Handel

by Handel- The Man

  Three days afterwards he wrote to Mattheson, with whom he still kept in touch, on the subjects of solmization (the system of linking individual notes to a series of syllables, do re mi et cetera) and the Greek modes. His admirably concise statements on these two subjects (dear to the heart of Pepusch, incidentally) have an absence of stuffiness and a general practicality typical of Handel as a composer. ‘I do not mean to argue’, he writes, ‘that solmization is of no practical use whatever, but as one can acquire the same knowledge in far less time by the method in use at present with such success, I see no point in not adopting the way which leads with greater ease and in less time to the proposed goal.’ Of the Greek modes he says, ‘Knowledge of them is no doubt necessary for those who wish to study and execute ancient music composed according to these modes; but as we have been liberated from the narrow limits of ancient music, I cannot see of what use the Greek modes can be to modern music.’ Handel was never so ignorant or improvident as to scorn assistance from the music of the past, as his oratorios make plain, but pedantic worship of the antique for its own sake was not for him.

  At length, during May of that year, he was able to leave for the Continent to fulfil the special orders given in a warrant issued by Newcastle on the Academy’s behalf, directing him ‘forthwith to repair to Italy Germany or such other Place or Places as you shall think proper, there to make Contracts with such Singer or Singers as you shall judge fit to perform on the English Stage’. He was bidden to keep in touch with the board and to tell them of any outstanding vocal discoveries and ‘upon what Terms he or She may be had’. And above all ‘Mr Hendel’ was to ‘engage Senezino as soon as possible to Serve the said Company and for as many Years as may be’.

  The Academy was resolved to begin in the grandest possible style. Senesino (‘the little Sienese’ – this had no connexion with his stature) was the name given to Francesco Bernardi, the greatest castrato of the decade and destined to create many of Handel’s most taxing operatic roles. Born in Siena about 1680, he made a name for himself in Venice, less, perhaps, as a stage presence (his features had that porcine effeminacy common to so many eunuchs) or for his musicianship than as the owner of a magnificently resonant voice, capable of a considerable expressive range. The Neapolitan impresario, Count Zambeccari, says of him: ‘Senesino continues to comport himself badly enough; he stands like a statue, and when occasionally he does make a gesture, he makes one directly the opposite of what is wanted,’ but audiences in Venice and Vienna seem generally to have been delighted, and his appearance at the Saxon court opera at Dresden in 1719 was on the crest of a wave of recent Italian successes.

  It was there that Handel went, by way of Dusseldorf and Halle for a visit to his family – narrowly missing, it is said, a meeting with Bach, one of the great ‘might-have-beens’ of musical history. Dresden itself was en fête in celebration of the forthcoming marriage of the Electoral Prince of Saxony to Archduchess Maria Josepha of Austria. There were performances by troupes of French and Italian comedians, firework displays, balls, masquerades and hunting parties, and if Handel needed any further inducement to stay on, it was offered by the presence of his old San Giovanni Grisostomo associates, Antonio Lotti and his wife Santa Stella.

  Teofane, the opera commissioned by Lotti for the festivities, was to make enough of an impression for Handel to take home the libretto and use it for his fourth Academy opera, Ottone. Besides Senesino and the castrato Berselli, both to be engaged for London, the Teofane cast included another Italian friend, Margherita Durastanti. She was signed up for an eighteen-month contract at £1,600 and Senesino’s price was £2,000. He and the other stars whom the Academy had in its sights proved harder to get hold of, possibly because someone at the Saxon court realized that Handel was not there purely for the sake of visiting the Lottis and enjoying the electoral wedding celebrations. It was not until the following year that the singers became available, after a quarrel with the Elector resulted in their dismissal.

  Lingering at Dresden, Handel entertained the court with his keyboard playing and was the subject of a slightly disgruntled letter from Count Jacob Heinrich Flemming, former Saxon minister to London, writing to King George’s mistress, Melusine von der Schulenburg: ‘I hoped to see Mr Hendel, and intended to speak to him in laudatory terms of you, but there was no opportunity. I made use of your name to persuade him to call on me, but either he was not at his lodgings or else he was ill. It seems to me that he is a little mad; however, he should not behave to me in that way, as I am a musician – that is, by inclination . . .’

  Flemming would not be the last to comment on the composer’s strong dash of eccentricity. The Academy directors, nevertheless, were satisfied with the way things were going, and they had now been joined by the Duke of Montague, by the indispensable Heidegger, and by another musical soldier, Colonel John Blathwayt who, as a pupil of Pasquini and Corelli and a regular attender at Cardinal Ottoboni’s Roman concerts, may have made Handel’s acquaintance during the spring and summer of 1707. The only sticking point in the negotiations was Senesino, whose initial failure to reach an agreement with Handel augured badly for their subsequent rapport. At a meeting on 30 November the directors, determined to procure the castrato’s services, asked the Modenese resident in London, Giuseppe Riva, Senesino’s personal friend, to step in.

  In constant touch with leading Italian cultural figures of the day, Riva was passionately concerned to promote an Italian interest at the Haymarket. As well as arranging with Senesino ‘to stay till the End of May on the most reasonable terms he can get him’, he may have been influential in laying the ground for the arrival of the illustrious figure of Giovanni Bononcini, to whom, as ‘Seignr. Bona Cini’, the Academy, at the same November meeting, resolved to apply. Meanwhile Johann Jakob Heidegger, as impresario of the King’s Theatre, stood by to give practical advice on details of house management and was asked to contact the Venetian composer Giovanni Porta. Pope was commissioned to furnish ‘a Seal with a Suitable Motto to it’ for the Academy’s documents and Arbuthnot undertook to negotiate the terms of a three-year contract with the soprano Anastasia Robinson. Handel himself was to be summoned home from Germany and made ‘Master of the Orchester with a Sallary’.

  The orchestra he assembled during the early months of 1720 numbered around thirty-two performers, the best available in London at the time. Nicola Haym appears as a cellist alongside Filippo Amadei, who would soon figure as a composer for the academy. Violinists included the Castrucci brothers, Prospero and Pietro, whom Handel had met in Rome, and Johan Helmich Roman, a talented young Swede who subsequently put his London experience to good use as a court composer, very much under Handel’s influence, in his native Stockholm. Among the oboists we find John Festing, member of a German musical family settled in England, and as principal trumpeter, John Baptist Grano, whose diary written during his spell in a debtors’ prison throws interesting light on the contemporary musical world. The whole band was probably distributed as six first violins, five second violins, two violas, six cellos, one double bass, four oboes, four bassoons, one trumpet, two harpsichords and a theorbo.

  Pope did not deliver his seal and motto, but Heidegger had more luck in securing the services of Giovanni Porta, already in London as a household musician to the Duke of Wharton. The première of his Numitore, scheduled for March 1720, took place in April owing to competition from a company of French comedians popular with the court. Though it only ran for five nights, the opera clearly impressed Handel, who did not disdain to quote from it in Samson and Solomon some twenty years later. Burney describes Porta as ‘one of the most able masters of his time; uniting learning with invention and fire’, but Numitore was his sole composition for the Academy.

  The opera’s librettist was Paolo Antonio Rolli, who, with Nicola Francesco Haym, was one of the Haymarket’s two theatre poets, and a word or two may be said here about each. Neither was known exclusively as a versifier, though Rolli’s translation of Paradise Lost, adapte
d for Catholic readers, won him fame. In his own right, as the author of highly polished odes and epigrams, and as a brilliant metrist, he ranks as the best Italian poet in the generation immediately preceding Metastasio. Haym, infinitely the less troublesome of the pair (though ready to describe himself as ‘not of inferior merit to any of my Profession now in England, particularly of ye Foreigners’) was born in Rome, the son of a peripatetic German musician. He began his career as a cellist, employed on several occasions by Cardinal Ottoboni, and in 1699, aged twenty, he journeyed to London in the suite of Wriothesley Russell, Duke of Bedford, who had engaged him while on the Grand Tour. He was given a handsome apartment in Bedford’s Bloomsbury house and in 1715, four years after the Duke died, ‘Mr Hyems that plays upon the Base viol’ entered the service of Lord Carnarvon. When still in Rome he had developed a talent for composing oratorios and cantatas. Now, though a Catholic, he was ready to furnish anthems for Carnarvon’s services at St Lawrence, Whitchurch, as well as writing chamber music for the Cannons players. In London Haym made himself a reputation as an antiquarian, giving advice on collecting and connoisseurship, and publishing editions of classic Italian poets.

  Less eager to adapt to London society, Paolo Rolli was even more zealous than Nicola Haym in wanting to promote Italian culture in England. Among cultivated Italians in general during this period there was a powerful sense of patriotism, which interestingly anticipated the political nationalism of the Risorgimento during the following century. London’s Italian community was expanding and a sizeable number of Rolli’s compatriots were attached, whether as performers or simply as enthusiastic hangers-on, to the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket. Rolli himself, with all his accomplishments, found it easy to mingle in metropolitan polite society, giving advice on matters of taste, while at the same time revelling in the atmosphere of backstage gossip and intrigue at the opera house.

  His dislike of Handel has perhaps been exaggerated by writers on the composer, but it is hard to warm to Rolli’s personality as it emerges from the composite picture formed by evidence from contemporary letters and diaries. Sly, mischief-making and determined to exploit the naïve Italophilia of his English patrons, whom he and his compatriots generally despised, he was not so much inimical to Handel as profoundly indifferent to his genius or his achievements. The circle of which he formed a part, which included Giuseppe Riva and Giovanni Giacomo Zamboni, a London agent for various German princes, concerned itself solely with the success or failure of Italian musicians and its correspondence during the 1720s is resoundingly empty of all but a handful of references to a composer who, by the end of the decade, would dominate the London musical scene.

  It requires no great degree of cynical penetration to understand why the works based on texts supplied by Rolli, operas such as Alessandro and Riccardo Primo, should be manifestly less successful than Haym’s. Excellent poet though he was, Rolli disdained to exercise his real gifts in devising the Academy libretti. As he later implied in one of his epigrams, the librettist’s task wasn’t really worth the effort: ‘I knock up old dramas in a new style and tack on dedications . . . if the directors lose out on them, it’s the fault of the singers, since the libretto doesn’t count. A good drama or a bad one, what does it matter so long as it’s cheap?’ Haym, though not noted for his poetic gifts, was much more alert than Rolli to the theatrical qualities of a lyric drama. His collaboration with Handel was sympathetic enough to suggest that the two men were friends as well as professional associates. Certainly Haym’s adaptations for Handel, such as Rodelinda, Tamerlano and Giulio Cesare, are notably more successful artistically than those of Paolo Rolli.

  None of the fourteen operas composed for the first phase of the Royal Academy’s existence makes use of an original text. It is surprisingly difficult for our modern critical sensibility to adjust itself to the late Baroque notion of opera as an inherently elastic medium, capable of being reshaped according to the demands of singers, audiences and composers or adapted to the propagandistic requirements of a ruling dynasty. Libretti were not sacred texts, specifically prepared for setting by a single hand and the intellectual property of their authors. A lyric drama was a palimpsest, scored over by numerous pens and given a wide variety of musical treatments. In the process arias could be rewritten, substituted or allotted to other characters, recitatives might similarly be shuffled or cut, and whole scenes or plot interests jettisoned meanwhile.

  Copies of these libretti (in London a parallel English verse translation was included) could be purchased by the audience and thus composers and poets built up their own supplies for future use. Hence some of the Academy texts were originally designed for operas by composers Handel is known to have encountered personally, such as Antonio Lotti and Domenico Scarlatti, while another possible acquaintance, Antonio Salvi, was the author of the dramas on which Rodelinda and Scipione were based. With the exception of Siroe which, though only two years old when Handel wrote his setting of it, had already been given five operatic treatments (including versions by Vivaldi and Porpora) the others were old-fangled Venetian texts, needing a general overhaul before presentation to a 1720s London audience.

  Siroe’s original poet was the brilliant young Pietro Trapassi, always known as Metastasio from his own Hellenized version of his surname. It was he who had furthered the process, begun in Venice by Apostolo Zeno, of giving opera seria an artistic integrity, which brought it more obviously into line with the ideals of French neoclassical tragedy in the Racinian manner, then the most widely admired dramatic form in Europe. Even before Zeno and Metastasio appeared on the scene, a move reflecting the current obsession with specific ‘kinds’ or genres in art had started towards separating out the mixture of narrative elements in Italian opera. Widow Twankey nurses and waggish lackeys of the sort found in early Venetian musical theatre were either removed to the buffo interludes from which full-scale comedies would soon develop, or else disappeared altogether. The number of plot interests and scene changes was cut down, the proportion of arias was reduced, choral numbers vanished almost totally and the formal aspects of the genre became heavily conventional. In the first great age of the singer as vocal acrobat, the aria, an offloading of emotions produced by moments dramatized in recitative, became the perfect means of displaying colour and technical agility, and the exit convention, whereby a character quitted the stage at the end of the piece, inviting applause to bring him back, was a standard feature of opera seria, conditioning the layout of the drama. There were few ensembles (caprice and mutual resentment among Italian singing stars was, then as now, taken for granted) but the opera nearly always ended with a coro from all the characters left alive at the end.

  The poetry of the lyric dramas is of an extreme artificiality, yet to those interested in this type of opera the high-flown clichés soon become like old friends. As scarcely anybody is below aristocratic rank, the discourse is invariably refined and a spade never gets called a spade. In essence the Italian is the same literary idiolect that went on being used until the mid-nineteenth century, and it is interesting to hear Violetta, Leonora or the Duke of Mantua resorting to the same tortured syntax and ballooning periphrasis as we hear from the lips of Cleopatra, Alceste or Grimoaldo. In Baroque Opera simile is used frequently as an aid to the composer, and the images are nearly always extracted from the same limited stock, ships in a storm or arriving in harbour, swallows far from their nests, bewildered butterflies, benighted pilgrims and sturdy oak trees. Obvious attempts are made to vary mood, since singers expected to display their talents in expressing a wide range of emotions.

  Like the French neo-classical tragedies on which they are so often based, the plots of opera seria are heavily involved with presenting stories and situations from the past in terms that would be immediately recognizable to the audience. However encrusted with the trappings of paganism and references to the ancient historians, the world of each opera is that of a Baroque court, and the conflicts presented smack as much of the Duc de Saint-Si
mon, Madame de Sévigné or the Comte de Grammont as they do of Tacitus and Livy. One of Antonio Salvi’s texts, ultimately set by Handel as Berenice, was originally called ‘The Contests of Love and Politics’, a title that effectively sums up the dilemma at the core of all such dramas. Though the audience may not always have followed the libretto closely throughout, we know that this kind of theatre, whether at Versailles or at Venice, was regarded as offering effective comment on contemporary society, and thus a visit to the opera was never (at any rate in theory) a mere escape to an idealized world. In London the noble subscribers to the Academy seem specifically to have demanded this kind of dynastic and historical drama, as opposed to the magic or pastoral operas popular during the previous decade.

  The ultimate success of opera seria, however, depended upon the tension between the world of illusion created by the stage picture and the affective realism produced by the composer and the librettist. To this end the scenes were changed in full view of the audience, the smooth magic of transformation being assisted by the arrangement of flats in grooves on either side of the stage and backdrops that could be quickly drawn up to reveal the new scene in a trice. This enchantment was further emphasized by the whole nature of eighteenth-century scenic design with its stress on complexity and apparently unlimited perspective, intended to give the spectator something for his fancy continually to dwell upon. As Stefano Arteaga, among the most lucid of eighteenth-century commentators on the genre, described it: ‘The secret . . . is to present objects in such a way that the imagination does not end at the same point as the senses, so that there is always something left for the audience to imagine beyond what the eye can see and the ear can hear.’