Handel
Page 7
The most serious assignment in the midst of all this may reflect the Marchese Ruspoli’s growing political involvement. Late that summer the continuing squabbles between the Pope and the Austrians over the lagoon of Comacchio and the territory around Ferrara developed into open conflict and the Marchese raised an army of 1,200 men to defend the city for the papal cause. He was not a particularly competent commander, but it seemed only right that the event should be celebrated in fine style with a Handel cantata on the grand scale. O come chiare e belle is, by its very nature, not among his most memorable examples of the genre, an occasional piece in which the spirit of the River Tiber, invoked by the shepherd Olinto (Pamphilj’s Arcadian name) is urged by Glory (soprano) to shed his fears of Austrian arms, with promises of historical fame. Olinto, making an oblique reference to universal papal supremacy, prepares to change ‘the humble bagpipe into a trumpet’, and the trio hail Ruspoli’s favourable star. The music, a series of facile, short-breathed arias, has all the signs of having been put together in a considerable hurry.
Ruspoli’s new regiment marched out of Rome on 9 September 1708. The parade was obviously a notable event in a city which, during the past year, had trembled at the likelihood of an assault by Austrian troops and the Marchese commissioned Alessandro Piazza, a painter of less than average talent, to capture what must have seemed like an auspicious moment for the embattled papacy. In the resulting panorama the more important figures in the Ruspoli entourage are shown gathered outside Palazzo Bonelli to watch the soldiers leaving. Among the group stand Margherita Durastanti, wearing the still fashionable fontange headdress of white lace over a tall comb, and Handel himself in a full-bottomed periwig and gold-trimmed gala suit, tricorne hat tucked under his arm, every inch the dapper young gentleman composer.
With Ruspoli away on campaign, Handel had no special reason for staying in Rome during the autumn of 1708. For nearly a year he disappears from view in the various written records through which it has been possible up until this point to trace his progress between the different Italian musical capitals. He may have returned to Halle or even gone back to Hamburg. In the new year, soon after Pope Clement and Emperor Joseph ‘came to a composition’, in the contemporary phrase, over Comacchio and the Ferrarese, Ruspoli was given the title ‘Prince of Cerveteri’. When the new-made grandee came home to his cantatas and oratorios, it was not the prodigious Saxon he made maestro di cappella but Antonio Caldara, the master whose opera Handel had enjoyed during the Venetian carnival. Given Handel’s independent spirit, he is unlikely to have wanted to tie himself down by accepting the job, had he been offered it. We can understand how professional pique may have made him reluctant to hang around once a musician of Caldara’s calibre was installed at Palazzo Bonelli.
He nevertheless continued to produce cantatas, of which ‘Panstufato’ Angelini duly made copies for Ruspoli’s collection, so the link between composer and patron was not irreparably broken. What one modern writer on Handel has called ‘a treasurehouse of musical invention’ went on producing its inexhaustible riches, and the same writer’s parallel with Schubert seems entirely appropriate. Works like Dalla guerra amorosa or Lungi da me, pensier tiranno, both probably dating from the summer of 1709, confirm what is already evident in Handel’s cantatas from the previous two years, that the possibilities of the musical form, especially its expressive intimacy, were enticing enough to make the compositional process a creative adventure as well as a purely technical exercise.
Material from the cantatas found its way into Agrippina, the major operatic project on which Handel began work during the latter half of 1709. Cardinal Grimani, amid all his other interests, was noted for a love of the stage. His father and uncle had founded two of Venice’s earliest opera houses. Vincenzo, with his brother Giovanni Carlo, had started a new theatre at San Giovanni Grisostomo in 1678 and during his years as envoy at Turin he had given practical advice on presenting operas to the Duke of Savoy. He also supplied the occasional texts to composers writing for his own theatre. Among his Venetian friends was Apostolo Zeno, most respected librettist of his generation, who would later be appointed Italian poet to the Austrian imperial court. Keen to raise the aesthetic tone of contemporary lyric drama and much influenced by French neoclassical tragedians, Zeno had founded an academy in Venice, the Animosi, whose members gathered in Grimani’s palace. Though the opera with which the Cardinal now furnished Handel is not the kind of weighty Racinian affair that might have appealed to Zeno, its sleek outlines and elegant versification would surely have had his blessing. So too would the consistency in its sardonic portrayal of bad behaviour among ancient Rome’s movers and shakers. Some doubt has been expressed as to Grimani’s authorship – his name is not given on the earliest printed libretto – but it is difficult not to suppose that his wide experience as a diplomat and political agent contributed to the success of what is, after all, one of the finest operatic texts Handel ever set.
The first performance of Agrippina at the San Giovanni Grisostomo theatre was scheduled for the winter season of 1709–10. All the Venetian theatres belonged to patrician families and the Grimanis’ was among the newest and grandest, standing next to the church of the same name north of the Rialto and close to the house where the explorer Marco Polo was supposed to have lived. The French Mercure Galant described it as ‘the finest and richest in the city. The room for the spectators is surrounded with five rows of boxes one above the other, thirty-one to a row, enriched with sculptured decorations.’ The ceiling showed the Grimani arms cradled among garlands held by cherubs in a trompe-l’oeil gallery. There was a drop curtain painted with Venus and Cupid, raised an hour before the overture, when a big chandelier and four candle brackets came down to illuminate the audience. Thanks to a barely legible inventory of the family effects made in 1714 we know something of the stage and the sets, from details such as ‘perspective backcloths’, ‘sky-borders’ and ‘a tin moon’ (Ariodante, incidentally, features a stage moonrise) and the six wings on either side. All of this has now disappeared; the theatre, much rebuilt, and fitted out in the ‘Liberty’ style in the early twentieth century, is now the Teatro Malibran, but its back view from the bridge across the canal on to which it abuts can have altered little since Handel’s day.
That season was an especially good one, with new operas by Gasparini and Albinoni at San Cassiano, and two by Lotti scheduled for San Giovanni Grisostomo on either side of Agrippina. Handel’s cast, what is more, was one of the best he ever mustered: Durastanti was there as Agrippina herself, Valeriano Pellegrini sang Nerone and Poppea was the outstanding Diamante Maria Scarabelli. Even the smaller roles carried distinction, if the presence of the bass Giuseppe Maria Boschi as Pallante is anything to go by. Success, of a sort Handel was hardly ever to know again, was inevitable and richly deserved. There were apparently twenty-seven performances, and we may surely believe Mainwaring when he says that ‘the audience was so enchanted with this performance, that a stranger who should have seen the manner in which they were affected, would have imagined they were all distracted. The theatre, at almost every pause, resounded with shouts and acclamations of viva il caro Sassone and other expressions of approbation too extravagant to be mentioned. They were thunderstruck with the gravity and sublimity of his stile . . .’
They were just as likely to have been impressed by its wit, for so far from being grave and sublime Agrippina is a wickedly satirical comedy of sex, politics and female ambition, in which hardly a single character escapes Grimani’s barbed pen. The story uses the same protagonists as Monteverdi’s more familiar L’Incoronazione di Poppea (Seneca is a conspicuous absentee, though maybe the Cardinal had turned over Busenello’s libretto) in dealing with the machinations of Agrippina to secure the imperial succession for her son Nero and to thwart the amorous designs of her husband Claudius on Poppea, who is loved by Otho. Throughout the libretto Grimani stresses the atmosphere of conspiracy and intrigue with which he himself was so familiar. Several of the dramati
c situations, requiring characters to overhear secrets or to deliver a series of asides, show clear debts to spoken drama, but a genuine consistency governs the management of plot and participants to the extent that the piece could almost be given independently of its music.
It is to Handel’s credit, of course, that this should not be allowed finally to obtrude. The integration of aria and recitative is ideally complete, so that a self-generating momentum is set up from the start. Many of the numbers, besides, are very short and each is perfectly shaped to fulfil a dramatic function. The tiny trio ‘E quando mai’, which follows on Lesbo’s announcement to the startled Claudio and Poppea of Agrippina’s impending arrival, is farce par excellence and marvellously economical in doing no more than is necessary to create an air of total confusion. Equally just in their positioning are the brief bursts of song, scarcely more than vocal dances, with which Agrippina, Poppea and Nerone reject the unfortunate Ottone, destined to wander through the opera in an atmosphere of misunderstanding and foiled good intentions.
He is given, in compensation, some of the score’s truly eloquent moments, when Handel pauses to dwell upon his integrity, and asks us to do the same as we listen to the flutes and muted violins of ‘Vaghe fonti’ (Keiser’s ‘Ruhig sein’ again) or the poignant G minor of ‘Pur ch’io ti stringa’. Yet it is Agrippina who dominates her own opera, a complete study in power, on whom all the other characters depend, but, for all her resourcefulness, gnawed by continuing doubts. Obsessively enjoining everyone to ‘follow my advice and you shall prosper’, she is revealed as essentially vulnerable in ‘Pensieri voi, mi tormentate’, an almost textbook demonstration of the inherent flexibility underlying Baroque recitative and aria forms.
Everything in Agrippina counts, and we catch, for the first time in Handel’s work, that skill in mingling musical idioms of all kinds, from the pompous French overture to the infectious rhythms of ‘Ogni vento’, which was to become a trademark of his style. Nevertheless, practically every number is a re-creation of something he had written before, so that the entire opera sounds like a guide to Handel’s singular memory. His technique of self-borrowing is not the result of a lack of originality. There were some thirty-five operas yet to spring from his pen, all of them crammed with new melodies. It is rather that he appears to have seen composition in terms of appropriate solutions to the demands of a given circumstance, and to have worked continuously at the fresh application of his initial ideas. Old beginnings and old endings (and one or two of the latter turn up everywhere in his work) do not necessarily enclose the same old in-fillings, and the effect of Agrippina on those who have grown familiar with his earlier pieces must inevitably be like that of rereading a much-loved novel of which we already know the story and can now appreciate the finer touches.
His Venetian triumph did not serve to keep him in Italy, but by any standards it was unforgettable, and must often have consoled him in some of the years to follow. As for Vincenzo Grimani, he was almost certainly not present at any of the Agrippina performances. His valuable work as viceroy of Naples was cut short when, during the summer of 1710, he fell ill with bladder cancer. As if in sympathy, the blood of the city’s patron saint Januarius (San Gennaro), which traditionally liquefies inside its reliquary on his feast day, 19 September, failed to do so and a week later the Cardinal died, aged fifty-five. On his deathbed he had asked Pope Clement to pardon any offence he might have given. The pontiff’s decidedly un-Christian reply demanded public recognition of Grimani’s ‘many errors’ and ‘the damages inflicted on Holy Church’.
3
Popery in Wit
Soon after the première of Agrippina Handel left Venice. The impact of his Italian journey was permanent, the experience mediated in later years through his habit of continually recycling melodic ideas or remodelling entire numbers from the works he composed during this period to adapt them to a new context, with the nonchalant skill of a couturier fitting a dress with the help of swatches, shears and pins. He was ready now to begin a professional career among the courts of Germany and, operating with his customary shrewdness, had gained various useful contacts and introductions from noblemen and diplomats encountered during his travels.
Ferdinando de’ Medici was one of these, apparently ready to bury any differences between them as rivals for the favour of Vittoria Tarquini. In a letter of recommendation addressed to Prince Karl of Pfalz Neuburg, governor of the Austrian province of Tyrol, dated 9 November 1709, Ferdinando wrote, ‘During his stay here, Georg Friedrich Handel, native of Saxony, has shown himself so endowed with honourable sentiments, civil behaviour, a great gift of languages and a more than ordinary talent for music, that since he has striven to earn my good will, I cannot refrain from trying to procure, on his behalf, the most useful support for him on his return to Germany. More especially, your Highness’s favour, destined by the promptings of your lofty genius to honour merit and virtue . . .’ Handel arrived at Innsbruck in March 1710, but did not stay to court the patronage of Prince Karl, who replied to Ferdinando that though the composer had presented his introduction, ‘the aforementioned had no need of my assistance’.
Handel must already have settled on a destination and a job to go with it. On his first trip to Venice he had been presented to Prince Ernst August of Hanover, visiting for the carnival season. The introduction was doubtless made by the Hanoverian envoy to the Serene Republic, Baron Johann Adolf von Kielmansegg, an ardent music lover married to the Prince’s half-sister. It was probably their recommendations rather than Ferdinando’s which he made up his mind to use, since both were Protestants, while the Medici family’s German links were with Catholic dynasties. The issue of faith was not unimportant to Handel, as the grandson of a Lutheran pastor and the descendant of refugees from religious persecution. Mainwaring tells us that the Roman cardinals had tried persuading him to convert to Catholicism. ‘Being pressed very closely on this article by one of these exalted Ecclesiastics, he replied that he was neither qualified nor disposed to enter into enquiries of this sort, but was resolved to die a member of that communion, whether true or false, in which he was born and bred.’ Efforts at winning him over to ‘outward conformity’ had no greater success, ‘unless it were that of confirming him still more in the principles of protestantism’. Hanover’s Lutheran court was a tolerant one, however, and its cosmopolitan climate tolerated not just those of other faiths but those, like the Irish Deist John Toland who spent some time there as a British government agent, with very little religion of any kind. Handel arrived there some time during the spring of 1710, and though the Elector officially appointed him kapellmeister, with a salary of 1,000 thaler, on 16 June, we find the old Electress Sophia writing to the Queen of Prussia two days earlier: ‘Here there is no news save that the Elector has taken into his service a kapellmeister named Handel, who plays the harpsichord marvellously to the enjoyment of the Electoral Prince and Princess. He is a good-looking man and the talk is that he was the lover of Victoria [sic].’ Both these last comments are worth noting. The first bears out the impression conveyed by the earlier portraits and underlined by George III’s German manuscript comment that ‘Handel was extremely well built and lacked nothing of manly charm’; the second makes rather more convincing the allusion to Vittoria Tarquini by Mainwaring.
In four years’ time the Elector Georg Ludwig of Hanover would succeed to the English throne as King George I. His son and daughter-in-law, the Electoral Prince and Princess, as George II and Queen Caroline, would become two of Handel’s staunchest supporters. Few royal figures of the period have been so deliberately misunderstood as these three, and we are even now moving only very gradually towards a proper appreciation of them as rational, cultivated individuals. George I especially has suffered from the propagandistic Victorian view of him, substantially created by William Makepeace Thackeray in his ‘Four Georges’ lecture series and indestructible thereafter, as callous, self-seeking, brutal to his wife, overfond of hunting and memorable solely for th
e odd habit of dressing his salads with whale oil. The twentieth-century English prejudice against the Germans, fostered by two world wars, has not helped to dispel this image.
The truth is that George, whether as Elector or King, was a far more complex figure than such dubious traditions have been ready to allow. Remote and charmless as he may have seemed in public, he was also refined, astute and politically adept, earning loyalty and admiration from his English ministers and universal respect among the various ruling princes of Europe. More significantly where Handel was concerned, he was a man of considerable culture, born into a family passionate for music and au fait, in this respect, with the latest French and Italian styles in opera and instrumental writing.
Hanover itself, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, was Germany’s most sophisticated princely court. The Elector’s parents had patronized the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz and created a miniature Versailles at Schloss Herrenhausen, designed by the Italian architect Giacomo Querini. French was the preferred language among the electoral family and French too was the idiom of the orchestral suites composed for the court band by its directors Jean-Baptiste Farinel and Francesco Venturini. At the opera, however, the bias was towards Italian composers. It was the Elector’s brother Ernst August who, in 1688, had invited Agostino Steffani, one of the leading contemporary operatic masters, to Hanover. A choirboy at St Mark’s in Venice, Steffani, aged thirteen, had been taken into the Elector of Bavaria’s service as a pupil of the Munich court kapellmeister Johann Kaspar Kerll. He visited Paris, where he heard Lully’s operas, and in 1681 his own debut took place with the Munich première of Marco Aurelio. Steffani’s skills were not merely musical. When he arrived in Hanover it was in the double capacity of composer and diplomat. By now he had assumed the status of an abbate (a priest in minor orders) enhancing his credit as the Protestant Duke’s envoy to Catholic courts. He became an important negotiator in the duke’s ultimately successful efforts to secure himself an electorate and was later made responsible, as Pope Clement’s Vicar Apostolic, for overseeing the welfare of Catholics in the various Protestant states and for sterling attempts to convert various wavering heretic royalties. Despite a handful of illustrious proselytes, he was doomed to almost constant failure in his drive to re-establish a Catholic presence in solidly Lutheran and Calvinist communities.