By LISA ROBINSON

One of the most important contributions of the historical performance movement has been the revival of Baroque opera, after more than two centuries of neglect. Following a period of re-acquaintance with the more familiar works of the period, presentations of lesser-known repertoire are now becoming more and more common. A case in point is Georg Friederich Handel's "pasticcio Oreste," first performed at London's Covent Garden Theatre on December 18, 1734, and not heard again until a 1990 performance in Karlsruhe, Germany. (As an indication of just how unfashionable Baroque opera was during the late 18th and 19th centuries, no Handel operas were performed anywhere between 1754 and 1920!)

A costume sketch by Tracy Dorman for the character Iphigenia in Handel's Oreste.

A decade after 1990, London audiences had the opportunity to hear the work in a performance by the English Bach Festival Opera at Covent Garden's Linbury Studio Theatre on January 23, 2000. Noting that the opera hadn't been performed in Britain in the 266 years since its premiere, a reviewer from The London Times concluded: "Now we know why. Despite a few amazing chromatic moments, this is far from vintage Handel: in fact, the old boy cobbled it together from his previous hits, while some hack librettist reduced Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris to a stock Italian-opera farrago."

New York opera fans will have the chance to come to their own conclusions about the work—and, given the unique talents and approaches of those participating in this production, may be in a better position to discover its merits than previous audiences—when the Juilliard Opera Center presents the U.S. premiere of Oreste on November 12, 14, and 16. Directed by Lillian Groag and conducted by Daniel Beckwith, a leading specialist in 17th- and 18th-century opera, the production will feature male soprano Michael Maniaci in the title role. This production will be the first time the new critical edition of Oreste, part of the Hallische Handel-Ausgabe, has been utilized for a performance in North America.

As indicated in Handel's title, the opera is a pasticcio—a term designating a work in which a new libretto is set to pre-existing music by one or more composers (in the most notorious examples, sometimes many more). In the case of Oreste, all of the music is by Handel, but the only newly composed segments were the recitatives and dances appended to each act. A sympathetic discussion of Oreste in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera's lengthy entry on the genre notes, however: "Since most Italian operas contained significant amounts of previously composed music," and "… since Handel was anyway a prodigious borrower and adapter of his own and others' music, there is only a fine line between this self-pastiche and, say, Rinaldo (1711), his first London opera and the supposed vanquisher of the despised polyglot pasticcios."

Like all of Handel's operas, Oreste adheres to the conventions of opera seria, the chief operatic form in the 17th and early 18th centuries, whose defining characteristics were its treatment of heroic or tragic subjects from mythological or historical sources and its musical focus on the da capo aria (in which the A section is recapitulated, with improvised embellishments by the singer, after a contrasting B section). The libretto was adapted by Handel from Giangualberto Barlocci's L'Oreste, after Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides. In some variants of the myth, Iphigenia dies when her father, Odysseus, offers her as a human sacrifice to the goddess Artemis (Diana) in the hope that she will provide favorable winds so the Greek fleet can sail to Troy. In Euripides' drama, Artemis replaces Iphigenia's body with a deer and brings her to Tauris to serve as her priestess. After his fleet is wrecked on the coast of Tauris, Iphigenia's brother Orestes is reunited with his sister, who saves him and his friend Pylades from death. Handel's librettist made Orestes (Oreste, in Italian) the focus of the story and added Oreste's wife, Hermione, to the cast of characters.

In a setting paying tribute to the story's Greek origin, Handel's Oreste was performed this past summer at the archeological site of ancient Corinth on July 25 and 27. The production will be staged at the Greek National Opera in January 2004 with the participation of the Camerata Stuttgart and will be recorded (for the first time) for MDG in Germany.

Juilliard Opera Center Handel’s Oreste Juilliard Theater Wednesday, Nov. 12–Sunday, Nov. 16 For time and ticket information, please see the calendar.

Director Lillian Groag acknowledges that Handel's adaptation of the story—which omits Artemis as a character and gives Toante, the King of Tauris, a major role—has a "clunky" plot, but notes that the popularity of his well-regarded Rodelinda has not been hampered by this supposed disadvantage. Her approach has been to treat the piece as if it were the "great masterpiece of the 18th century" and ask the singers to give their utmost, trusting that "it will add up to something very exciting." The concept of dramaturgy, notes Groag, was very different in Handel's time from what it is for today's audiences, who expect some degree of psychological progression. Therefore, she says, part of her work with the singers is to help them make their da capo arias, with their abundant repetition of text and music, as emotionally compelling as possible. What she describes as an "elegant, sleek, relatively empty" set will contribute to a "singer-oriented approach—but a very different one from the showy entertainment and focus on vocal pyrotechnics that Handel's audience would have experienced."

Lillian Groag brings a wealth of experience to the task at hand. Born in Argentina to an Italian mother and Austrian father, she came to the U.S. to study acting at Northwestern University. After spending several years as an actress, she went on to notable success as a playwright and theater director, and over the last several years has achieved an outstanding reputation as an opera director. She has productions to her credit at the New York City Opera, Virginia Opera, and Glimmerglass Opera (where she met Michael Maniaci, the lead in Juilliard's production, when she directed him in Handel's Agrippina in 2001). Groag's love of opera was instilled as a child growing up in a household where, she says, "we listened to opera all the time; it was our pop music." Her father was a musician who studied conducting at the Vienna Conservatory with Herbert von Karajan, but decided against a career in music. Groag herself is a skilled amateur pianist. Thoroughly conscientious in her work as an opera director, she even studies voice "to be sure I don't ask singers to do anything unreasonable." This production marks her first engagement to direct at Juilliard.

As those familiar with one of the more delicate aspects of Baroque opera might suspect, the role of Oreste was written for a castrato; such roles nowadays are normally sung by either a counter-tenor or a female soprano. The Juilliard Opera Center's production will be the first in which the title role has been sung by a male soprano, a rare voice type presumably closer in timbre to that of a castrato. Mr. Maniaci, whose voice never changed as an adolescent, has won rave reviews for his performances of Baroque and contemporary opera and was a Metropolitan Opera National Council Grand Finals winner in 2003. The cast of gifted young singers also includes Camille Zamora as Ermione, Amy Shoremount as Ifigenia, Javier Abreu as Pilade, Weston Hurt as Toante, and Christianne Rushton as Filotete.

Lisa Robinson is the writer for The Campaign for Juilliard.