The underlying idea is the kind of moral abstract cherished by the Baroque imagination. Cantatas in this style *(d) were based on the notion of ‘The world’s wicked vanities’ and had titles like ‘How Deceitful Are Our Pleasures!’, ‘Teach Me How To Die’ or ‘The Contest Between Wisdom And Holiness’. In Il Trionfo Time and Truth oppose Pleasure in a combat for the allegiance of Beauty, who eventually yields to them after being offered visions of what will happen if she chooses the alternative. Pleasure is finally sent packing, in a burst of resentment, when Beauty casts her away after another look in the faithful glass, which she has invoked in the opening aria. As dramatic material there is nothing especially promising in all this, but it gave Handel the chance to develop a distinctive aria style which, though it absorbs material from the Hamburg years, is very different from anything he had evolved earlier. Something of the sweep and exuberance of his mature operatic manner is here already, underpinned by a rich scoring, which includes paired recorders, plentiful work for solo oboe and violin, and a sinfonia with an organ solo, whisking a somewhat bewildered Beauty into the Domain of Pleasure. Several of the numbers have, besides, a genuine distinction, which transcends the imaginative limits of Pamphilj’s text. There is an extended quartet, in which Handel plays with the word ‘tempo’ as Beauty pleads for time to consider her choice, while Time, Truth and Pleasure throw in their arguments. Among the arias ‘Urne voi’, Time’s exclamation of dignified outrage at frail Beauty’s sheer insolence, is justly admired for its harmonic boldness. A sequence of jagged chords in F minor (one of Handel’s favourite ‘special effect’ keys) forms the starting point for what ultimately becomes a shattering vision of anarchic gloom, as the urns of dead beauties are commanded to yield up their grisly treasures.
The overture to Il Trionfo may well have been the source of a famously contentious moment between the young composer and Corelli. As leader of the Ottoboni band, Corelli had some difficulty in satisfying Handel’s demands as to style and execution; impetuous as ever, Handel snatched the violin from the master’s hand and the Hamburg second fiddle tried to show one of Europe’s finest instrumentalists how to play. Corelli, whose typical modesty hid a sly sense of humour, answered: ‘But my dear Saxon, this music is in the French style, and I don’t understand that sort of thing at all.’ In fact, as his own compositions show, he understood it very well, and if the remark was intended to put Handel gently in his place it probably succeeded.
Under the name of Arcomelo, Corelli was a member of the prestigious Accademia Arcadiana, founded in 1690 and including Ottoboni, Pamphilj and the bizarre figure of Queen Maria Casimira of Poland, a disappointing substitute for the lamented Queen Christina of Sweden, whose patronage had been so valuable to seventeenth-century Roman musicians. The Arcadians, led by influential critics such as Giovanni Maria Crescimbeni and Carlo Gravina, set out to refine literary expression among contemporary Italian writers: as apostles of order and dignity in art they represent a significant element in a more general trend, which was to carry opera along with it and which inevitably had its effect upon Handel. The whole cast of the Accademia Arcadiana was emphatically pastoral. Its members were all pseudonymous classical shepherds and the annals of the society were written up in a quaintly rustic fashion – for example, Ottoboni’s enormous palace becomes ‘the hut of the famed Crateo’. Membership was open to musicians. Arcangelo Corelli became an Arcadian, and in 1706 Alessandro Scarlatti and the harpsichordist Bernardo Pasquini joined the exalted swains, as Terpandro and Protico respectively.
Handel was too young to be a member, but was undoubtedly a welcome guest. The Roman climate was then agreeable enough for meetings often to take place out of doors, in an attractive amphitheatre, the Bosco Parrasio, which can still be seen within its garden on the Janiculum. The grounds belonged to Marchese Francesco Maria Ruspoli, who had joined the Arcadiana in 1691 under the name of Olinto Arsenio, soon followed by his wife Maria Isabella Cesi and their two children.
Ruspoli became Handel’s most important Italian patron, but their relationship was scarcely that of master and servant. The son of the Bolognese Count Alessandro Marescotti, he had inherited the title and considerable fortune of his uncle Bartolomeo, whose father had married a Ruspoli heiress in 1616. The family now lived in some splendour at Palazzo Bonelli, on the south side of Piazza SS. Apostoli, where the Marchese’s willingness to spend money on music rivalled that of the Roman cardinals. He commissioned over fifty oratorios, some of them from composers as eminent as Alessandro Scarlatti and Antonio Caldara (his maestro di cappella for seven years) and gave musical conversazioni on Sundays, celebrated for gathering together some of Rome’s finest performers and for launching new compositions.
Handel’s instinct for going straight to the top wherever artistic and social contacts were concerned is a notable feature of his career. He was almost certainly Ruspoli’s house guest from his arrival in 1706, and his presence in the Marchese’s entourage during the early months of 1707 is confirmed by documents now in the Vatican archives. The composer’s role, if not officially that of a domestic musician, was that of furnishing a series of chamber cantatas to Italian texts, works exemplifying the form at its most polished, and sometimes related to specific events or festivities.
The cantata was very much a Roman musical form, developed in the mid-seventeenth century by composers such as Luigi Rossi, Giacomo Carissimi and Antonio Cesti, using aria and recitative to create small scenes or depictions of the singer’s alternating moods. There was an obvious link with opera, but the two genres always remained distinct from one another. Though certain cantatas might seem to invite staged performance, they were not intended for theatrical performance and there is no contemporary record of Handel’s cantatas ever having been presented in this fashion. Given the prevailing ban on opera in Rome, this would hardly have been possible in any case.
A quick learner, Handel immediately grasped the form’s expressive potential, especially in the hands of a versatile contemporary practitioner such as Alessandro Scarlatti, whose mastery led to the composition of over 500 cantatas, many of them commissioned by the more musically inclined Arcadians. During his stay in Italy Handel himself produced nearly a hundred works of this type. The existence of several manuscript copies of selected cantatas in various Italian libraries suggests that it was precisely these works for which he first became famous (a collection of twenty-three of them in the Biblioteca Marciana at Venice features two portrait caricatures, developed from the initial ‘C’ of ‘cantata’, one of which may even be of the composer himself ). Respect for his handling of the genre is shown in the number of contemporary copies of individual examples, such as Sento là che ristretto and Se pari è la tua fe. Admiration was well founded. The cantatas are an extensive sampler of Handel’s skill in capturing a range of different moods, besides underlining that essentially human dimension which never failed to stimulate his musical imagination.
Many of them are carefully observed character portraits, by turns passionate, ironically humorous or tenderly pathetic, but tinged with a characteristically broad sympathy. Some exploit that favourite feature of Italian lyricists, the simile aria, in which the lover’s state of mind is paralleled with a ship in a storm or a swallow seeking her nest. Others take us through the various phases of an emotional drama. Tu fedel, tu costante, for instance, shows an integration of numbers so absolute as to make the mocking simplicity of the final aria a logical counterpoise to the hysterical turbulence of the opening sinfonia. Handel was to use pieces of identical form (abrupt staccato chords followed by volleying semiquaver sequences) in Partenope and Alcina for the obviously similar purpose of precipitating crises of feeling. In the cantata we watch the jilted girl’s sense of injustice at her Fileno’s sexual effrontery turn to a frank cynicism as Handel progressively lightens the music’s intensity.
What most clearly appealed to him was the form’s dramatic potential. Three of his finest cantatas are cast in the shape of tragic scenas, the heroi
ne in each being a woman driven by circumstance to the brink of despair. Agrippina condotta a morire (Agrippina led to her death), whose title encapsulates its theme, is a striking essay in structural control and an excellent illustration of the way in which the Baroque recitative and aria form are designed to work. Initially Agrippina is still the vigorous Roman matron of history, properly outraged at the way events have overtaken her, but as her nerve starts to crack, so does the rigidity of the cantata’s outlines. Her third air collapses into simple recitative after fourteen bars, briefly resumes with her resolve, then peters out again, a pattern continued through the scene with an aria whose middle section changes from quadruple to triple time. The whole piece ends with superb abruptness on four bars of unadorned recitative. Armida abbandonata, of which J. S. Bach made himself a copy, opens with an extraordinary stretch of declamation introduced by a vocal line supported on two arpeggiando violins and featuring one of the earliest of those plangent sicilianos Handel enjoyed devising for his lovelorn heroines. The cantata O numi eterni, for soprano and continuo, carrying his fame out of Italy under its better known name of La Lucrezia, is an eloquent musical portrait of the ravished Roman heroine in her final moments, a companion, in its tragic poignancy, to those paintings of Lucretia by artists like Reni and Guercino so popular with Baroque patrons and collectors.
One of the best, however, was probably completed after Handel’s return to Germany. Apollo e Dafne or La terra è liberata is almost an opera in itself. The cantata’s effectiveness springs less from mere polish of line and surface than from Handel’s penetrating sense of the realities of feeling that lie beneath the mythological framework. The simple harmonies and cheerful ditties of the sun god, bumptious after strangling the Python, are answered by the gentler, more reserved cast of Daphne’s music as in ‘Ardi adori’ she meets his advances not so much with anger as with detached remonstrance. The duet ‘Deh! lascia addolcire’ emphasizes their separateness by the use of glacial flute tones, a different tempo for each of them, and the fact that their voices are never allowed to blend. Apollo’s final pursuit is brilliantly realized in an air with concerto grosso accompaniment, which dissolves into alarmed recitative as Daphne is transformed into the laurel he ultimately hails in a dignified lament.
The principal soloist at the first performances of many of Handel’s Roman cantatas was the soprano Margherita Durastanti. In 1700, aged only fourteen, she had made her debut as a singer for the opera-mad Duke Ferdinando Carlo of Mantua, remaining under his patronage until 1704, when the pressures of money and politics forced him to rein in his theatrical enthusiasm. By January 1707 she had arrived in Rome with her mother as chaperone and was installed as one of Marchese Ruspoli’s singers. Durastanti was evidently an able linguist (her farewell to the London stage was in English) and Handel composed cantatas for her in Spanish and French. More important, she was the first singer we know of whose individual vocal qualities were directly related to the music Handel wrote for her. She was not particularly attractive – a contemporary caricature stresses her jutting ‘singer’s chin’ and large breasts – but her evident gifts as a singing actress helped to ensure the success of several of his operas with the London public. The two of them were much in each other’s company during this Roman spring and summer, and it is not inconceivable that their relationship was more than merely professional, though documents are silent on any such liaison.
In February the pair set off in Ruspoli’s entourage to stay at his villa near the ancient Etruscan town of Cerveteri. It was the end of the stag-hunting season, and Handel himself rode out with the Marchese for a day’s sport. His newly composed cantata, Diana cacciatrice, was performed that morning, possibly, as has been deduced from the final rousing fanfares, to speed the hunters on their way. A fortnight later Handel (who had been allotted his personal servant) and Durastanti followed Ruspoli to Civitavecchia, principal western port of the Papal States. Here the Marchese had fitted out a brigantine in splendid style as an alternative to the traditional galleys still favoured by the Pope’s naval establishment. Was the cantata Udite il mio consiglio, with its slightly mysterious Arcadian text, meant to offer an elaborate metaphor for this change from oared vessels to sailing ships, especially significant now that pontifical armed forces seemed likely to be dragged into the War of the Spanish Succession? Perhaps so, since its première took place at a banquet thrown by Ruspoli for the civic and military governors of Civitavecchia on 18 March.
In late May the Marchese Ruspoli left Rome once again, this time with his entire household, for the villeggiatura, always a part of the seasonal rhythm of Italian life. Nowadays the summer exodus takes place in August and is generally a dash to the seaside, but in the eighteenth century it was a slow, stately progress to the country villa, where the sweltering days were spent in gossip, flirting, and pottering about the estate. Handel, with his love of the country, must have enjoyed a two-month sojourn at Ruspoli’s moated palace in the little town of Vignanello, in the foothills of the extinct volcano Monte Cimino, between Rome and Viterbo. He was busy in any case with Armida abbandonata and had written three Latin motets, O qualis de coelo sonus, a Salve Regina and Coelestis dum spirat aura, for the weekend celebrations of Pentecost and St Anthony’s Day, when the cathedral was presented with a new altarpiece by the painter Michelangelo Ceruti. The Marchese was well pleased with the music and its performers. Handel got a jewelled ring and so did Durastanti, which suggests either that as a woman she was given the then exceptional privilege of being allowed to sing in church, or, more likely, that the motets must have been given in the Ruspoli palace.
At meals Handel, listed in the Ruspoli accounts as ‘the Saxon’, joined Durastanti at the top table, ‘l’eccelentissima tavola’. As a distinguished addition to the company in the dining room, Cardinal Ottoboni had dropped in on his way to Bologna. With him he may have brought the soprano Vittoria Tarquini, since the Vignanello guest list includes someone simply referred to as ‘Vittoria’, and a week later we find the diva detained in Ferrara by the advance of the imperial army. Nicknamed ‘La Bambagia’ (cotton wool), either for her flossy blonde hair or her generous figure, she was the mistress of Ferdinando de’ Medici, Crown Prince of Tuscany, but this seems not to have deterred other admirers, among them the young Saxon composer. She, rather than Margherita Durastanti, may have given the first performance of Armida abbandonata and another work written for the villa party, Una alma innamorata.
It seems reasonable to assume that a more important commission than either of these two works was preoccupying Handel during his days in the Latian countryside. The exact circumstances under which he came to compose his first Italian opera are unknown, and for many years even its actual performance history was in question. It has now been discovered that it was given in Florence during the early autumn of 1707, and that its title (it has always been called Rodrigo for convenience) was Vincer se stesso è la maggior vittoria (The greatest victory is over oneself). It was probably presented in the Teatro del Cocomero, which since 1652 had been the seat of the Accademia degli Infuocati, a splinter group of members of the original Accademia degli Immobili, established under the protection of Cardinal Giovanni Carlo de’ Medici. One of numerous such learned bodies in Florence – there were also the Sorgenti, the Cadenti and the Nascenti, as well as the Conversazione del Centauro and various smaller ones – the Infuocati had their theatre, now known as the Nicolini, in Via dei Servi by the Duomo. Its name was taken from the exploding grenade which the Infuocati – literally ‘aflame’ – had adopted as their symbol and which resembled the watermelons, cocomeri, still sold on stalls in Florence today. Renamed Teatro Niccolini, it has the distinction of being one of four surviving theatres (all of them rebuilt since the eighteenth century) associated with Handelian first nights.
One of the Infuocati at the time of Handel’s Florentine visit was Antonio Salvi, Prince Ferdinando’s court poet and one of Italy’s most important librettists. He may have supplied Handel with the text,
a revision of Francesco Silvani’s Il duello d’Amore e di Vendetta, written for Venice in 1699. The story is very loosely based on events and characters from the last days of Visigothic Spain, but though the historical figures of Roderick and Julian both appear, the invading Moors they were responsible for letting in do not and the drama ends with a lively coro, the customary closing ensemble for all the singers that rounded off a Baroque opera. There is some distinguished poetry here, and among two or three highly effective dramatic moments the finest is undoubtedly the scene in Act III when, as Giuliano and Evanco are about to kill the tyrant Rodrigo, Florinda rushes in to claim vengeance for herself and is in turn stopped by the appearance of her infant son in the arms of Esilena, brandishing the child as an object of moral blackmail.
The autograph manuscript of Rodrigo is incomplete. Evidence from the printed libretto, however, under its title Vincer se stesso è la maggior vittoria, suggests that the original concept had been significantly adjusted by the time of its first performance. Several arias were replaced, another was reassigned and a duet disappeared altogether. It has since been possible to reconstruct the entire piece with the help of early manuscript copies of Handel’s works and, in one case, through an inspired musicological conjecture linked to The Triumph of Time and Truth (1758) an English-language recension of Il Trionfo del Tempo.
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