Christopher and Geoffrey in the Lions' Den

A fascinating rediscovery sees the light of day - Francesco Scarlatti's dramatic oratorio Daniele, combining the Biblical stories of Daniel in the Lions' Den and Bel and the Dragon, is full of fire and fury, given an energising performance by Armonico Consort under their founder and artistic director Christopher Monks.

The music itself is the result of diligent editing and preparation by Geoffrey Webber (recently appointed Armonico's associate artistic director), whose musicological efforts have restored Scarlatti's oratorio to performability. I spoke to both Christopher and Geoffrey about what makes this music so unique, how such a striking work was lost (and then found), and what their next plans are...

How did you first end up working together on these Scarlatti restoration projects?

CM: Ever since I started Armonico (which is twenty-five years ago now!), we've been in touch - I studied with Geoffrey at university and we have been in contact since then. And after eight years or so we had the idea to do the first Supersize Polyphony concert.

Geoffrey and I have worked together ever since I left Caius. Armonico recorded the Francesco Scarlatti Dixit Dominus when we were still an amateur/student choir, and I'd always wanted to re-record it and polish it up a bit. And that's what we did in 2022 - but it needed new editions, because the original edition we used had so many inaccuracies. So the timing worked out - everyone had time on their hands due to COVID - and Geoffrey decided we should do it.

GW: It's been very nice staying in touch with Chris and working on these sorts of projects. From my perspective it gave some really good opportunities for the students in the college choir to do concerts of interesting music, work alongside professional singers and so on. It was very enjoyable. At that stage I was full-time at the university, so I didn't have much time to do editions and extra things for Armonico, but since I left Caius I've been able to do more. And that's why I've been able to do the work on the Scarlatti.

How did you come across this work? I think I’m right in thinking it was hiding in a corner of the Fitzwilliam Museum - how did you bring it back to light?

GW: Well, you can't just walk into these places and nose around the shelves! There has to be some sort of link, some sort of mention. And The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians had a worklist including everything that is so far known of Scarlatti's work, and Il Daniele is listed there, but nobody has looked into it or written about it. There's quite a lot of scholarship on Italian Baroque music, as you'd expect. And I think probably because there's so much more music by Alessandro Scarlatti (not all of which is available in modern editions either!), Francesco has been a little forgotten.

Also because of the fact that it's mostly in the UK, because he came over and worked here (like Geminiani and others). The Italian specialists have naturally been focusing on what's in Italy, because that's where most of Scarlatti's stuff is, but these works have been neglected by Italian scholarship because it's been beyond their shores.

What led to Daniele being forgotten about for so long? Were works like this conceived as being relatively short-lived or even ‘disposable’, not meant to be revived?

GW: There's just so much Italian Baroque music out there that the sheer quantity is too much. Also because in and of itself it's not a new genre - the Mass, the Dixit Dominus, the oratorio, there are loads of these out there, and it really needs someone to take the initiative of asking who a given individual really was and what was interesting about them specifically. Then you have the incentive to go on and find out more about the music. And one reason there have been relatively few investigations into Francesco is that he spent so much of his life here in the UK.

People will probably have heard of Domenico Scarlatti, and perhaps of Alessandro; what is Francesco’s music like in comparison?

CM: In terms of the choral writing I don't think there's any comparison. The cantatas I don't know so well yet - Geoffrey may talk about them in a bit - but the chorus work is not only different from the other Scarlattis but also different from pretty much every other Baroque composer. The Daniele itself has very little chorus writing, but the Mass and the Dixit Dominus are totally extraordinary. They have this Venetian-style polychoral arrangement of four choirs around the room, and they have those kinds of antiphonal conversations, but it's much more polyphonic than the Venetian repertoire. And in terms of its actual theatrical drama, it's not comparable.

We paired Daniele with the Dixit Dominus when we did it at the Wigmore Hall, and the way the chorus writing works in that feels more like that of the Mass. These quartets of, say, four sopranos or four altos - it's odd, and I don't know of any other work that does that. But he must surely have been influenced by Handel. One could even speculate that he might have heard Handel's Dixit Dominus and decided to use it as a model.

GW: You can look at it in two ways - the genres themselves are absolutely standard, but what he does with them is unique and different. This is why he's such an interesting and puzzling composer. You'd expect a 'minor composer' to have a go at writing the usual sort of stuff, and for it to be basically all right and doing the same things as everyone else, but no - he had a real individuality. Maybe there's a hint there of why his career turned out to be so unsuccessful. Maybe he was a slightly odd individual, even hard to get on with? We don't know. There were so many Italians in London and in Dublin (where he also went) that there was a degree of competition. Scarlatti clearly had considerable musical ability, but never landed any of the top jobs, either as a composer or even as a violinist. He wasn't made the leader of the orchestra in Dublin, he wasn't the leader for Handel at Covent Garden. But we do see in his compositions some real individuality. In the Daniele, for example, there's an echo part, and the tradition for that in the oratorio is that you use echo voices, whereas here Scarlatti uses two different instruments. And I haven't found any precedent for that in any of the oratorios by Alessandro that I've been able to get access to. So he was a quirky and interesting individual.

I was quite surprised to find this oratorio lacked a large chorus - I suppose I was thinking of big favourites like Messiah! How normal was it for composers of Scarlatti’s time to write dramatic works solely for soloists?

GW: It's completely normal. It's much more common in Italian oratorio for there to be ensembles at the beginning and the end, but they are made up of the cast. There's no actual need to have extra singers. We did, last week in the Wigmore Hall, and it's nice to use them, but in all the Alessandro oratorios there's a lack of ensemble writing. It's there for dramatic reasons, but it's not the Handelian approach.

CM: The quintets in Daniele are a bit like the turba choruses and so on that you get in Bach, but those are more the emotional reactions to what's happened. I don't think these choruses have quite the same role. And the writing is completely different.

Similarly, Daniel being cast as a soprano seems unusual - would it be cynical of me to suggest that Daniele was designed mainly to keep opera singers in work during Lent, and that the casting maybe reflects this?

GW: I don't think that's cynical at all - it's just a fact, that's exactly what happened! That's where they got their entertainment during Lent. It was completely normal, that was the standard pattern everywhere in Italy at that time. Daniel might have been sung by a castrato.

Would that have been within the singable range?

GW: I think so - pretty much the same as sopranos.

Speaking of opera… Lent or no Lent, the drama of the lions’ den and a hero fighting a dragon absolutely cries out for lavish staging. Is there any evidence of people pushing the boundaries of oratorio to present an opera-like level of spectacle? Or would the audience simply have had to use their imaginations?

CM: Well, what about Bach's St Matthew Passion? Effectively one of the greatest operas ever written.

Doesn't have a dragon in it, though...

CM: Depends how you want to view the characters!

GW: When we performed Daniele in Wigmore Hall, Graham Neal (who sang Habakkuk) pulled his hair up to visually illustrate being carried off by the angel.

And there are all those points where the scene clearly changes, as when Habakkuk is out in the wilderness and then is called by God to go somewhere else. 

GW: Yes, and it's because it's the same basic approach as an opera. But we don't think that they were actually semi-staged or staged at the time. It's certainly become fashionable these days - a lot of Handel's oratorios are now staged as operas, because people have realised they're essentially the same thing.

And those recordings a few years ago of staged versions of the Bach Passions from the Berlin Philharmonic...

GW: Yes, those have been staged or semi-staged too. It's great that we're having fun with this - I don't think it's what they did at the time, but that doesn't matter.

This is your second album of Dr Webber’s Scarlatti editions, after the acclaimed Dixit Dominus and Messa - are there more in the pipeline? The accompanying notes do refer tantalisingly to some other cantatas also lurking in the Fitzwilliam Museum…

CM: There's a Miserere mei which needs recording, and there's also a motet Laetatus sum, but that only adds up to about 35 minutes of music, and we're not at the moment aware of any other choral music; there's plenty of chamber music which has already been recorded, which must have been the stuff left in Italy, but it would be just a dream to find another great, massive work of the same scale as the sixteen-part Dixit Dominus. At the moment there's no record of that, so unless it turns up lining the drawers in someone's house in northern Dublin, we may not find it.

But Geoffrey's got an idea that there are these cantatas that could be a natural pairing to finish this third disc.

GW: I'm keen to investigate the cantatas - they're mostly solo voice and continuo, which was fairly standard, but there is one that's recorded as being a duet with instruments, which is in Austria, and it would be good to check that out, so in the coming months I'm hoping to have a look at as much as I can of the remaining repertoire, and see which of these would be the best to go with for a third project.

And you said these were more secular works, I think?

GW: Probably, yes, though you can't always tell from the title.

Yes, I suppose you get things that are a bit in-between, like L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato and so on?

GW: Moral but not necessarily religious, yes.

CM: It would be great to get the complete choral works of Francesco Scarlatti finished, as it's never been done before.

I think the main thing about these recordings is that there is simply nothing like this in choral writing. You can't compare it to anything - Bach, Handel, anybody. He is such a totally unique individual - and he must have had an extraordinary sense of humour, we was probably quite rebellious (and maybe a bit dour as well), but the music is totally unique and deserves to get out there. Le Figaro, in their review, were of the opinion that it was the greatest classical find of the century, and I think it truly is. So we just have to keep going until we're finished!