meeting with the great conductor René Jacobs at the Ambronay Festival

The great René Jacobs returns to the Festival of Ancient and Baroque Music in Ambronay with Handel, four years after having presented the famous oratorio there Trionfo del tempo e del disinganno (in French : The triumph of time and disillusion) This time, the Belgian conductor presents two cantatas at the Abbey, Il delirio amoroso and Apollo and Dafne. We met him in a lounge of his hotel shortly before the start of the concert.

Franceinfo Culture: You are rare in France, the only French concert of the Friborg Baroque Orchestra for this program is in Ambronay…
Rene Jacobs: Yes, when we launched this project of the two cantatas by Handel, luck wanted it to fall with the period of the Ambronay Festival. I said yes straight away when they offered it to me, because the program hadn’t been played here yet. It is a very important early music festival and the setting is unique.

Handel once again. What is your relationship to the German composer?
My relationship with Handel began very early, when I was not yet a conductor but a singer. Any countertenor carries Handel in his heart as perhaps the most important composer. Obviously, Handel did not compose explicitly for countertenors, but in his operas there are beautiful arias and beautiful roles for castrati and the countertenors have become the substitutes for these voices which are no longer there, God be praised, because it is still something very barbaric.

And as a leader?
I continued on this line as a leader. These are not the only works that I obviously conduct – there are many other things, especially from the 19th century – but Handel is apart. And especially young Handel. The Trionfo del tempo e del disinganno that we did here and these two cantatas, Il Delirio amoroso and Apollo and Dafne, were composed around the same year (1709, editor’s note). All this happened in a very short period of his long life, where he was in Italy, especially in the city of Rome. And what he composed there is young but already extremely mature! And besides many of the themes that he invented for these works, he reused them several times in later works. In a way, the music he composed afterwards certainly contains many masterpieces, but they are less modern than what he composed in Italy.

Was it the ardor of youth, the virtuosity of Handel that attracted you to the two chosen cantatas?
The passion of youth, yes. She is very clear in her works, which have a pure virtuosity, not only vocal, but also in the writing. Take the example of a soprano voice which is in duet with an oboe: the two have very fast notes (sixteenth notes), together, and for a long time, you have to imagine the management of the breath for the two, which can be a problem. It’s really written to the limit of what you can do on the oboe and on the voice.

We know your passion for sacred music. The two cantatas chosen are secular, even if one of the two was written by a cardinal…
Both ! But that doesn’t mean anything (laughs)! We are in Rome, so the papal state, the cardinals lived in very rich palaces with a lot of culture. They inspired and sponsored the arts – painters, composers… – and often wanted to be poets themselves! And their lyrics weren’t bad at all. Especially that ofApollo and Dafnereally very good on the literary level.

The two cantatas offer pure emotion: one speaks of the mourning of the loved one, the other of love or rather of amorous arrogance…
It goes even further than that. Because this second cantata, Apollo and Dafne, tells the story of Daphne’s metamorphosis into a laurel tree (after trying in vain to repel Apollo’s advances, the nymph turns into a laurel tree to escape him, editor’s note). Besides, the word to say laurel in Greek is daphne. She is transformed by her father who is a minor god, and it is there that Apollo understands what the no means – moreover it is a very “MeToo” cantata -. She’s gone, but at the same time she’s not gone, she’s the tree, the laurel. And she said to him: I will always love this tree. But the laurel was the symbol.

And this music too, its subjects are full of symbols. The laurel is the symbol of the poet’s talent. We know the expression “poeta laureatus”: whoever wears the laurel wreath is crowned as a great poet. Like Dante, or Goethe. In ancient times, when an emperor returned from a war he had won, he also received the laurel wreath. So it’s all in this music. And at the end, the last aria is not a triumphant aria: she has disappeared as a woman, and he, Apollo, sings all alone of his love for this tree. It brings a certain melancholy.

Melancholy is a word that connects the two pieces…
Yes the Delirio amoroso is a kind of mad scene of a woman imagining things about her deceased loved one. He is dead, she is so torn by his death that she goes mad: she imagines herself descending into Hell like Orpheus to live with him. So she imagines she sees him but he doesn’t want to look at her. Also as in Orpheus. But apparently there was something between these two in their past life that was not going very well: maybe he wanted to leave her, we don’t know, it’s deliberately very obscure. It is also very virtuoso music, the more virtuoso of the two cantatas because of an extreme violin solo, a very virtuoso oboe solo and a very beautiful cello solo.