Handel 2009
Interview with Emma Kirkby
Conducted at Handel House Museum in 2005
Emma Kirkby was born in Camberley in 1949, and studied at Oxford. A soprano known for her pure and expressive voice, she is a distinguished interpreter of Handel. She has sung with the Academy of Ancient Music, London Baroque and the Taverner Players and has appeared widely with the lutenist Anthony Rooley.
What are your early experiences of Messiah?
The first time I suppose I heard it was Isobel Bailey on the radio singing Redeemer. I was very young then. She died at a ripe old age but that performance was recorded probably before I was born. And I loved the music – I didn’t know it very well at all.
I fell into rather specialist areas of music as a student, sang for fun in choirs and small groups, and I became a professional more or less by accident and began specialising in earlier things. Then I met people who were working with earlier instruments, with baroque instruments, and I got an amazing chance to record Messiah with Christopher Hogwood, I think it was 1979. It was a lovely performance with Christchurch Cathedral Choir (the boys just sang their hearts out), Simon Preston conducting and Christopher Hogwood’s (relatively new) Academy of Ancient Music playing.
It was great fun. I was invited in because suddenly a second soprano was needed. They were doing a special version based on the Foundling Hospital performances that Handel gave in order to help raise money for Thomas Coram’s brilliant charity for street children. And it would have happened, I guess, in the new Foundling Hospital chapel in 1754. It included some odd things, things sopranos don’t normally sing, and for me this was a huge piece of luck because I was a real beginner in the field. I loved singing but I didn’t have a lot of experience with Messiah. I ended up singing But who may abide, which nowadays is more often done by an alto, and also another aria more often done by an alto, Thou art gone up from the middle section, then If God be for us which is often omitted, but it’s a beautiful aria at the end of the piece, normally sung by a soprano. But I didn’t sing Redeemer which was, I thought, the most wonderful piece in the world and I didn’t feel ready to tackle that yet. I felt really lucky to be able to join in this performance, treading territory that hadn’t already been well trodden by other and better people, which made me feel more confident to give it a go. I hugely enjoyed this, I must say.
Since then I’ve sung most versions of Messiah that a soprano can take part in, including Mozart’s arrangement, which in itself is a very lovely thing to do provided that it’s small enough. That’s a very interesting thing about the Mozart version. If you do it with huge forces I don’t think it works at all. He apparently chose to make that version of Messiah because he considered he didn’t have sufficient forces to do Handel’s version. By then the fashion for Handel was so enormous, and the numbers were so huge, Mozart felt he didn’t have the hundreds of people he needed. That feels very strange to us because we know that Handel’s Messiah works quite beautifully with twenty to thirty people.
Are there any other recordings you have particularly enjoyed taking part in or listening to?
I myself have recorded Messiah twice. Having done all the unusual arias the first time, I was able to do all the usual arias the next time with EMI and Taverner, and I enjoyed that one too. I think William Christie’s recording is very special. As I say, I heard Isobel Bailey when I was a child. I’ve heard a few live ones on the radio and there’s one or two that have been very thrilling.
I’ve taken part in a great many live versions which means I’ve heard a lot of other singers doing the other bits. I have to say that my really thrilling moments with Messiah are not from listening on CD but being part of a live performance. The lovely thing about those performances for the soloist is that you get a lot of time to just sit and listen and get completely carried away.
Why do think it is that Messiah is such a popular work to hear live?
I think the tremendous strength of Messiah is the lyrics, the libretto. Jennens made a work of genius out of picking out bits from the Old Testament and juxtaposing them in very beautiful ways, and then Handel responded to the images in them. I just think it’s the most effective and incredible telling of the story. It also works very well because you can do it at any time of the year and it really doesn’t matter. You’ve got the whole Christian year: Christmas, the Resurrection and the Passion. So what more do you need (laughs)? It’s a wonderfully flexible story and I guess that’s one reason that it is so popular. Whatever crazy solutions you may find to the instrumentation and the voicing there is a directness about these texts. They do move you very deeply I think, and people do come away somehow clarified and uplifted.
Do you have any favourite soloists?
There are too many and it’s difficult to pick out individual singers. There are certain arias that I always get excited to see how they’ll be. They are inevitably not the soprano ones (I’m generally having to think about those), but I can just sit and be transported by the others. I think – oh it’s very hard to choose – I think possibly the one that I love best is the bass prophesy at the beginning: Darkness Shall Cover the Earth and The People that Walked in Darkness. I think that’s wonderful! Tremendous economy of means in the way he set it, but it is so evocative. I’ll not forget David Thomas’s version of that. It’s so engraved on my soul now. I’ve heard it since the late seventies, and he just brings something so special to that piece. Having said that, there are other wonderful basses I’ve heard since that can evoke that same felling of darkness and light. The kernel of the story is in that prophecy.
Do you have a favourite chorus?
I think the choruses are extraordinary, and when I’m sitting listening to the chorus I sometimes follow one line or another and imagine I’m singing either alto or tenor, and even sing along sometimes - generally not the soprano as I think that might stick out (laughs). It’s just great fun to see what a good time everybody has in the choruses. I do love O thou that Tellest. I think the alto introduction is just glorious and when the chorus join in it’s almost like they can’t resist getting up to sing. That has a wonderful joyous feeling. But there are so many wonderful choruses. It’s an extraordinary piece from that point of view, and I’m not surprised that choral societies don’t get tired of it.
Do you have any other Messiah stories?
The first Messiah I recorded was another first. It was the first one on baroque instruments that got a wide reception. There might have been some other recordings made elsewhere, but this was made by Decca and distributed all over the world and had a big impact. I think people suddenly realised there was another way of looking at this piece that had got very large and grandiose, and there was a great exuberance to that version that was great fun.
As I said, I had this extra experience of singing unusual versions for soprano. I remember we chose to use the underlay that Handel first used. He was German and though his command of English was pretty good, you do get some odd moments. I remember David Thomas singing, “in-co-or-rup-ti-ble” (laughs) and it’s charming, a sort of Germanic idea. And in the soprano aria If God be for us there’s a triple. The most rational way to do it is: "If God be for us who can be a-gainst us", but Handel wrote: "If God be for us who can be against us" and I religiously sang that because this was Handel’s version and we had to get it right.
I was hugely amused, more that twenty years later, to go to the Foundling Hospital this year where they’ve just opened the most wonderful museum of Handel memorabilia. And there I saw the autographed scores which I think Smith wrote for use for that performance and Signeura Passarini, the little sparrow, and there it says very clearly: "If God be for us who can be a-gainst us". So I reckon that twenty years ago I very carefully sang what was, in fact, for that performance the wrong version. And I think this was great because it shows you that authenticity is always going to be a moveable feast and frankly, I don’t mind. The only really true moment is the one you’re listening to now and if a performance has a voracity of its own then I’m not going to worry about arcane rules of scholarship at this very moment.
Handel House Museum at 25 Brook Street will be at the heart of the Handel celebrations this year. This landmark address is where Handel lived for thirty-six years of his life and where he died on 14 April 1759.