Handel
Page 8
As a musician Steffani has justifiably been termed ‘the greatest Italian master between Carissimi and Scarlatti’ and his stylistic cosmopolitanism significantly foreshadows Handel’s. There is no doubt that he used his enormous musical gifts as a diplomatic passport to places that might otherwise have been more impervious to him. The two composers may have met in Rome during the autumn of 1708, when Steffani, by now a fully ordained priest and engaged in mediation between Emperor Joseph I and Pope Clement XI, found time to sing at one of Cardinal Ottoboni’s concerts. ‘Such an acquaintance’, says Mainwaring, ‘[Handel] was glad to renew: for Steffani’s compositions were excellent; his temper was exceedingly amiable; and his behaviour polite and genteel.’ The mingled Franco-Italian idiom of Steffani’s operas written for Hanover during the 1690s had its impact on Handel’s style, but the older composer’s best-loved works were his chamber duets, abundantly expressive settings of Arcadian love poetry, demonstrating his contrapuntal skill. Handel, having acquired a collection of these during his stay in Hamburg, began making his own experiments in the genre while travelling through Italy and returned to it, presumably in emulation of the master craftsman, once established in Hanover. His poet here was Ortensio Mauro, a Venetian diplomat resident at the court, whose witty and graceful texts had already proved pleasing to Steffani. In Handel’s duets – he was to write several more during the 1740s – the combination of engaging conversational directness in the vocal exchanges, some effortlessly skilful counterpoint and an overall seasoning of ironic humour is irresistible.
Apart from these pieces and a handful of keyboard works, Handel composed nothing of major importance during his stay in Hanover. The Spanish Succession War had made cost-cutting necessary and the Elector had been forced to reduce his musical establishment, so that there was no opportunity for large-scale performances, either at the opera house or in the Lutheran court chapel. We know nothing of Handel’s other duties as kapellmeister or of his execution of them. The more we examine the circumstantial details surrounding it the more the appointment comes to seem like an inspired stopgap on the part of the Elector, probably assisted by the enthusiasm of his son and daughter-in-law, with whom he was still on good terms. This is borne out by his readiness to allow Handel to leave the court almost as soon as he had taken up his position, with the apparent intention of visiting England.
It may have been during his first Venetian trip in 1708 that the idea of working in London was suggested to him. Mainwaring tells us that the invitation came from Charles Montagu, Duke of Manchester, then Britain’s ambassador to Venice, a noted enthusiast for the theatre. The Duke was currently corresponding with the architect and dramatist John Vanbrugh who, having designed and opened the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket, was now on the lookout for singers and musicians. Further encouragement may have been given Handel by Pietro Grimani, Cardinal Vincenzo’s kinsman, whom the Serene Republic named in 1710 as its envoy to England. On either of his Venetian visits the composer could also have been presented to other music-loving English noblemen enjoying the city’s pleasures on the Grand Tour.
The Elector’s readiness to give his admired young kapellmeister a year’s leave of absence suggests that there may have been other agenda behind Handel’s projected visit to England. Relations between Hanover and the court of St James’s were now closer than ever, albeit on an unofficial level, as Queen Anne, after a dozen unsuccessful pregnancies and the deaths of the hydrocephalic Duke of Gloucester in 1700 and of her husband Prince George eight years later, was now seriously concerned with the impending succession crisis. There was, it is true, no love lost between her and the Hanoverians, and the collapse of the Whig ascendancy following the fall from favour of the Marlboroughs easily exacerbated this, but already shrewder politicians were looking towards Hanover with a view to feathering their nests, while at the same time keeping an eye cocked in the direction of Saint Germain and the Pretender. Georg Ludwig was a shrewd enough operator to see how advantageous the presence in London of a talented young German composer might be, especially one with the necessary savoir faire to make himself agreeable to persons of influence in court and government circles. Agostino Steffani’s example proved that the careers of musician and diplomat might be successfully combined. Handel, while neither an ambassador nor a spy, could keep his ear to the ground, passing on whatever information might be useful to the Elector as English politics entered one of its most volatile phases and the issue of Queen Anne’s likely successor remained questionable. Politics may thus have swept Handel to London: in one form or another they were to colour his English enterprises for the next thirty years.
Before leaving Germany in the autumn of 1710 he went south to Halle to visit his mother. ‘Her extreme old age . . . tho it promised him but a melancholy interview, rendered this instance of his duty and regard the more necessary,’ says Mainwaring. Dorothea Handel was then fifty-nine, even by eighteenth-century standards not excessively old. He visited friends and relatives, ‘among whom his old Master ZACKAW was by no means forgot’, and then set off for Dusseldorf, where he had been invited some months before by the Elector Palatine Johann Wilhelm. The ubiquitous Steffani had for a time acted as Johann Wilhelm’s chief minister and had managed to carry the Palatinate successfully through the toils of the war, now in its ultimate phase. A further recommendation had been made by Ferdinando de’ Medici, whose sister Anna Maria was married to the Elector Palatine. Delighted with the young composer, the latter wrote to Florence: ‘I have found in the virtuoso Georg Friedrich Handel all those singular talents for which he enjoyed a justified place in Y.R.H.’s favour, whose kind letter he has given me. I am, moreover, Y.R.H.’s debtor for the satisfaction I have received from his several weeks’ stay here,’ signing himself ‘Your Brother and Servant even in the Grave’. Though Johann Wilhelm was disappointed not to secure Handel’s services, ‘he made him a present of a fine set of wrought plate for a desert, and in such a manner as added greatly to its value’. Doubtless this trophy, along with the similar gift made earlier by Prince Ferdinando, was eventually shipped to England with the rest of Handel’s baggage, but there is no mention of all this handsome tableware in either his will or the household inventory made after his death.
The years before Handel’s arrival in England had seen startling changes in the nature of London’s flourishing theatrical life. At the start of the century there were two playhouses open in the city, the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane and the house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In 1705 a new theatre was built at the bottom of the Haymarket to designs by Sir John Vanbrugh, on a site now partly occupied by New Zealand House and Her Majesty’s Theatre. ‘Van’s tott’ring dome’, as the contemporary poet Nicholas Rowe called it, was an ambitious affair and the acoustics were generally inadequate: ‘the Tone of a Trumpet, or the Swell of an Eunuch’s holding Note, ’tis true, might be sweeten’d by it; but the articulate Sounds of a speaking Voice were drown’d, by the hollow Reverberations of one Word upon another.’ This was corrected some four years later, by which time audiences had had ample opportunity to judge both sorts of entertainment in their new setting. Meanwhile opera, for better or worse, had arrived in England and altered the entire spectrum of stage entertainment in the capital.
Its appearance was not altogether a surprise. London audiences had grown increasingly accustomed to musical interpolations in comedy and tragedy performances, and all plays were in any case given with ‘act music’ designed to cover scene changes, quieten the spectators and introduce the forthcoming stages of the drama. During the 1690s Purcell had brought out his ambigus or ‘semi-operas’, plays heavily larded with dramatic music of the highest calibre, though not all the speaking roles were expected to sing as well. The growing number of young noblemen spending long periods on the Continent to complete their education inevitably made for a greater sophistication in the taste of at least one important sector of the metropolitan public. Thus Italian singers and instrumentalists started by degrees to figure in thea
trical programmes, and operatic arias were inserted at appropriate moments.
The Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket opened under Vanbrugh’s direction on 19 April to a prologue spoken by Anne Bracegirdle, the most accomplished actress of her day, written by the royal physician Sir Samuel Garth:
Your own magnificence you here survey,
And cars triumphal rise from carts of hay.
Swains here are taught to hope, and nymphs to fear,
And big Almanzors fight mock Blenheims here.
Descending goddesses adorn our scenes,
And quit their bright abodes for gilt machines.
Garth’s lines introduced a pastoral entertainment, Gli amori d’Ergasto, by Jakob Greber, an undistinguished German composer who two years earlier had written the music for Nicholas Rowe’s popular tragedy The Fair Penitent. The new opera was notable solely as the first to be given in London with foreign singers and an Italian text. It was at Drury Lane, however, in the preceding January, that the town had been introduced to ‘An Opera after the Italian manner, all sung’ in the shape of Arsinoe, an English-language adaptation of a Venetian libretto with music provided from various sources by Thomas Clayton, a member of the Queen’s band. The project, in which Clayton was joined by the harpsichordist Charles Dieupart and the cellist Nicola Haym, later to become one of Handel’s librettists, was aimed at introducing the London public to the Italian operatic style by tacking the musical entertainment on to the end of a spoken dramatic performance. The first run reached twenty-four performances and a 1706 revival ran to eleven, but Arsinoe’s success probably owed more to its novelty value, enhanced by some exceptionally handsome sets designed by England’s leading decorative painter Sir James Thornhill, than to the quality of the score Clayton had cobbled together.
London had not heard the last of Clayton. Two years later, zealous for the triumph of vernacular opera, Joseph Addison, by now one of the most respected components of the Whig propaganda machine, brought out Rosamund, based on the life of Henry II’s unfortunate mistress, to Clayton’s settings. Addison’s high-flown muse was unsuited to lyric-writing, and matters were made worse by his attempt to imitate the by now outmoded Venetian habit of introducing low comedy characters. He can hardly be blamed outright for Rosamund’s failure (a miserable three-night run) since he seems to have known little about music and the operas he saw on his Italian travels in 1701 included Pollarolo’s Cato Uticense, another of Matteo Noris’s surreal lyric farragos. Ironically, nevertheless, he was able to note among the Venetian theatre poets ‘a multitude of particular words that never enter into common discourse . . . For this reason the Italian Opera seldom sinks into a poorness of language, but amidst all the meanness and familiarity of the thoughts, has something beautiful and sonorous in the expression.’
The Rosamund fiasco soured Addison’s view of Italian opera for good. His comments, distributed to London breakfast tables in the Spectator, set the tone for an opposition to the genre so rootedly English in its xenophobic, philistine simple-mindedness as to have survived in certain quarters almost unchanged to this day. One of the chief objections, in a decade during which Englishmen saw themselves as embattled champions of liberty, was the fairly basic one that it was foreign:
No more th’Italian squalling tribe admit
In tongues unknown: ’tis Popery in wit,
wrote his fellow journalist Richard Steele, neatly summarizing the common view. Writers, what is more, saw their public being snatched away by the new craze. In a letter to Ambrose Philips, Jonathan Swift, as proud as other Augustan literary men of not being musical, says, ‘The Town is run mad after a new Opera. Poetry and good Sense are dwindling like Echo into Repetition and Voice. Critick Dennis vows to G— these Opera’s will be the ruin of the Nation and brings Examples from Antiquity to prove it. A good old Lady five miles out of Town askt me tother day, what these Uproars were that her Daughter was always going to.’
High-minded and humourless, John Dennis pitched into opera with a blinding obtuseness. It could not, he said, ‘inspire publick Spirit and publick Virtue, and elevated Notions of Liberty’. Music, unless subservient to Reason, encouraged vanity, selfishness and stupidity. Opera was ‘Barbarous and Gothick’ and unpatriotic. ‘If any Yeoman of Kent or Sussex should neglect to sow his Wheat or his Barley, should grub up his Fruit-Trees, and demolish his Hop-Grounds, and fall a planting the Olive of Lucca, the Orange of Naples, and the Muscatello of Monte-Fiascone, or of Mont-Alchin, what would his Neighbours think of such a Proceeding?’ – and it promoted homosexuality – ‘ . . . if our Subscriptions go on, at the frantick rate that they have done, I make no doubt but we shall come to see one Beau take another for Better for Worse, as once an imperial harmonious Blockhead did Sporus.’
Heedless of such warnings, the public avidly embraced the new form. The earliest complete Italian opera given in London was Giovanni Bononcini’s Camilla, originally written for Naples to a text by Silvio Stampiglia, now translated for the English production, opening on 30 March 1706 at Drury Lane. The buffo characters Linco and Tullia were retained as roles for the popular playhouse singers Leveridge and Salway (who sang the part en travesti) and the opera’s triumph was reflected in its sixty-four performances between 1706 and 1709. An apparently deathless controversy over singing opera in the original language found a compromise in the half-English, half-Italian version of Scarlatti’s Pirro e Demetrio, but Italian finally conquered with Almahide and L’Idaspe Fedele, given at the Queen’s Theatre with almost exclusively foreign casts.
In January 1708 a definitive separation was made by the Lord Chamberlain Charles Talbot, Duke of Shrewsbury, between the domains of lyric and spoken drama in the Haymarket and Drury Lane. Opera became the sole preserve of Vanbrugh’s company at the Queen’s Theatre, while plays were restricted to Drury Lane under the management of the impresario Christopher Rich. Shrewsbury’s attempt to hive off the two entertainment forms was what Vanbrugh had for some time been aiming at, but though he was optimistic that ‘Operas will settle and thrive in London’, the new arrangement proved far from ideal. Vanbrugh’s misgivings, arriving all too soon, had a timeless ring: ‘you are sensible the daily Receipts of the Operas are not near sufficient to answer the Daily and monthly demands and whenever they fail there will be a full stop . . . ’ Writing to the Duke of Manchester in Venice, he deplored ‘the Pride & Charge of Our Present Singing Ladys, who Cost the House four hundred pounds a Year apiece’. Even Vanbrugh’s virtuosity and resourcefulness were daunted by the complexities of opera management. Stepping back from hands-on administration, he handed over the running of the Queen’s Theatre to a sequence of lessees.
Foremost among these when Handel arrived in the autumn of 1710 was the enterprising figure of Aaron Hill, the son of a Wiltshire lawyer, who had travelled in Egypt and the Levant before involving himself in various doubtful money-making schemes. The age was crazy for speculation of all kinds, and overseeing the affairs of an opera company must have seemed no more uncertain a project than exporting Scottish timber, sinking a coal mine or making a cheap substitute for almond oil out of beechmast, at each of which Hill had tried his hand. Now he embarked on an opera libretto, devising a scenario to be turned into verse by the Haymarket’s Italian theatre poet Giacomo Rossi. The work, loosely based on an episode from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme liberata, was entitled Rinaldo and the composer selected to write the music was ‘Mr Hendel, the Orpheus of our century’.
Some of Handel’s works had already been aired before London audiences by the time he completed the score, probably in February 1711. Before Christmas the Queen’s Theatre had a taster in the shape of ‘Ho un non so che nel cor’ from Agrippina, slipped into a revival of Scarlatti’s Pirro e Demetrio and sung by Francesca Vanini Boschi, who had taken part in the première of Handel’s opera. Earlier still, before he had even set foot in London, the overture and dances from Rodrigo had turned up as incidental music for a revival of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, all a
ttributed by their publisher John Walsh to ‘an Italian Master’.
The court of St James was also interested in Handel. Queen Anne herself was fond of music, having learned as a girl to sing and play the harpsichord, but her increasing obesity and gouty legs now ruled out the theatre trips she had enjoyed when younger. The opera instead came to her – Arsinoe and Camilla were given command performances at St James’s – and royal birthdays were celebrated, according to custom, with a specially commissioned ode, a ball and a banquet. On 6 February 1711 the festivities were particularly lavish. ‘The nobility and gentry went to compliment her majestie in richer habits than has been known since 1660; the ladies appeared with jewels very glorious . . . and the evening concluded with bonefires, illuminations &c.’ In the afternoon, noted another report, ‘was perform’d a fine Consort, being a Dialogue in Italian, in Her Majesty’s Praise, set to excellent Musick by the famous Mr Hendel . . . with which Her Majesty was extreamly well pleas’d’.
The soloists on this occasion were Italian singers from the Queen’s Theatre and the work itself may have been Handel’s cantata Echeggiate, festeggiate,*(e) known to have been written in London around this time. Evidently assembled in some haste from already existing material, the work is a setting of a self-consciously political text, in which various Olympian deities hymn the blessings of peace. The Tories, currently in the ascendant after Anne had quarrelled with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, were eager to bring Britain’s ongoing war with France over the Spanish Succession to a close and prepared to quit the Austrian alliance, which had carried the conflict forward over eight victorious years. Campaign fatigue was in the air, the Duke of Marlborough, formerly the nation’s hero, was suddenly yesterday’s man, mired in corruption charges, and the war was now portrayed by government propagandists as costly, pointless and without obvious benefits for the nation.