Perhaps the total loss to us of Handel’s music has something to do with the fact that Nero was a failure, withdrawn after one, or perhaps two performances. Discussing the libretto, one of the Hamburg poets who had earlier pitched into Feustking exclaimed, ‘How is a musician to create anything beautiful if he has no beautiful words? Therefore, as in the case of the composition of the opera Nero, someone has not unjustly complained: “There is no spirit in the verse, and one feels vexation at setting such a thing to music.”’
The someone may have been Handel, who promptly vanished from the Gänsemarkt stage. A third opera, Florindo, ultimately divided into two by its librettist Heinrich Hinsch on grounds of length, was given two years later as Der beglückte Florindo and Die verwandelte Daphne, but of the score only a handful of fragments has survived. The two operas may indeed have existed as separate libretti.*(a) He presumably went on playing in the opera band, and eked out his income by giving lessons to the children of Hamburg citizens. A sizeable amount of his keyboard music can be conjecturally dated to this period on stylistic and other grounds, and several voluminous chaconnes and pieces containing ideas figuring more solidly elsewhere may have been written as teaching exercises.
Handel was not temperamentally cast in the mould of a great teacher. Sir John Hawkins might be a little too partial in saying that he ‘disdained to teach his art to any but princes’, but he was not one to dazzle his audience with musical science and was far too impatient and quick-tempered a man to suffer fools or slowcoaches gladly. Profoundly educative though it is to the spirit and the imagination, his music is notoriously resistant to textbook exemplification. Thus it is almost impossible to imagine him writing an Orgelbüchlein or an Art of Fugue or even compiling a notebook for some notional Anna Magdalena. Like Beethoven or Elgar, he took pupils because he needed the money. And in the autumn of 1706, when he had scraped enough of it together, he set off for Italy.
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Caro Sassone
With Handel’s Italian journey we enter on one of those periods of his career when conjecture is exasperatingly paramount. We can guess why he should have wanted to go to Italy since, as the nursery of established musical form, terminology and style during the period, it was the logical goal of young composers from all over Europe, but whether he was, as tradition has it, invited by Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici, son of Grand Duke Cosimo of Tuscany, is altogether more questionable. Ferdinando was indeed out of Florence at some stage immediately before Handel’s departure from Hamburg, could certainly have been visiting some of his German princely connexions, and might perhaps have met Handel on one such visit – but there is no proof that he did so.
Finances are a somewhat simpler issue. As a rule Baroque artists travelling in Italy were paid for by their patrons, who saw the tour as a species of talent investment, paying off in the resulting sophistications of style. Handel had no need of this. Money was forthcoming from his father’s estate, friends and family connexions rallied round, and Handel was able to leave for Italy ‘on his own bottom’, as Mainwaring has it. The word ‘bottom’ has the English eighteenth-century sense of ‘initiative’, ‘enterprise’ or ‘substance’. Once in Italy itself, the necessary bottom would have to be provided by his own creative resources, directly linked to the network of patronage, cronyism and contact-forming hardly less essential to Italian life now than it was in those days.
His journey may have taken him through such musical centres as Munich, Turin and Milan, all of them with resident composers and flourishing operatic traditions, but he is first supposed to have halted for any length of time at Florence. The capital of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany under the rule of Cosimo III, obsessively religious and increasingly preoccupied with the issue of a likely successor among his brood of wayward children, was not the culturally vibrant city it had been during the Renaissance, but music of all kinds gained enthusiastic support from the Grand Duke’s eldest surviving son Ferdinando. The prince had received a broad education, including practical courses on the violin and harpsichord from the Genoese composer Giovanni Maria Pagliardi. An anonymous contemporary notes that
he also sang most gracefully . . . he liked operas, sad and serious ones for preference . . . he had his amusements for each season: in the spring he went to Poggio a Caiano, where he kept a troupe of comedians on purpose to act for him. Then he went to Villa Imperiale, where . . . the pages and courtiers improvised entertainments . . . In the autumn he went to his favourite villa at Pratolino . . . there he went hunting and there he had a musical drama acted by the choicest singers, with a great crowd of spectators. Other operas under his patronage were given at Leghorn, where he ‘gently obliged’ the richest merchants to buy all the tickets, lending his own orchestra, led by the virtuoso Martino Bitti. Besides this he was active in encouraging special performances of music for Holy Week in the Florentine churches, featuring new commissions. No wonder that when he died it was said of him that ‘the most musical prince in all the world is dead’.
Nothing Handel composed on this first visit to Florence has survived and in the last days of 1706 we find him already in Rome. On 14 January 1707 the diarist Francesco Valesio noted that ‘there has arrived in this city a Saxon, a most excellent player on the harpsichord and composer, who today gave a flourish of his skill by playing the organ in the church of S. Giovanni*(b) to the amazement of everyone present’.
It must have been at this time as well that he first heard the music of the pifferari, the Abruzzi shepherds whose tradition it was to play their bagpipes in the Roman streets during December and January. The simple tunes over their drone clearly made a deep impression: though this kind of one-note bass is a cliché of Baroque musical rusticity, the merest mention of sheep or shepherds, whether in ‘Quanto voi felici siete’ in Ezio or ‘But as for his people’ in Israel in Egypt, is enough to set the pastoral Handel going and a symphony labelled pifa duly introduces the shepherds of Messiah.
From a musical point of view Handel could not have chosen a more interesting moment at which to visit Italy. From a political aspect he could scarcely have hit on a worse. Popular historical awareness tends all too readily to forget that the War of the Spanish Succession involved more diffuse theatres of activity than the plains of Flanders and the Danube on which Marlborough gained his famous victories. Bourbon and Habsburg armies were heavily engaged not only on France’s eastern borders but also in Spain and throughout the entire length of Italy. Handel’s arrival was on the heels of a huge imperial push made possible by the brilliant operations of Prince Eugene, culminating in his victory at Turin and the surrender of Milan, both during the September of 1706. With the exception of Venice, which adopted its by now customary position astride the diplomatic fence, all the Italian states were heavily committed, either through enforced levies as imperial fiefs, or through direct political and military involvement.
In terms of prestige the severest losses were suffered by the dominions of the Pope, whose support of the Bourbon cause in Spain and of the family of the exiled James II of England outweighed his efforts towards peace as far as Austria and her allies were concerned. Raised to the papacy in 1700, as Clement XI, Gianfrancesco Albani was destined to a term of office as miserable as it was long. Unlike his immediate predecessors, who had interpreted their responsibilities in a spirit of self-seeking worldliness, Clement was a worthy and conscientious pontiff, whose idealistic attempts to do right were perpetually frustrated by the cynical turn of European great-power politics.
Early in his reign he had seen his capital devastated by a succession of natural disasters. The Tiber flooded the city three times in as many years, and on 14 January 1703 there began a series of violent earth tremors, which lasted with a more or less consistent intensity for nearly two months. Special prayers, fasts and processions took place to ward off what was seen as a fitting punishment for the decadent luxury of Roman society: ‘Faith is not dead in Rome,’ said an eyewitness, ‘the earthquake, in fact, has been a great preacher.’
Terrible cracks appeared in the Vatican and the Colosseum, and the pillars of Bernini’s great baldacchino in St Peter’s were seen to tremble. Perhaps the most amazing scenes took place on the night of 2 February, when a rumour spread that the city was to be destroyed within two hours. Streets, squares and gardens quickly filled with people, many of them half dressed, flinging themselves on their knees, making public confession and embracing each other as if for the last time, and it was almost morning before a relative calm was restored.
Clement was instrumental, not only in sustaining Roman morale during such periods of intense crisis, but in reaffirming the city’s metropolitan character through his extensive restoration of its older basilicas and his reconstruction of walls, aqueducts and fountains. The Rome in which Handel arrived was thus in one of its signal moments of renewal, even though its population was decreasing and in area it was little more than a magnificent market town among a scatter of impressive ruins.
Roman society was naturally dominated by ecclesiastics and by the noble families from whose ranks many of them were recruited. The machinery of patronage was controlled by these two heavily interlinked groups, and the city’s flourishing artistic life depended exclusively upon their support. Alone among the major Italian cities, however, Rome boasted no opera house. The puritanical zeal of Innocent XII had closed the Teatro Tor di Nona in 1697 and no new theatrical enterprise was to be set on foot until the opening of the Teatro Capranica in 1709. Musicians nevertheless continued to flock to the city. Besides the inevitable demand for new music to accompany church celebrations of every kind, there was enough continuing impetus from wealthy and distinguished amateurs among the cardinals and their noble relatives to promote an exciting musical culture, whose influence was to condition Handel’s style more strongly than any other he had encountered before or was to meet again.
Several of the leading ecclesiastics maintained their own domestic bands and, if not actually composing themselves, wrote texts for the musicians they patronized. Pietro Ottoboni, for example, appointed a cardinal at the age of twenty-two by his great-uncle Pope Alexander VIII, seems to have laid out most of an enormous income in indulging a passion for music. Before Innocent’s ban on theatres, Ottoboni had staged operas by promising young composers such as Alessandro Scarlatti, Giovanni Bononcini and Francesco Pollarolo, in his huge Palazzo della Cancelleria, which also had a little stage for marionette operas. *(c)
None of Handel’s works was specifically written for Ottoboni, but the Cardinal’s Wednesday music meetings offered Handel a chance to make valuable contacts with some of Italy’s leading musical masters. The atmosphere is well summed up for us by the French traveller Blainville, who was in Rome at the same time. ‘His Eminence keeps in his pay the best musicians and performers in Rome . . . so that every Wednesday he has an excellent concert in his palace. We were there served with ices and other delicate liquors . . . but the greatest inconveniency in all these concerts is that one is pestered with swarms of trifling little Abbés, who come thither on purpose to fill their bellies with these liquors, and to carry off the crystal bottles with the napkins into the bargain.’ The Ottoboni connexion in fact bound together many of the musical Italians who later made their way to London while Handel was there. Nicola Haym (already in England) and Paolo Antonio Rolli, later to become his librettists, for example, had both been part of the cardinal’s circle, as had the violinist Pietro Castrucci, leader of the opera band, and Filippo Amadei, a brilliant cellist who later collaborated as a composer with Handel and Giovanni Bononcini on Muzio Scevola.
Handel’s most significant encounter at the Cancelleria was with the orchestra’s leader, Arcangelo Corelli. Corelli is one of those artistic figures whose effect on their contemporaries is out of all proportion to the volume of their output. He wrote and published a relatively small amount, six instrumental collections in all, but in so doing he profoundly altered and deepened the whole character of European music. His influence pervaded everything from a tiny trio sonata to a full-blown opera, and with those of Vivaldi and the elder Scarlatti his musical personality dominates the central phases of the Italian Baroque. Domenico Scarlatti once told the violinist Francesco Geminiani that he was especially struck by Corelli’s ‘nice management of his band, the uncommon accuracy of whose performance gave the concertos an amazing effect . . . for Corelli regarded it as essential to the ensemble of a band, that their bows should all move exactly together, all up, or all down; so that at his rehearsals, which constantly preceded every public performance of one of his concertos, he would immediately stop the band if he discovered one irregular bow’. The example was surely not lost on the young Handel, consolidating on what he had already learned as a member of the Gänsemarkt orchestra.
The effects of the master’s music itself upon his own style are not so much heard as felt within the framework of the pieces Handel composed during this period, through the creation of structures immediately recalling those used in Corelli’s concertos (which, though not published until 1714, may already have been known in manuscript). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the setting of Psalm 110, Dixit Dominus domino meo, which Handel completed in the April of 1707. The Corellian lyricism and suppleness of the string writing determine the character of the entire work, essentially a series of vocal concerto movements, relentless in its momentum and dazzling in its grandeur of design.
The stylistic synthesis is not only between Handel and Corelli but draws together elements from the composer’s German church training of Halle days and features which suggest that he must have begun to study the work of earlier Italian masters, Antonio Stradella, Giacomo Carissimi, Giovanni Paolo Colonna (in whom Boyce was later to detect an obvious Handelian model) and maybe even works by Monteverdi and his accomplished assistant at St Mark’s, Alessandro Grandi, whose own strikingly idiosyncratic Dixit Dominus was published in 1629. The sturdy cantus firmus of ‘donec ponam inimicos tuos’ in the first movement could pass as easily for a Latin psalm tone as for a Lutheran chorale (it is not unlike Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme) but the pattern of contrasts between soli and five-part chorus, and the double fugue setting ‘Tu es sacerdos in aeternum’ marching against the rushing semi-quavers of ‘secundum ordinem Melchisedech’ are quintessentially Italian in idiom. This very movement Handel was to use again, more than thirty years later, in Israel in Egypt, a work that achieves the same sort of fusion, albeit on a far grander scale, through the remarkable diversity of its allusions.
There is no record of a first performance for the Dixit Dominus, but since it forms part of the Vesper Offices, the ingenious suggestion has been made that Handel intended it as part of a far larger service, at which his settings of two other vesper psalms, Laudate Pueri and Nisi Dominus, would also be given. A Handelian Vespers, to place beside Monteverdi’s set of 1610 and Mozart’s Vesperae Solennes de Confessore is an attractive idea, though nearly three months divide the composition of Dixit Dominus and Laudate Pueri, finished on 8 July. The theory is that together with the motet Saeviat tellus inter rigores they may all have been given at the Carmelite church of Santa Maria di Monte Santo, in special commemoration of deliverance from the recent earthquakes. The only piece of Handel’s, however, which has a definite link with such a commemoration is the motet Donna che in ciel for soprano, chorus and orchestra.
A more recent theory suggests that the Dixit Dominus was written as a psalmus in tempore belli, to be sung in the presence of the Spanish ambassador Don Pedro Tellez, Duke of Uceda, at the hill town of Frascati north of Rome. On 20 April 1707, fearing the advance of an imperial army against Rome itself, the Duke, inviting fifty guests to join him, had fled the city. Once safely ensconced at Frascati, he offered his friends a banquet to celebrate the feast of St Philip and St James on 1 May, a red-letter day in the Spanish calendar. The turbulence at the heart of Handel’s Dixit setting, whether in the swooping string arpeggios of its opening movement or the jaggedly dramatic setting of ‘Conquassabit caput in terra multorum’ (he
shall wound the heads of many upon earth), suggests a context of war rather than the earthquakes for the psalm’s first performance, though once again no documentary evidence supports the idea of such a première.
Whatever their purpose the two other psalms show us that the Roman Handel had begun as he meant to go on. The Laudate Pueri uses the same technique of contrasted textures (a florid solo soprano opening, for example, balanced by rich choral writing) and explores a bewildering selection of keys (including a doom-laden switch from F to F sharp in the sixteen-bar Quis sicut Dominus) before homing to the original D major in the Gloria. This final movement repeats the traditional ‘As it was in the beginning’ device, more deftly used in the Dixit Dominus, in which the sense of the words is mirrored in a reprise of the opening material. A similar ploy marks the close of the Nisi Dominus, whose ostinato string figure is used again to thrilling effect at the beginning of Zadok the Priest. The psalm is a tiny capsule of perfectly staged coups de théâtre (note the miraculous stillness, for example, of Cum dederit delectis suis somnum, in which the voice floats above the ghostly accompaniment like a winter sun) ideally Roman, ideally Baroque, in form and idiom.
During the spring of 1707 Handel was busy in other directions. As well as his entrée to the Ottoboni household he had gained an introduction to an equally rich and influential amateur who very soon became a devoted admirer of his music. Like Ottoboni, Benedetto Pamphilj was both a cardinal and the great-nephew of a pope. Innocent X raised him to the purple in 1681 and his musical patronage embraced several of those who performed at the Cancelleria, including Corelli and Scarlatti, for whom he wrote libretti. As a poet he was not without talent. Handel clearly appreciated the musicality of his verses and various cantata texts are certainly his. On a much larger scale Pamphilj produced a work in the genre identified as ‘moral cantata’, to be set by Handel possibly for one of Ottoboni’s concerts. Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno nella Bellezza ravveduta (The Triumph of Time and Truth over Beauty repentant) has never really received the attention it deserves from Handel enthusiasts. The fact that he returned to it on two subsequent occasions, thirty and fifty years respectively after the first version, suggests that he maintained some sort of special interest or involvement in the work. At any rate the libretto is certainly no worse than many others he came to set, and in overall smoothness and elegance often a good deal better.
Handel Page 4