie lyrique the stage is awash with people – dancers, choristers, soloists. And you could also do things in opera that they didn't allow in French neoclassical theatre – you could introduce the extraordinary world of Le merveilleux, the tradition of magic and enchantment, which was achieved through extravagant machines and special effects.

CE: You just made a passing reference to the difference in singing style between French and Italian Baroque opera. French Baroque musical utterance was supposedly based on the cadences of 17th-century French drama, which would naturally place huge importance on the comprehensibility of the text. Might that also account for the relative lack of florid singing in French Baroque opera in comparison with Italian Baroque?

WC: You're dealing with a whole different aesthetic, really. Yes, there's an awful lot more recitative, or conversational style in French Baroque opera, a lot more reliance on music that is strongly linguistic. That said, Rameau is perhaps a bit less interested in this equilibrium between declamation and song than Lully had been. Lully had this idea that singers should be essentially orators or actors with good voices. Rameau gives lip service to that, but in a sense he is veering toward the Italian model. He requires singers to really sing and to be technically very accomplished, though it's still a much different affair vocally than you find in Handel. Compared to Italian music drama of the 1730s or 40s, Rameau is still very linguistic.

CE: French Baroque opera also seems to rely upon different vocal types from those of Italian opera seria. Can you elaborate on that?

WC: In Italian music drama, it's the age of the castrato, so you have male sopranos and altos and female sopranos, with some use of basses. Italian opera was largely high-voice dominated, and of course relied heavily on extreme coloratura, whereas in the French tradition, you're dealing with female sopranos but no castrati, as well as basses and very high tenors. And they're all there essentially to convey drama as well as to impress people with vocal technique. And this means that the singers that we've hired are people who will be far more attentive to language because there's an awful lot more recitative, dialogue, conversation, than there would be in Italian opera. And I'm going to be an absolute taskmaster about getting proper declamation from the singers. There's going to be a lot of insistence on the linguistic and declamatory aspects of this music. Of course that will be shared not only by the singers but by the instrumentalists, who can't form coherent syntax in terms of their own phrases and articulations without that sort of attention to the words.

CE: Hippolyte et Aricie was Rameau's very first opera, but he wrote it when he was 50 years old. Why did he wait that long?

WC: We don't know the answer to that. Except that we know Rameau thought of himself as a great theorist. He had a keen scientific mind, and from very early on he was writing theoretical material as much as he was writing music. He complained several times that he spent too much time writing music and not enough time writing treatises, about harmony especially. He came from the provinces, he was an organist in Dijon and came to Paris, where he started out writing theoretical treatises but also wrote harpsichord music, motets, cantatas, small-scale stuff, some of which is lost now. We're lucky that he wrote so much. He is France's foremost composer of the 18th century. But his first tragédie lyrique is Hippolyte, from 1733, which is unusual because he was already a middle-aged man.

CE: And after Hippolyte, between 1733–1753, Rameau went on to write some 30 operas?

WC: Not exactly. I think you can define opera for Rameau as essentially the large-scale tragédie lyrique, so by that definition he wrote very few, just five. But he wrote many other shorter or lighter stage works classified as Opéra-ballets, Pastorales héroïques, or Comédies lyriques.

CE: In your view, why is this the right time for Glyndebourne's first French Baroque opera? And why Hippolyte in particular?

Sarah Connolly as Phaedra. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian.

WC: Glyndebourne has been cutting-edge in terms of operatic experience in the 20th century, and one would expect that to continue in the 21st. And I think this is a very important step in that direction. The house is certainly really well suited to it acoustically and in terms of its size. And the Glyndebourne audience has been given a steady diet of very good 18th- century music in the past decades. Certainly the recent performances of Handel and Purcell have shown that the audience adores this stuff. And when we were finally able to go ahead and do a Rameau opera, I was pretty instrumental in suggesting that the choice should be Hippolyte, not so much because it's Rameau's first operatic work but because I think it is arguably the most dramatic and the most perfect of the tragédies lyriques Rameau ever wrote.

CE: Hippolyte is based upon Racine's great tragedy Phèdre. Then why does it have a 'happy' ending?

WC: Well, Phaedra herself doesn't end happily by any means at all. She's done in! At the end of the fourth act, after this brilliant divertissement of the hunt, the sea rolls over, the monster comes in and kills Hippolytus. Phaedra, full of remorse, realises that she created this terrible mess. She's destroyed her marriage, she's destroyed the love affair between her stepson Hippolytus and Aricia, all because of this extraordinary passion, the pure lust she had for him. Then she kills herself. The 'happy' ending is something that occurs after a relatively grisly bit with Theseus, who is about to jump off a cliff and he's stopped by Neptune. And then the gods Diana and Cupid decide that this has really gone too far. Hippolytus is brought back to life and reunited with Aricia and thereby the two of them end the opera by restoring the cosmic order. But then again, that's certainly not new in opera. And it doesn't take anything away from the inexorable rush toward bleak tragedy, which is what you feel in the first four acts.

CE: Why did French Baroque opera go out of fashion in the late 18th century?

WC: Well, everything goes in and out of fashion. That's been the story of Western music ever since it has been around. Even Bach, after his death in 1750, went out of fashion. Yes, there was often antiquarian musical interest. People sometimes listened to old music but often it was clothed in a different way than originally intended. Bach did Palestrina in Leipzig but he put instruments with it, and a continuo bass. I think Rameau went out of fashion because he'd been around a long time, and he was intellectually and socially considered a bit too refined, too elegant, too hard to understand, perhaps. There was a kind of aesthetic or philosophical desire on the part of many people in France to essentially rediscover simplicity.

CE: What prompted the revival of interest in French Baroque music in the late 19th century?

WC: I think there was simply a return to the antiquarian movement, the revival of interest in figures like Handel or Bach. It was big in all fields of art starting in the mid-19th century. Rameau got a somewhat later start, but by 1900 people were playing things that had really not been done for over 100 years. But it wasn't being done on Rameau's terms. His pieces were reorchestrated or 'improved' by people like Vincent d'Indy and others. So what people in 1910 or 1920 were hearing when they heard a piece by Rameau was not particularly 18th-century, nor was it certainly a sound that Rameau himself had ever heard. And I think the singing styles and playing styles didn't really do justice to his music. Finally in the end of the 20th century, this movement towards not historically correct but at least historically informed musical practice has brought composers like Lully or Rameau or Campra back to life. They've found their eloquence anew thanks to old instruments. We can't really talk about authenticity, obviously, but there's this desire to at least try to place this music in a context that would be closer to the intent of the composer. Certainly England has been good about this.

Of course it's a trademark of Glyndebourne to be able to spend enough time to digest this music and evolve a common aesthetic, and I think we should be very happy we've got the luxury. And we certainly have a fantastic team, one that's not only international, it's cosmopolitan. We've got some of the best exponents of French singing today and we've got English singers with whom I've been working now for 15 or 20 years. Sarah Connolly sang Les fêtes d'Hébé with me and Les Arts Florissants 15 years ago. We've made a very conscious effort to unite the best ingredients possible for the most convincing and the most eloquent performances we can muster.

This article is taken from the Glyndebourne 2013 Festival programme and is reproduced with kind permission.