by Anne E. Johnson
Published March 14, 2025
Thinking of Bach theatrically ‘takes it from concert logic and puts it into opera logic.’
Connecting The Four Seasons with the realities of climate change: ‘We have the opportunity to tell stories that matter.’
By definition, early music is old music. For many, that’s part of its appeal. But a growing number of creative artists hope to attract new fans by offering more than old music played on old instruments on a concert stage. Current projects involving Vivaldi and Bach exemplify this trend. Yet a weighty question hangs over these endeavors: Is this still early music?
Boston Lyric Opera’s (BLO) upcoming The Seasons, co-produced by AMOC and SCENE, is a new opera using music by Vivaldi with a libretto by playwright Sarah Ruhl and co-created by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who will also perform in the premiere production in Boston, running through March 16. The opera, directed by Zack Winokur, tells a story about a group of people affected by climate change. Between vocal selections, movements from The Four Seasons will support choreography by Pam Tanowitz.
Meanwhile, New York’s Music Before 1800, in association with Concert Theatre Works, is developing a semi-staged version of a reconstruction of Bach’s Markus Passion, which will be performed by the Sebastians and Chatham Baroque. Bach’s score is lost, although Picander’s libretto survives. The reconstruction was created by Malcolm Bruno using music from other Bach works; the part of the Evangelist will be spoken (not sung) in English by actor Joseph Marcell. MB1800’s artistic director, Bill Barclay, directs the premiere in Pittsburgh on April 11 followed by New York City on April 13. The Oregon Bach Festival, which commissioned this Markus Passion, performs with its own ensemble in Eugene, July 11, with additional West Coast shows in Portland on July 12 and Seattle on July 13.
Bruno’s main musical source is a Bach funeral tombeau called the Trauerode, which Barclay believes is more than a convenient pairing with Picander’s text: “Because the Trauerode would only have been used for a single occasion, and because Bach had to recycle everything given his writing schedule, it seems obvious that his Markus score was based on the Trauerode.”
Despite its title, The Seasons was not conceived around The Four Seasons. It started with Vivaldi arias “that no one ever hears,” Costanzo says. He researched the operas these aria came from, but “they were boring.” So he turned to playwright Ruhl. “We were looking for how to tell a new story first with those arias,” says Costanzo. “Then came the idea of The Four Seasons and the weather that is in the text for so many of the arias. We decided that we could use The Four Seasons for dance and also as a connective tissue.”
The arias include “Vedrò con mio diletto” from Il Giustino, and “Gelido in ogni vena,” from Farnace. In fact, The Seasons contains about 15 of these gems, plus “a trio, and an aria that we made into a duet, and three choruses,” says Costanzo. The choruses come from two Vivaldi sacred works: “Et misericoria” from the Magnificat and “Et in terra pax” from the Gloria.
As The Seasons’ music director Stephen Stubbs explains, “Et in terra pax” will be performed by children’s chorus. “It will start off in Latin, but then near the end we go over into English so it ends with an English text that the audience can directly understand.” They’ve taken a historical approach to voicing: SATB, but with “the tenor and bass parts up the octave. It makes for a special texture, and luckily we actually know that Vivaldi did that” when they were performed by girls at the Ospedale in Venice.
‘I look for opportunities to make early music more graspable, more appreciable, more conversational, more vernacular, more experiential’
So, why not just do a Vivaldi opera or one of the extant Bach Passions? For Barclay, accessibility is key. He loved that the Markus Evangelist speaks in English. “I look for opportunities to make early music more graspable, more appreciable, more conversational, more vernacular, more experiential.” MB1800 has a growing reputation for such programs, including Secret Byrd performed by Gesualdo Six or Letters to a Young Poet, a theatrical reading of letters between Rainer Marie Rilke and a poet fan, paired with Ravel’s String Quartet played on gut strings.
Barclay is convinced that adding stage elements will enhance the impact of this Passion. “The music is full of weighted tragedy. With the liturgy placed on the [Trauerode] music, it has this very strong vector that heightens the drama and makes it entirely about the inescapable fate of Jesus Christ.”
In Boston, there were two fundamental goals behind the creation of The Seasons. One is to share the arias. The other is a social purpose, as BLO Artistic Director Nina Yoshida Nelsen said during a presentation about the opera as part of New York’s Works & Progress (W&P) series: BLO is “seeing first-hand the realities of a changing climate” in the form of flooding in their Boston neighborhood. So it made sense to create an opera about climate change. “We have the opportunity to tell stories that matter,” Nelsen said. In the use of The Four Seasons movements out of order, Costanzo draws a parallel between climate reality and the opera’s story. “In the same way the weather has changed, we look at the ways in which The Four Seasons have become less ordered and less authentic in that sense.”
“I noticed that so many of the arias talked about the weather,” Ruhl said at the W&P presentation. So she let the original Italian text guide her. “I wanted to honor Vivaldi’s intention.” Collaborating with Costanzo helped her navigate vowel sounds, stresses, and other Baroque opera elements. “I didn’t even know the word ‘melisma’ when we began,” she admitted.
They focused on the Italian first, and ended up keeping some of it in the libretto if they couldn’t find the right English word or sound. “For Sarah, who doesn’t speak Italian, the English was like a close-up in a film where you could really get the detail of what was happening,” says Costanzo. “But the Italian was like a beautiful long shot where you got a sense of the entire atmosphere.”
During the week leading up to the W&P event, the score editing began in earnest as they finalized the English text for the recitatives, recalls Stubbs: “That required quite a lot of readjusting of music.” They tried to find Vivaldi music to set Ruhl’s recitative texts, but sometimes there wasn’t anything appropriate. “So I just strung it together with newly composed music,” says Stubbs. “In the end, the recitatives are a combination of Vivaldi, Grant Herreid, and me and Sarah.”
In some cases, they decided to use only a sections of Four Seasons movement. There were occasional transpositions needed as well. Still, Stubbs doesn’t anticipate any disorientation for pros who’ve played that Vivaldi classic over and over. “The Four Seasons is not so much a story line as it is a series of pictures. So taking one picture out of context doesn’t seem problematic to me.”
The only changes being made to the arias, Costanzo says, are those that Vivaldi would have understood, such as transposing to fit a singer’s register or deciding not to repeat a B section in da capo form. He and Ruhl went out of their way to keep original rhythmic details intact. “We are trying to preserve as much of the music as we can. I like this idea of really honoring the tradition and letting that speak, but also finding a way to reinvent that doesn’t betray it.”
Bach in Spoken English
In the Markus Passion, the biggest deviation from the familiar Bach Passions is the use of English spoken text for the Evangelist. Bruno’s version also uses “14 or 16 chorales, more than any other work by Bach,” says Jeffrey Grossman, founder of The Sebastians, who will be conducting the Markus. Bruno also added a few extra arias. “There would have been dramatic moments — let’s say, after the death of Jesus — where Bach would have put an aria that isn’t in the libretto,” says Grossman, believing Bruno hoped “to recreate some of the structure that we know Bach would have had.” These include “Erbarme dich” from Cantata 55 and “Es ist vollbracht” from Cantata 159.
The arias will be sung in German. “Whenever one of the apostles has a line of text,” says Barclay, “one of the singers will say that [in English]. That means that the audience changes gears between the music and the text. They go from reading along in their program, what they normally do at an early-music concert, to putting it down and watching faces and looking for clues and being complicit in the story. That antiphonal switching of focus is very different from a concert dynamic.”
Pascale Beaudin, a regular collaborator of Chatham Baroque and the soprano soloist for Markus, doesn’t expect the language switch to be a burden for listeners. “With Bach, we repeat the same words over and over again, so you just have to read two lines and then look up at what’s going on.” Nor does she think it will be distracting to add a theatrical element to a genre usually performed without it. A theatrical layer “can make the story much clearer and much more fluid,” she says, although “it’s important to leave some things to the imagination and to the interpretation of the audience.”
Thinking of Bach theatrically, says Barclay, “takes it from concert logic and puts it into opera logic.” Even the instrumentalists are involved: He’ll have a flutist, violinist, and oboist stand up for their memorized solos while connecting dramatically with a singer. This will engage the audience further, Barclay believes, “even though it’s not like they’re dancing, they’re not sword fighting, they’re not cracking jokes, but they are just two bodies interacting.”
These activities for instrumentalists “might help make us characters more than behind-the-scenes action,” says Grossman. “We’re trying to construct an emotional impact on an audience and create it solely through the music. The additional element of stage business can hopefully heighten the emotional impression.”
A lot more happens onstage in The Seasons. For one thing, there’s Pam Tamowitz’s choreography, a combination of modern, ballet, and various world traditions. Rhythmic intricacy was a major reason Costanzo wanted her: “She’s incredibly musical and uses every trill and every gesture,” he says, “but she does it in such an unexpected way that illuminates this very familiar music in a totally new way.”
The Seasons’ carbon-neutral sets will be made of water and dish soap, with huge bubble films, which performers can walk through without popping them. There are giant foam mountains, bubble fog, and helium-filled bubbles that look like snow.
Modern dance with Baroque music is a known concept. More surprising are The Seasons’ carbon-neutral sets. Winokur and designer Mimi Lien are collaborating with MIT Media Lab’s Jack Forman. “The whole set will be made of water and dish soap,” Winokur explained during W&P. There will be huge bubble films, which performers can walk through without popping them. There are giant foam mountains, bubble fog, and helium-filled bubbles that look like snow. Forman even designed a 3D-printed fan blade that can create bubbles silently.
That’s a lot. But is it too much? Barclay does not mince words about why he supports attempts to bring more theater to early music. “I’m bored most of the time in concert culture. I think a lot of people feel this way, and concert culture has gotten very safe.” He finds this applies particularly to early music: “It’s at a distance, and it can be very precious. It takes extra effort to grab the audience by the lapels and say, ‘This is important. This is our history,’ really releasing the fabrics and rugs off the speaker and allowing you to hear something fresh.”
For Costanzo, creating The Seasons started with him acknowledging that Vivaldi is fallible. “Sometimes Vivaldi as a dramatist isn’t operating in the same way as Handel that really connects to audiences today. Sometimes that simplicity or that circle of fifths that we love from Vivaldi is just so beautiful, so spine-tingling — but when it’s not, you get a long evening in which there’s a kind of numbness that develops.”
The danger is that bubble sets and language switches will distract from the music. “That’s always a small concern,” says Grossman about Markus, “but I don’t worry about that in this instance. We won’t become background music. We’re not even in a pit. I don’t think there will be any forgetting that these are human beings playing and singing this music.”
Stubbs has learned over his career that “it is possible to overload the audience with visual stimulus so that they literally stop hearing the music.” He has no worries about The Seasons, however. “I think it’s going to be one effect at a time that will be a pleasant companion to the music you’re hearing.”
‘I’m bored most of the time in concert culture,’ says Barclay. ‘I think a lot of people feel this way, and concert culture has gotten very safe. It’s at a distance, and it can be very precious.’
Barclay sees an economic reality behind the need for such innovation. “People aren’t leaving the house. In a post-COVID dynamic, the music itself unfortunately isn’t enough. How are you going to get them to come, particularly the young people, the non-musicians? We want people to say, ‘I would like to take a risk on that. I think I might understand that.’” He recognizes that theatrically enhanced productions are not for everyone. “Our audience are here at MB1800 to hear the best early-music musicians from around the world. So, in this sense, we do need to have the pure stuff. But it has to be balanced with things that are more approachable to the first-time audience member.”
“It’s not that people want less music,” agrees Grossman, “but that enriching the experience with other elements can be really meaningful and lead you to hear the music in a new way. I do think audiences are looking for ways to connect.”
But are these new works really early music? When bass Brandon Cedel sang an excerpt from The Seasons at W&P, the recitative had lines like “I used to be a weatherman, but I quit to work the land,” while the aria warned, “Fight for your life, your life on earth. Weather is warming, don’t fall asleep.” Not what you’d expect in Vivaldi, yet those modern sentiments were delivered using ornamentation and long melismas in a da capo form right out of the early 18th century.
‘We’re trying to recreate the spontaneity and the excitement that was in this music when it was written. That doesn’t always come from performing exactly the ink on the page.’
The fact that it’s not pure Vivaldi doesn’t matter to Stubbs, who is glad the audience will be “exposed to the absolutely fantastic art of Vivaldi as a vocal composer, which is almost unknown.” Costanzo even argues that this new work is authentic, in a way: “Authenticity is not only in the preservation of what we find in the score. Is it more pure to try and replicate something as a museum piece, or to try and give the audience today the feeling that Vivaldi was trying to evoke in that moment?”
“In some ways,” Grossman agrees, speaking of the Markus, “this is really in the spirit of early music, in that we’re trying to recreate the spontaneity and the excitement that was in this music when it was written. That doesn’t always come from performing exactly the ink on the page.” He categorizes the reconstructed Passion as “definitely early music. It’s historically informed. It’s historically inspired, which is maybe more important. Every note that you hear is Bach.”
For Costanzo, the focus is on the artist’s responsibility: “Our job is to be really creative and great interpreters. I think that when we get stilted and lose that sense of interpretation, the music doesn’t come alive. Interpretation existed in the world premiere of these works and it still exists today. That’s not trying to recreate anything; that’s trying to create something new.”
He hopes to enable such creations through his organization, SCENE, an opera thinktank that considers “how to draw new pathways between artists, audiences, funders, and institutions.” SCENE invested over $100,000 in the development of The Seasons.
Barclay likewise describes MB1800 as “a pillar, and we have to help the whole ecosystem.” He considers it his duty to ask, “How are you going to leave the ecosystem better than it was before?”
Perhaps the answer lies in reconsidering the past.
Anne E. Johnson is EMA Book Editor and frequent contributor to Classical Voice North America. She teaches music theory, ear training, and composition geared toward Irish trad musicians at the Irish Arts Center in New York and on her website, IrishMusicTeacher.com. For EMA, she recently wrote about celebrations for Palestrina’s 500th.
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