George Frideric Handel | Le Concert d’Astrée (The Triumph of Time and Disillusion)/ 2025

the inevitable ravages of time

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Frideric Handel Le Concert d’Astrée (The Triumph of Time and Disillusion) / the performance I attended at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles was on March 27, 2025

 

The other evening, with my dear friends Wendy Walker and Carol Tavris, I had the opportunity to see a rarely performed oratorio which might truly be described as an allegorical opera except that when its composer George Frideric Handel lived in Rome, opera was banned, oratorios and cantatas replacing them. The work, Il Trionfo del tempo e del disinganno (The Triumph of Time and Disillusion) has only four characters, consisting of Beauty (Elsa Benoit), Pleasure (Julia Lezheva), Disilluson (Iestyn Davies), and Time (Petr Nekoranec).

       Beauty is what she / he always is, a figure in love with her/himself, looking into the mirror and making a pact with Pleasure that she/he will never abandon one another. Of course, we know given the presence of time, and the warnings by the wonderful counter tenor representing Delusion (Davies) that she is destined to a terrible end if she cannot discover the error of her ways.

        But Handel doesn’t speed through that transformation easily, providing us with almost two hours of incredibly glorious music as Beauty discovers the errors of her ways.

        Under the direction of Emmanuelle Haïm, who also performs on the harpsicord (along with the two full harpsichords, an organ, two recorders, a group of strings, a long-necked plucked lute [a theorbo], oboes and bassoons) this production was truly astoundingly beautiful as we made our way through so many stunning recitatives as these four allegorical figures play out all the challenges of Beauty having to come to terms with Time.

        As always, it’s a sad affair, having to abandon pleasure for the recognition of greater glory of a scared notion of love and protection. Beauty rightfully argues for her needed youthful pleasure, while the busy Disillusion tries to warn her away and ultimately forces her to see the truth of Time and its inevitable results.

     Handel so wonderfully pushes and pulls us through the troubles all of us must share as we come into the recognition that we will not always be what we pretend or even imagine for ourselves by helping us realize through exquisite arias such as “Lascia lap spina, cogli la rosa” (“Leave the Thorn, Take the Rose”) and others that Beauty will necessarily have to abandon her beloved Pleasure.

       Strangely, in this work, Beauty has little fun, while Disillusion has all the best musical moments, despite the fact that all singers were so lovely that you didn’t want them for a moment not to make their cases. This was the earliest and latest of Handel’s compositions, since he couldn’t let that music he had created at such an early age alone. He kept revising, recreating, reusing the lovely refrains he had created. Who wouldn’t?

       This was such an incredibly magnificent musical gathering that I can’t even imagine a more perfect night. Like Cinderella, I lost my shoe in the escape from the spinning wonderment, and became again an old man stumbling into my retreat.

 

Los Angeles, April 2, 2025

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (April 2025).