Then I'm with you in the Naughty Corner - a super work.  Cleaned of the patina of the Victorian moralising you mention it reacquires the timeless relevance of the Faust legend.  The rest of Gounod's output has been "damned by association" and also needs revisiting... although I fear many of them are "too far gone" to be restored to the repertoire any time soon - ROMEO ET JULIETTE gets occasional outings in France.  CINQ-MARS has some fabulous music in it, and the story of the girl sold unwillingly into an arranged marriage to an old rich man is far from irrelevant.  (We go back here to the discussion we had about Opera Lyrique in the opera section a few months back.  Massenet's ESCLARMONDE is another warhorse).


That one remains stuck in the warhorse category for me   It's been there since Handel's own day, and the accretion of lore and whimsy attached to it seems unremovable now - it's become a C19th oratorio by proxy.  Part of the problem is Jennens's pious tub-thumping - rather like a certain kind of tv-evangelist of our own times, he realised the financial possibilities and invincible moral position of public god-bothering - one dare say nothing ill against this turgid work.  (Handel himself realised Jennen's libretto was tedious and prolix,  and spiked large portions of it - greatly to Jennens's ire).   I quoted Wagner on exactly this subject recently, and I'm fully with Der Meister on this theme.

Warhorses existed in both Handel's and Mozart's time.  Most opera soloists had their portfolio of warhorse arias, which they would expect to be allowed to insert into any other opera,  regardless of the suitability or otherwise.  Handel's legendary clash with Cuzzoni - the window-dangling threat, in which he told her "I know you are a she-devil, but I am BEELZEBUB, Chief of Devils!" - arose from exactly this...  not only did she refuse to sing Falsa Imagine in OTTONE, but she intended to replace it with a warhorse aria of Porpora's already in her repertoire.  Handel had continuous warhorse problems with OTTONE - when Farinelli appeared in the opera (a 1734 production staged by the rival "Nobility Opera", and the only time he ever sang a Handel role) - he refused to sing Handel's arias for Adalberto, and inserted favourites of his own instead.

When Sobeschanskaya was recruited to dance Odette in the 1877 newly-mounted revival of Tchaikovsky's ill-fated SWAN LAKE (a box-office flop twice-over, and officially withdrawn from repertoire),  she insisted that she would not dance Tchaikovsky's pas de deux, but would insert a "warhorse" composed especially for her by Minkus.  (She - and others - insisted that Tchaikovsky didn't understand ballet and that his music was the reason behind the ballet's failure).  The livid Tchaikovsky refused, saying that he would compose an alternative with the same musical structure and bar-lengths,  so that his ballerina wouldn't be inconvenienced by it.  In fact he simply reharmonised Minkus's existing melody,  but it remains in the score.  Is SWAN LAKE itself a warhorse?  Ballet dancers certainly believe so....  

To sort of elaborate on my earlier post, when does "core repertory" become a warhorse ? Is Beethoven 5 ( or any of the symphonies ) a warhorse ? Maybe the violinist's choice of Sibelius or Tchaikovsky may not elicit groans but what about Mendelssohn or Bruch ?

One other thing struck me about 'warhorse' status - whilst a piece may have 'warhorse' status for some in the audience and the orchestra, it's worth bearing in mind that there will be some in the orchestra for whom this is their first experience performing it. The smile on his face, and the eagerness with which he attacked his part, made me think the timpanist hadn't performed Scheherazade too many times before!

(Digression:

I have only  heard Messiah once live and I do not have a recording.  Probably I'll hear it one day and see how good it is, but for the moment I'd rather explore the other oratorios with far more drama, sensuality and wit.  It is quite sweet, as I remember.

However I must defend Jennens' libretto against misrepresenatation, viz.


Please cite one example from the libretto to substantiate that, reiner.

Jennens wrote none of the words, he merely assembled quotations from the Bible, and did a pretty subtle job of it, as far as I can tell.  There is no clear narrative: it is only alluded to through the text, a rather Modernist way of going about things, I would have thought.  The characteristic evangelical appeal to personal commitment is not explicit, although the work was massively popular with the evangelically inclined.

For tummy-turning, toe-curling, masochistic, evangelical piety Chrysander's words for Bach's Matthew Passion, really take the törtchen.)

I stand corrected.  Chrysander was Handel's editor, wasn't he?  Mind you, I have never seen a decent English translation of the arias - Victorian rhyming versions are the only ones I have seen.  But my German is enough to tell me that the subject matter is the same.  Messiah never goes in for that What a Friend We Have in Jesus sort of stuff.

"I know that my Redeemer liveth"?

The only English translation of the Matthew Passion I know, maybe the same as yours, is all over the place ("Blute nur" becomes "Break in grief" for example IIRC). It's fairly mild compared with some of the other Passion texts circulating in Germany in the mid-18th century, which are frequently quite gruesome. While personally I don't think Messiah is fit to wheel the tea-trolley for Bach's piece (how TOP is that?!?) I don't have a problem with its text. I don't know that anyone would claim it's Handel's strongest oratorio musically, and some of it ("The trumpet shall sound" for example) I find very worthy and tedious, but the libretto seems well-constructed to me.

The more I think about it the more I think you're being unfair about Bach's libretto. The arias all stress the inner personal significance of the events of the narrative, because, let's face it, the Matthew Passion is neither a choral piece or a big public statement like Messiah but an intimate enactment which takes its place in a "local" tradition even while transcending it.

I'm looking forward to Belshazzar on Saturday.

An old general favourite of which I do not have a recording, and which I had not heard for years is Don Giovanni.  I saw it this spring at the Hackney Empire and  I was deeply impressed.

Mind you, I suppose Mozart, like Bach, never gets warhorse status as there is always something to interest musicians, however many times it is played on Classic FM.

I listened to Beethoven 5 the other day for the first time in ages, and thought how good it was.  And having fallen out of love with Metamorphosen, I was hooked again a couple of Sundays back when I heard it on Burnside's programme.

I never seem to tire of Vltava from Ma Vlast.  Same goes for L'Apres Midi.  Are these warhorses in anyone's view?

Not sure any re-enamourment was due to performance - more likely because my ears had had a long rest and were encountering an old friend again.

Tommo