From Venetian artist Tintoretto’s 16-century painting “Esther Before Ahasuerus” to filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille’s 20th century epic “The Ten Commandments,” the Hebrew Bible has long inspired Western culture.
So, too, it has been with operas and oratorios since the start of the Baroque era in the 1600s. Many have touched on characters and stories familiar to people, Jewish or not, who have a passing acquaintance with the Bible.
That is why Rachel Biale, executive director of the Jewish adult education institute New Lehrhaus in Berkeley, has assembled a powerhouse faculty for a new course, “From the Page to the Stage: The Bible in Text and Opera.”
Nicholas McGegan, a conductor and early music expert, Kip Cranna, the San Francisco Opera dramaturg emeritus, and Robert Alter and Ron Hendel, longtime academics at UC Berkeley, will co-teach an eight-session class online, starting Jan. 14. New Lehrhaus is offering the class in partnership with Berkeley’s Cantata Collective.
Through the years, said Biale, there has been no dearth of Bible study and opera appreciation courses. So, she thought “let’s do something creative” and combine the two.
With Alter, a Hebrew and comparative literature scholar, and Hendel, a Hebrew Bible and Jewish studies professor, students will do close readings of passages pertaining to King Saul, King David, Jonathan, Esther, Jephtha and Samson and Delilah. They’ll also learn about the historic and cultural influences of the Biblical narratives.
Under McGegan’s and Cranna’s musical expertise, the class will listen to and watch musical productions about these Biblical characters and learn why so many composers referenced them in their works. Those composers include George Frideric Handel, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Camille Saint-Saëns and American-born modernist Hugo Weisgall, whose “Esther: An Opera” was originally commissioned by the San Francisco Opera.
Handel, said McGegan, is one of the luminaries of Bible-based musical compositions. Born in Germany, he spent most of his adult working life in London, where, under the patronage of Kings George I and II, he composed no fewer than 15 oratorios, or large-scale musical works without costumes, scenery or staging. Most of them focused on Biblical characters, including Samson, Esther, Jephtha, Solomon, Deborah and Judah Maccabee.
The interest in this material among the English in the 18th century was tied to their empire-building mode, Cranna said.
“They identified themselves with the children of Israel,” Cranna said. They saw “themselves destined to be blessed by God” in their efforts to extend their sphere of influence around the world.
Cranna pointed to Deborah Rooke’s 2012 book “Handel’s Israelite Oratorio Libretti: Sacred Drama and Biblical Exegesis.” Rooke wrote, “To its people, Britain was the Israel of its day, preserving the true faith by God’s help against a bevy of infidels, just as the biblical Israelites had been chosen by God to preserve the true faith against all those who opposed them, from the Philistines to the Babylonians.”
This did not mean, Cranna and McGegan noted, that Handel, his contemporaries or later composers who wrote Bible-based operas and oratories remained true to the original text. They often borrowed from other sources, such as Greek mythology, as Handel did in his “Jephtha” oratorio, which in some ways mirrors the story of Iphigenia and Agamemnon.
Because 18th-century audiences wanted “happy endings,” composers often deviated from Biblical accounts. Jephtha’s daughter in Handel’s opera, for instance, does not die, as she does in the Bible. Rather, she is consigned to eternal virginity.
Perhaps modern audiences would not consider this a “happy ending,” but it met the demands of the audiences for whom it was originally written, McGegan said.
Trading off with McGegan and Cranna on alternate weeks, Alter and Hendel will tackle the multiple meanings of the age-old Biblical tales. Their interpretations will extend beyond the literal, touching on issues of gender, sexual orientation, power, religious identity, parent-child relations and class.
For instance, they will explore what is meant by David’s proclamation of love for Jonathan in the Book of Samuel when he says: “My love for you surpasses the love of women?” Beyond its suggestion of homoerotic love, said Hendel, the question is political in nature, as it addresses matters of inheritance and succession. King Saul was Jonathan’s father. And who followed as monarch of ancient Israel upon Saul’s death? None other than Jonathan’s beloved, David.
The nature of human relations is fraught, and the Hebrew Bible is chock full of examples.
“There is a sophisticated articulation of the [Samson] story,” said Alter, in which “his weakness for women … leads him to danger and destruction.” Added Hendel, “Samson keeps falling for these Philistine [women]. I don’t think that Freud wrote about it, but he’d have had a heyday.”
So, too, is the Jephtha story replete with psychological ramifications. Not as well known as some of the other Biblical characters, Jephtha was the “son of a prostitute” who was viewed by his half-brothers as a “third-class citizen,” Alter said.
These half-brothers “drove him out of the house with the help of the community. [Jephtha] forms his own militia,” Alter said. Later on, some of the elders who helped push him out “implore him to help them against the Ammonites,” political and religious foes of the ancient Hebrews.
“He is successful on the battlefield and sacrifices his only daughter” as he’d promised to do if he prevailed, Alter said. “He uses the term ‘turning back’ or ‘coming back’ repeatedly when he says, ‘I made this solemn vow to the Lord, and I can’t take it back.’ It is a reversal of the Abraham and Isaac story” in which the father spares his son at the very last second.