Maurice Greene (1696-1755)
Jephtha, oratorio (1737) transcribed and edited by Peter Lynan, 1996
Andrew Staples (tenor) – Jephtha
Mary Bevan (soprano) – Jephtha’s Daughter
Michael Mofidian (bass) – First Elder of Gilead
Jeremy Budd (tenor) – Second Elder of Gilead
Jessica Cale (soprano) soloist in duet ‘Awake each joyful Strain’
Early Opera Company/Christian Curnyn
rec. 2024, Church of St Augustine, Kilburn, London
Libretto included
Chandos CHSA0408 SACD [2 Discs: 98]
By the time that the English Oratorio was conceived, in the 1730s, Maurice Greene was ready to embrace the new form. He was organist at St Paul’s Cathedral, organist and composer to the Chapel Royal and in 1735, two years before he began work on his second oratorio, Jephtha, he was appointed Master of the King’s Music and was therefore England’s leading native-born musician. Even those of us who hold a torch for John Stanley have to acknowledge that Greene, sixteen years older than Stanley, conceived oratorios much earlier.
His earlier work in the form, The Song of Deborah and Barak, is called in the notes by Peter Lynan – who transcribed and edited Jephtha – ‘a retrospective narrative rather than a true drama’ whereas Jephtha is a pioneering work in the oratorio form by an English composer, one that embraces the potential for some psychological and dramatic depth. The librettist was clergyman and dramatist John Hoadly, who stuck closely to the Book of Judges, chapter 11. It would however be unfair to contrast it with Handel’s later work of the same name, which has a full ‘cast’, is in three acts, conceives a happy ending for Jephtha’s daughter, and operates at altogether a more sophisticated and penetrating level of musical insight. Greene’s more compact work is in two parts and is largely static though it contains much of value and interest. After its initial performance at a tavern, in which form the chorus must have been smaller than the 16-strong one on this performance, it was revised and soon performed again, but then unheard until 1997 when the BBC broadcast it to mark the 300th anniversary of Greene’s birth. Over a decade ago, Bampton Classical Opera produced it in Oxford in Lynan’s edition but this Chandos SACD is its first recording. I listened on a conventional CD set-up.
The Overture is grave and serious, with some tight double-dotting from the crisp players of the Early Opera Company, who play throughout with incisive sympathy and plenty of colour. The First Part is divided into two scenes and concerns the sycophancy of the sons of Gilead – represented by the two Elders, bass Michael Mofidian and tenor Jeremy Budd, who have turned away from God – toward the banished but now returned Jephtha, a role taken by Andrew Staples, whom they attempt to cajole to fight for them. Jephtha is gradually won over by their penitence. Greene responds to all this with a perceptive calibration of emotional responses within a static tableau format. He contrasts the gloomy self-pity of the Elders of Gilead with Jephtha’s rather Handelian da capo aria vivace full of contempt for them. Later his emollient ‘Pity soothing melts the heart’ marks the psychological breaking point between scorn and acceptance. His final aria in Part 1 is one in which he makes his vainglorious and ultimately fatal boast that he will sacrifice the first virgin he sees on his return from war. The rather charming, lilting nature of the aria is at odds with the destructive nature of the text and it’s not the first time in this oratorio, nor the last, when Greene’s capacity for ironic detachment is apparent.
If Part 1 establishes the story, Part 2 amplifies, heightens and deepens its consequences and allows for a more expansive exploration of the psychologies involved. The vapid stupidity of Jephtha’s strutting divisions in his victorious aria ‘O God, we own Thy mighty hand’ after his routing of the Ammonites, foreshadows his meeting his own daughter, sung by Mary Bevan. She first appears singing a pastoral aria and duetting with chorus member Jessica Cale accompanied by the sixteen-strong chorus. The tremors in her aria ‘Ah! My foreboding Fears’ are accompanied by a caesura in the vocal line, a moment of heart-stopping realisation. Later she sings melismas in her aria ‘If I thy grief’ which intensify the horror for the listener but Greene remains largely equable. Mary Bevan sings these arias with lucid, loving and hopeless honesty and it’s hardly coincidence that the two longest arias in the oratorio, by far, are sung by her, whose exchanges with Jephtha take up much of Part 2. Jephtha vacillates between love and anguish, singing an aria (‘O Thou most Dear’) which is ballad-like in its line, whilst his daughter exemplifies a kind of genteel pathos in her recitative exchanges with him. These exchanges offer the heart of the work and some of the deepest utterances come not in arias but in recitatives, such as in the long accompanied one that ends in her lines’ That must not be’ where she accepts her fate. Here time stops and the final duet between the two then modifies the terror of her impending death – postponed for a little while, allowing her to ‘let me awhile defer my Fate – toward acceptance of duty. The final Grand Chorus offers a measured, reflective rather downbeat ending, refusing all easy consolation of uplift and fugal interplay.
There are numerous instrumental felicities. The theorbo (Sergio Bucheli) is deftly employed – listen to it in Jephtha’s recitative ‘Thought I your vow’ – and the and oboes (and elsewhere recorders) of Nicola Barbagli and Sarah Humphrys thread eloquently through the orchestral texture in the chorus ‘Thou, universal Lord’. The harpsichord’s fillip (Tom Foster) in introducing Jeptha’s recitative ‘No more, with Joy I Undertake your Cause’ emphasises his steadfast determination. The Handel-lite concluding chorus of Part 1 is suitably brassy. The chamber organ played by Oliver John Ruthven is employed adeptly and the accompanying instrumentalists, notably cellist Andrew Skidmore – I assume it’s him and not Lucia Capallaro – offer sensitive shaping in their roles.
Mofidian and Budd make for a fine contrasting pair, the former resonant of voice and rounded, the latter exuding a high tenor not inappropriate for the Second Elder’s equally rather wheedling role. Staples is the work’s titular lead, cavalier, bombastic and then increasingly stricken, starting with a contemptuous nasality in Part 1 that gradually modifies into a full realisation of his folly. Mary Bevan has sung Greene before. Back in 2019 she sang his La libertà, a brief aria di camera, on an album of Baroque music on Signum with Lucy Crowe, with the London Early Opera conducted by Bridget Cunningham. She is the oratorio’s still point and works within Greene’s relatively constrained expressive compass to express the full terrain of her dilemma. It’s a very moving characterisation. Christian Curnyn directs the excellent Early Opera Company with his typically expert sense of pacing. He’s never too fast, unlike some of his ilk, preferring to give full measure to each aria, and ensuring that recitatives sound naturally weighted and comprehensible. The music flows naturally and breathes where necessary, expanding as the work deepens.
The recording in the Church of St Augustine, Kilburn, London has been extremely well judged. There’s a full libretto and Lynan’s admirable notes to consider. Greene’s Jephtha is no revived masterpiece but it is a work of convincing structure and psychology. It has a number of attractive arias and choruses as well as accompanied recitatives that offer colour and candour alike. Above all, it is a complete work, one that opens in Part 1 with a fretful chorus, proceeds through bartering arias to a triumphant final chorus, resumes in Part 2 with the initial glamour of victory immediately dispelled. It’s the ensuing to-ing and fro-ing between father and daughter that is the focus of the remainder of the work, one that repays listening with the generosity of its writing, the relatively wide-ranging nature of its material – from ballad to imperial chorus – and the honesty and directness of its consoling vision.
Jonathan Woolf
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