In recent years, the Juilliard Opera Workshop has presented under-explored repertory in simple yet affecting productions that feature undergraduates in Juilliard's Department of Vocal Arts. The Juilliard Opera Workshop (J.O.W.) enhances the education of undergraduate singers by offering vocal students a rare opportunity to develop and perform operatic roles in their entirety, complete with staging and acting. With recent productions of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and Eccles's Semele, J.O.W. is quietly emerging as a vital venue for intriguing performances of Baroque music at The Juilliard School.

Costume designer Kim Sorensen's sketches for Phillis and Daphne in The Shepherd's Lottery.

This month, under the musical direction of Kenneth Merrill and the stage direction of Ed Berkeley, J.O.W. presents "Love Times Three," a trio of English masques that spans 68 years of the English Baroque. The three one-act works, performed together in a single evening, are Venus and Adonis (1683) by John Blow; The Judgement of Paris (1701) by John Eccles; and William Boyce's The Shepherd's Lottery (1751). The production features 20 undergraduate vocal arts students; Juilliard's resident string quartet, the Avalon Quartet, joins Ken Merrill (who conducts from the harpsichord) to provide vibrant instrumental accompaniment.

Though called masques or "afterpieces" in their own time, Venus and Adonis, The Judgement of Paris, and The Shepherd's Lottery are far from traditional, courtly English masques that mixed speech, singing, and dancing. Each work is a fully formed, completely sung musical drama with thoughtfully drawn characters, inventive vocal melodies, and a mix of lighthearted and serious situations all touching, in one way or another, on the subject of love. Through-composed in a virtually continuous, measured arioso and perhaps the most originally conceived opera in J.O.W.'s trio, Blow's Venus and Adonis portrays the shattering of Venus's love for Adonis after the hero is fatally gored by a wild boar. In Eccles's The Judgement of Paris, also based upon mythology, three goddesses compete in a beauty contest, judged by the shepherd Paris, who ultimately picks the goddess offering him the love of Helen of Sparta. The Shepherd's Lottery, by William Boyce, develops a ridiculous Arcadian ritual of shepherds drawing lots to pick their future wives on May Day. In J.O.W.'s production, the three operas are distinguished visually by means of costumes and sets, with Venus and Adonis set in ancient Greece, The Judgement of Paris transferred to modern dress, and The Shepherd's Lottery employing a country Baroque look.

Love and Fate in Venus and Adonis

A prolific composer of church music for Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal, John Blow (1649-1708) was persuaded to compose Venus and Adonis for private performance in the court of King Charles II in 1683. The masque, Blow's only fully sung drama, remains the earliest surviving English opera and is widely believed to have served as a model for Dido and Aeneas, written by Blow's pupil and friend, Henry Purcell. Organized in a prologue and three brief acts—each separated by evocative dances—the work calls for six solo voices and chorus. The anonymous libretto draws its story from Ovid's Metamorphoses, and in its poetry draws parallels between the mortal dangers of hunting and the emotional dangers of love.

Love Times Three Studio 305 Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Feb. 24, 26, and 28, 7 p.m. An extremely limited number of free tickets will be available only to Juilliard students, faculty, and staff beginning Monday, Feb. 10, in the Vocal Arts Department, Room 403.

Blow's Venus and Adonis presents with clarity and little excess, especially because the composer's setting of the text displays a near total absence of arias. After an overture in French style, the prologue comically explores the tensions between sexual desire and faithful love. Cupid (Venus's son) strikes a familiar pose as arbiter of human love for an audience of shepherds and shepherdesses, and eventually advises the youths to give in to their lustful desires. Act 1 begins with Venus (the goddess of love) and Adonis (a youth of remarkable beauty) about to make love. Their pleasure is interrupted by Adonis's huntsmen, who suddenly draw him away from Venus with the promise of fame in the hunt of a wild boar. While Adonis perilously hunts his prey, Venus and Cupid provide comic relief in Act 2, when mother instructs son in the art of love. When Venus asks Cupid how to make her lover Adonis more faithful, Cupid advises her to scorn him. Act 3 is fully tragic, as it opens with Adonis having just been mortally wounded by the boar. Adonis blames his death on Fate, and Venus engages little cupids to begin a solemn procession. Her own love suddenly taken away, as if also by Fate, Venus vows to mourn his death until she is "fall'n into as cold a sleep."

The rapid changes of emotion in Venus and Adonis—a scene of tragedy on the heels of a comic episode—embody a common Baroque aesthetic of drastic contrast. The same can be said of Blow's musical setting. His recitative style employs pungent harmonic juxtapositions and spontaneous passages of florid melodies to emphasize individual words or feelings in the poetry. This style obviates the need for lengthy exposition of character, exemplified by our first encounter with Venus and Adonis in Act 1. In that scene, simple repetitions of lovers' names over pleasing harmonic patterns make the couples' intense passions and desires immediately clear. Blow's gift for text setting is evidenced also in the several contrapuntal choruses interspersed throughout the opera. The most inspired of these is the g-minor "Mourn for thy servant," the opera's final tragic chorus. The chorus's delicately exposed major harmonies, especially on the word "weep," and artfully placed melodic suspensions seem to evoke the sun glinting through the forest in the forsaken grove in which the tragedy unfolds.

Love and Persuasion in The Judgement of Paris

The organizers of a 1701 London composition contest from which John Eccles's The Judgement of Paris was born were an ironic bunch. Written by William Congreve, the libretto chosen for the contest takes as its subject a contest from mythology: that of Paris and the golden apple. Visited by Mercury, messenger of the gods, the shepherd Paris is given the unenviable task of determining the most beautiful among three goddesses—Juno (queen of all gods), Pallas Athene (goddess of war), and Venus (goddess of love)—and is to award a golden apple as the prize. One after another, each goddess makes her case to Paris: Juno offers the shepherd the opportunity to be ruler of all Asia; Pallas Athene offers victory in all future combats; Venus promises him the love of Helen of Sparta, the essence of mortal beauty. Persuaded by the assurance of future love, Paris chooses Venus as the prizewinner.

Already house composer at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theater, John Eccles (1668-1735) sharpened his own powers of musical persuasion in a quest to win the contest for which the prize was not a golden apple but 100 guineas. No expense was spared for the contest: the submissions by Eccles and his three competitors—Daniel Purcell (brother of Henry Purcell), Gottfried Finger, and John Weldon—were given public performances at the Dorset Garden Theater prior to being voted upon by the theater's subscribers. The most inexperienced composer, John Weldon, unexpectedly won, and Eccles, Purcell, and Finger took successively lower prizes. Eccles would later collaborate with Congreve on his Semele.

Written some 18 years after Blow's Venus and Adonis, John Eccles's The Judgement of Paris makes audible the advancements in orchestral writing, likely due to musical influences from the continent. His setting of Congreve's libretto effectively addresses the critical dramatic issue of the opera: giving three formidable goddesses and their shepherd-judge musical individuality in a short span of time. Eccles steps up to this task through the orchestra. Paris's first glance of the goddesses manifests in a ravishing lament-like piece that suggests, in its chromatically descending bass-line, the shepherd melting as the beautiful goddesses gaze upon him. Each goddess makes her persuasive statements in the course of two arias in contrasting keys, styles, and colors. Obbligato violin and flute distinguish Juno and Venus respectively, while trumpet-like figures suggest Pallas's reign over martial affairs. In the end, even the promise of love, rather than love itself, affects the human heart, and this is celebrated at the end with a grand chorus of Venus's followers.

Love and Chance in The Shepherd's Lottery

Although William Boyce (1711-1779) wrote in the gamut of 18th-century musical genres and for both the public theater and the court, he remains best known for a set of elegant three-movement symphonies that are suggestive of an early Classic style. All but one of these symphonies, incidentally, were originally overtures to odes or dramatic works. Boyce's theatrical music included only four fully sung works—the opera Peleus and Thetis (1740); the serenata Solomon (1742); and two masque-like "musical entertainments," The Chaplet (1749) and The Shepherd's Lottery (1751)—but his skills in vocal writing are evident also in numerous solo songs, many for performances in spoken plays, and extravagant odes written purposefully in his service as composer to the Chapel Royal.

The Shepherd's Lottery was conceived as an "afterpiece" to a 1751 production of The Revenge, a five-act tragedy by Edward Young, at the Drury Lane Theater. The setting of a libretto by Moses Mendez, a stockbroker hoping to ascend among London's literati, The Shepherd's Lottery develops the story of youthful Arcadian shepherds who choose their wives by lot on May Day. Thyrsis and Phillis love each other, but as May Day approaches, their anxiety increases out of fear that their lots will not lead to their marriage. The lovers share their fears with others, but find nobody of a like mind: Daphne simply likes to tease her suitors, then walk away, and Colin loves "those who yield the soonest." On May Day, Phillis draws her lot to find that Venus has smiled upon her and has given her Thyrsis as her husband.

Boyce's prowess in songwriting is clear from the overall musical texture of The Shepherd's Lottery, where orchestral strophic songs dominate among very brief pockets of sometimes concerted recitative. Daphne's character, drawn in the poetry with witty and modern language, emerges as the most inviting to modern ears. Her jaunty aria, "As soon hope for peace," lays out the battle of the sexes, 18th-century style, amidst a virtuosic and wordy melody, with orchestration that intelligently exposes the punch line of each of her verses. Presented with an elegantly adorned melody, Phillis's double aria, "Goddess of the dimpling smile," is special among the arias of The Shepherd's Lottery, for the opera's vital action—the drawing of lots—takes place while the aria is sung, rather than during recitative. As Phillis draws her lot from the urn, the music evokes the sight of Venus, adorned with purple and gold, approaching in her cart. The presence and suggestion of Venus, goddess of love, in each of the three operas in J.O.W.'s "Love Times Three" will invite stimulating comparisons for all who are able to attend the performances.

Christopher Mossey is associate director of the Campaign for Juilliard and holds a Ph.D. in musicology. His edition of Francesco Cavalli's Doriclea (1645) is forthcoming from A-R Editions.