Aria Borealis (FINAL)

About The Transforming Fire

The Transforming Fire was born from the Aria Borealis competition’s core ambition: to give these young singers more than a string of arias to perform, and allow them to prove themselves as opera singers, whose singing is a form of acting and relies on the connection between music and meaning in Baroque music as much as the ability to cooperate with others on stage. While brainstorming the way to give everyone the best opportunities, Emma Kirkby, Irma Niskanen and myself chose to not propose a single opera, in which roles would have to be split between singers, and instead montage together cohesive scenes from multiple stage works by Handel.

Pasticcio, the combination of material from multiple operas into a new whole, is made possible by the fact that operas of Handel’s time usually follow similar structures and involve recurring character types, making it easy to move arias from one story to another. The Transforming Fire builds on that tradition to do something different: the original stories remain distinct, and their similarities connect them while their differences stand out. The result is not so much a ‘best of’ – although our singers will have a chance to perform highlights from some of the most famous Handel works – as it is an exploration of motives to which a composer has returned constantly throughout his prolific career, including by revisiting his own works to rewrite them or repurpose some of their material.

The modernity of Handel’s musical dramas resides in the fact that Fate plays no great role in them. Their fundamental unit being the aria, their main focus is rather on how characters deal with something happening to them, and how their own reaction to it transforms them. Falling in love, being jealous out of fear of losing someone, the grief that follows loss, are some of our ways of dealing with change, and at the same time they are also emotions that bring about change within ourselves. An aria is a character’s method of trying to make sense of their emotions as something that is happening to them, and embrace into what kind of person it makes them.

At its barest, this is the allegorical character of Beauty looking into a mirror and expressing the universal fear of aging: Un dì mi cangerò (One day I will change). In The Transforming Fire, we get to follow her through an entire hall of mirrors built by a composer who took seriously the question of what the active metamorphosis of the self means in an ever-transforming world.

Dramaturge-director Aleksi Barrière