For London audiences, the conductor Charles Farncombe was primarily associated with the productions of the Handel Opera Society, which he helped found and of which he was musical director for the whole of its 30-year existence, from 1955 onwards (in 1977 it was renamed Handel Opera). He was subsequently conductor of the fundraising concerts of the Malcolm Sargent Festival Choir. His work outside Britain covered a wider range of repertory, though still with an emphasis on vocal music, while near his home in Monmouthshire he founded and directed an annual festival of music and drama remarkable in its scope.
Monmouthshire, also known as the County of Monmouth, is one of thirteen historic counties of Wales and a former administrative county. It corresponds approximately to the present principal areas of Monmouthshire, Blaenau Gwent, Newport and Torfaen, and those parts of Caerphilly and Cardiff east of the Rhymney River.
Background
Farncombe was born in London and received his early musical training as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral. He continued his education at Dulwich College and at Imperial College, London, where in 1940 he took a degree in civil engineering. After two years of work in that field with John Mowlem and Co. (involved in the laying of cats' eyes), he saw service in the second world war as captain of a tank recovery unit (21st Army Group) with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. A severe wound received at Caen ended his active involvement and left him with a slight limp, though it never inhibited his subsequent enjoyment of walking and swimming.
Canterbury Cathedral in Canterbury, Kent, is one of the oldest and most famous Christian structures in England. It forms part of a World Heritage Site. It is the cathedral of the Archbishop of Canterbury, currently Justin Welby, leader of the Church of England and symbolic leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Its formal title is the Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of Christ at Canterbury.
Mowlem was one of the largest construction and civil engineering companies in the United Kingdom. Carillion bought the firm in 2006.
During recuperation, Farncombe decided to change to a musical career, taking up the French horn. He returned to Canterbury to study at the Royal School of Church Music (1947–48), and went on to graduate from the Royal Academy of Music in London (1948–51). Ralph Vaughan Williams encouraged his aptitude for directing amateur choirs, but it was Edward J Dent, professor of music at Cambridge, who pointed Farncombe towards the then neglected repertory of Handel's operas. With the vital help of the administrative skills of Gwyneth McCleary (secretary of the Board of Trade Choir, which Farncombe then directed), Dent's desire was brought to fruition with a staged production of Handel's Deidamia (in Dent's English translation) at the St Pancras Assembly Rooms, London, on 3 June 1955.
The Royal Academy of Music in London, England, is the oldest conservatoire in the UK, founded in 1822 by John Fane and Nicolas-Charles Bochsa. It received its Royal Charter in 1830 from King George IV with the support of the first Duke of Wellington. It is one of the leading conservatoires in the UK, rated fourth in the Complete University Guide and third in the Guardian University Guide for 2018. Famous Academy alumni include Sir Simon Rattle, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Sir Elton John and Annie Lennox.
Deidamia is an opera in three acts composed by George Frideric Handel to an Italian libretto by Paolo Antonio Rolli. It premiered on 10 January 1741 at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, London.
Handel Opera Society
The Handel Opera Society was then formally established with a view to giving annual productions, which duly followed, with their venue being Sadler's Wells from 1959. Several works were given their first modern revivals – in Britain, if not the world – and Farncombe often had to prepare new performing editions of the music.
Not only operas were covered. Dent drew Farncombe's attention to Winton Dean's advocacy of staging Handel's dramatic oratorios (powerfully expressed in Dean's published study of 1959), which required use of the chorus, and in its early years the society's productions of such works as Semele, Hercules and Theodora were as revelatory as those of the Italian operas.
Winton Basil Dean was an English musicologist of the 20th century, most famous for his research concerning the life and works—in particular the operas and oratorios—of George Frideric Handel, as detailed in his book Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (1959).
An oratorio is a large musical composition for orchestra, choir, and soloists. Like most operas, an oratorio includes the use of a choir, soloists, an instrumental ensemble, various distinguishable characters, and arias. However, opera is musical theatre, while oratorio is strictly a concert piece – though oratorios are sometimes staged as operas, and operas are sometimes presented in concert form. In an oratorio the choir often plays a central role, and there is generally little or no interaction between the characters, and no props or elaborate costumes. A particularly important difference is in the typical subject matter of the text. Opera tends to deal with history and mythology, including age-old devices of romance, deception, and murder, whereas the plot of an oratorio often deals with sacred topics, making it appropriate for performance in the church. Protestant composers took their stories from the Bible, while Catholic composers looked to the lives of saints, as well as to Biblical topics. Oratorios became extremely popular in early 17th-century Italy partly because of the success of opera and the Catholic Church's prohibition of spectacles during Lent. Oratorios became the main choice of music during that period for opera audiences.
Semele, in Greek mythology, was the youngest daughter of the Boeotian hero Cadmus and Harmonia, and the mother of Dionysus by Zeus in one of his many origin myths.
Rinaldo is an opera by George Frideric Handel, composed in 1711, and was the first Italian language opera written specifically for the London stage. The libretto was prepared by Giacomo Rossi from a scenario provided by Aaron Hill, and the work was first performed at the Queen's Theatre in London's Haymarket on 24 February 1711. The story of love, war and redemption, set at the time of the First Crusade, is loosely based on Torquato Tasso's epic poem Gerusalemme liberata, and its staging involved many original and vivid effects. It was a great success with the public, despite negative reactions from literary critics hostile to the contemporary trend towards Italian entertainment in English theatres.
The Handel Festival in Halle an der Saale, Saxony-Anhalt, is an international music festival concentrating on the music of George Frideric Handel in the composer's birthplace. It was founded in 1922 and it grew into a center of Handel studies and performance in Europe. Especially Handel's operas have been staged regularly, some of them as first revivals.
Farncombe was able to engage many of the best singers of the time for leading roles, including Joan Sutherland, Jennifer Vyvyan, Heather Harper, Janet Baker, Elizabeth Harwood, Alexander Young, Richard Lewis and Geraint Evans. Some of the society's productions were taken to other festivals, including Göttingen, Halle, Herrenhausen and Liège. Farncombe's musical direction, though sometimes tending to attract the adjective "efficient", was usually animated without loss of dignity at fast tempos, and he could bring great depth of expression to slower numbers.
Like many pioneering organisations, the Handel Opera Society was to some extent a victim of its own success. As Handel's operas and oratorios became more familiar, critical tolerance of the variable quality of the society's productions diminished, especially after English National Opera's Giulio Cesare set a new benchmark in 1979. The society also ignored the implications of the new approach to "early music" led by period-instrument groups, though Farncombe himself worked with period instruments in some productions for Lina Lalandi's English Bach Festival, including the first modern revival of the 1754 version of Rameau's Castor et Pollux in 1981 (it was recorded by Erato). Little else of his operatic performance legacy is preserved in audio recordings, though the Handel Opera Society's performance of Rodelinda (with Joan Sutherland and Janet Baker) is available on Opera d'Oro.
Thus, the Arts Council's decision to discontinue their annual grant to the society after 1984 was not altogether surprising. The coincident demise of the Greater London Council, the other main source of funding, sealed the society's fate. In its dying days the GLC did, however, provide enough to enable the society to finish its operations in the Handel anniversary year of 1985 with a final novelty: the British premiere of Rodrigo, Handel's first Italian opera.
Outside Britain
Farncombe's most important appointment outside Britain was that of chief conductor of the historic Royal Court Theatre at Drottningholm, Stockholm, from 1968 to 1979, where he helped to bring that remarkably preserved baroque theatre to working life. His success there, and at the Royal Swedish Opera, gained him the gold medal of the Friends of Drottningholm and appointment Knight Commander of the Order of the Polar Star. He was also conductor of the Handel festival at the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe from 1985 to 1995, his experience again valuable in the development of a new venture. In 2001, he was invited to return to Karlsruhe for the 25th anniversary of the Handel festival to conduct Handel's Ottone.
Other appointments
Farncombe declined an OBE in 1975 but two years later was appointed a CBE.[citation needed] City University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1988. From 1985 he was musical director of the Malcolm Sargent Festival Choir – with whom he diversified into Verdi's Requiem, Berlioz's Grande Messe des Mortes and Rossini's Petite messe solennelle – and, in the 1990s, was a regular conductor at the Komische Oper in Berlin. In 2005 – aged 85 – he directed a semi-staged performance of Handel's serenata Parnasso in Festa at St John's Smith Square in London.
Llantilio Crossenny Festival
Having purchased a farm in Llantilio Crossenny, Monmouthshire, Farncombe established his very own festival there. From 1962 it brought to a rural community an extraordinary sequence of annual staged productions in the local church, beginning with medieval musical dramas (including Farncombe's own transcription of the Play of Elche) and eventually encompassing, in suitably scaled-down form, operas by Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Puccini and many others.
Family life
In 1963 Farncombe married the American violinist Sally Mae Felps, who was a constant support and a lively front-of-house presence at his performances until her premature death from cancer in 2003. They are survived by their daughter Eleanor, operations manager of the London Opera Players.
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References
Obituaries printed in The Guardian newspaper on 19 August 2006, (written by Anthony Hicks) (primary source), The Telegraph on 31 July 2006 and The Times on 2 August 2006.
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