Handel

by Handel- The Man

  Handel remained constant to this type of opera throughout his career and touches of it permeate practically everything else he wrote (Messiah, for example, contained a number of operatic features, including a duet placed just before the closing numbers). The newer Venetian manner, in which heavily contrapuntal textures are abandoned in favour of lightly moving syncopated melodies over drumbeat bases, turns up in Agrippina and Il Pastor Fido, and Handel shows himself a past master of it throughout his subsequent operas. The most eclectic of all the great composers, he took what he wanted from an immense range of musical styles and made it his own, but his thirty-eight operas testify to his belief in the validity of opera seria as an art form.

  His earliest Academy opera, Radamisto, receiving its first performance on 27 April 1720 at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, is an obvious statement of intent on the part of both the composer and the opera management. Its dramatic effectiveness and the consistency of its musical characterization and overall design make it one of the best operas he ever wrote. There is every indication that Handel had taken full advantage of his stay at Dresden to absorb newer Italian styles and the result is a work that establishes a standard hitherto undreamt of in English theatrical music, one which reflects most, if not all, of the features typifying his methods and ideas in the operas of the so-called ‘Academy’ period.

  The libretto is an adaptation, probably by Nicola Haym, of L’amor tirannico by the Neapolitan poet Sebastiano Bianciardi under his pen-name of Domenico Lalli, originally set by Francesco Gasparini in 1710 for Venice’s Teatro Cassiano. Based on an episode from Tacitus’s Annals, its ultimate source was a French tragedy, Georges de Scudery’s L’amour tyrannique, produced in Paris in 1638. Haym, using a Florentine version of Lalli’s text, replaced several of the arias and slightly diminished the contribution made by certain of the characters, creating in the process a drama of baffled intimacy and fatal misapprehension, which has one of the most gripping plots in any Handel opera. The composer would provide a radically altered edition of Radamisto for a revival at the end of the year, but the story in both versions remains fundamentally the same. Radamisto, prince of Thrace,*(i) is attacked by his brother-in-law Tiridate, King of Armenia, who desires Radamisto’s wife Zenobia: Tiridate’s queen, Polissena, long-suffering but ultimately provoked beyond endurance, begins with a hopeless yearning for her fickle husband, which finally turns to righteous fury when she sees Radamisto condemned to execution.

  Like Verdi, whom as a creative personality he so frequently resembles, Handel was clearly drawn by certain types of story and seems to have had a special fondness for that favourite Baroque figure, the heroine in extremis. With such characters he could exercise his penchant for the tender-pathetic, that quality which relates him so strongly to the preromantic sentimentalism of the age of Ossian and Werther, the era immediately following his own. Zenobia and Radamisto, the sundered husband and wife, are portrayed, like Rodelinda and Bertarido five years later, with the mature awareness of a relationship intense enough to survive the gravest emotional shocks. From the stirring flourishes of the overture till the leisured close in Handel’s longest vaudeville finale, there is hardly a dull moment in the piece. The musical characterization builds on the sturdiness of the text, its dramatis personae firmly outlined in moods and aspirations, and further established for us, in various cases, through their association with a particular key.

  One of the most interesting of the principals is Polissena, who begins the opera with the majestic wretchedness of ‘Sommi Dei’. The librettist’s treatment of her is noteworthy in that she makes the briefest of appearances in Act II in order, as it seems, to have something to sing (in this case an attractive G minor aria in triplet rhythms). Handel clearly felt that, notwithstanding the distinction of her music in the first version, there was not enough for her to do and gave Maddalena Salvai, who sang in the December revival, a scene to open Act III, transferring, in the process, one of Zenobia’s most moving utterances. Tiridate’s young brother Fraarte also has some engaging music, including ‘Mirerò quel vago volto’ in Act I, with its ravishing flattened third in the vocal part’s opening phrase and, even if not altogether necessary to the story, makes a character of real substance, foreshadowing Cherubino in his naïve ardour. The summit of Handel’s achievement in this masterly opening to the first phase of his operatic maturity is reached in Radamisto’s anguished invocation to the wife he supposes dead, ‘Ombra cara’, which remained a personal favourite among the composer’s own works. Burney says of it: ‘. . . too much praise cannot be given to that song, in which, though the composition is so artful, an inverted chromatic imitation being carried on in the accompaniments, yet the cantilena is simply pathetic throughout. I remember hearing Reginelli sing this air at the opera in 1747, among some light Italian songs of that period, and it seems the language of philosophy and science, and the rest the frivolous jargon of fops and triflers.’

  After the first night of Radamisto Lady Cowper, in the suite of the Princess of Wales, noted laconically in her diary: ‘At Night, Radamistus, a fine opera of Handel’s Making. The King there with his Ladies. The Prince in his Stage-box. Great Crowd.’ Handel had taken the uncommon step of dedicating the libretto in person to the King, and George’s general enthusiasm for the Academy project is shown by Handel’s implication, in his brief dedicatory epistle, that the King had already heard and approved the music. There was indeed a great crowd at the performance, which started at half past six. ‘In so splendid and fashionable an assembly of ladies (to the excellence of their taste we must impute it) there was no shadow of form, or ceremony, scarce indeed any appearance of order or regularity, politeness or decency. Many, who had forc’d their way into the house with an impetuosity but ill suited to their rank and sex, actually fainted through the excessive heat and closeness of it. Several gentlemen were turned back, who had offered forty shillings for a seat in the gallery, after having despaired of getting any in the pit or boxes.’

  The cast was an English and Italian mixture, with Durastanti as Radamisto, Anastasia Robinson as Zenobia, the soprano Benedetto Baldassari as Fraarte, and that interesting figure Alexander Gordon as the tenor Tiridate. Gordon’s remarkable career had begun in the theatres of southern Italy; he was later to abandon singing for connoisseurship and his final incarnation was as secretary to the governor of South Carolina, where he died a prosperous landowner. Known as ‘Singing Sandie’, he was clearly well thought of by Handel, but his threat to jump on the harpsichord when irritated by the composer’s accompaniments drew the stinging retort: ‘Oh, let me know when you will do that and I will advertise it; for I am sure more people will come to see you jump than to hear you sing.’

  The first version of Radamisto featured ballet numbers, with danced entractes at the close of Acts I and II, and three further items after the opera’s final coro. These were all dispensed with for the revival on 28 December. The sole remnant of the original casting was the bass Lagarde in the minor role of King Farasmane, the hero’s father. By this time Senesino had arrived to take over as Radamisto, Durastanti became Zenobia, and Tiridate was given to Giuseppe Maria Boschi, Handel’s bass of earlier days, now firmly instated as the roarer and blusterer of the Academy stage. No wonder the young Mary Pendarves, better known to us as the Mrs Delany she later became, could write to her sister Ann Granville that ‘the stage was never so well served as it is now, there is not one indifferent voice, they are all Italians’.

  Things looked auspicious enough for Handel. The King granted him a fourteen-year copyright and on the strength of this Richard Meares published a finely engraved edition of Radamisto, personally supervised by the composer. But the artistic direction of the Haymarket, as he must already have guessed, was unlikely to offer a smooth ride. Almost at once the cultural chauvinism of the Italians began to declare itself. Giuseppe Riva disliked Radamisto for its failure, in his view, to touch the heart, attributing its success to English ignorance. ‘In the land of the blind, blessed a
re the one-eyed,’ he sardonically observed in a letter to Agostino Steffani. Rolli meanwhile directed his scorn at Durastanti, of whom he had earlier remarked, ‘Oh, what a bad choice for England! I won’t discuss her singing, but she is an elephant.’ The singer herself, having arrived in London with her husband the impresario and connoisseur Casimiro Avelloni, was pregnant, to the annoyance of the directors, and Bononcini, run to ground in Rome by Lord Burlington, was taking his time to arrive, but in September Senesino at last set foot in England. ‘Signor Senesino, the famous eunuch, has arrived,’ said Applebee’s Weekly Journal, ‘and it is said that the company allows him two thousand guineas for the season.’ Rolli, though he hurried to find him lodgings in a house near Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square) and judged him ‘well-mannered, well-read, extremely kind and endowed with the noblest sentiments’, also thought him ‘a noisy busybody and certainly not the soul of discretion’, but he had obviously marked Senesino down as a potential ally in backstage plots.

  Senesino’s relations with Handel began as they meant to go on. Salvai, the new Polissena for the Radamisto revival, had brought with her Girolamo Polani whom, as composer for the San Fantin and Sant’Angelo theatres, Handel must already have known in Venice. Handel’s idea was apparently to employ him as an assistant at the opera, working as conductor and adaptor of Orlandini’s Amore e Maesta, a recent Florentine success. Rolli was set to tinker with the libretto, junking much of the recitative and adding fresh arias for Senesino, who naturally wanted new music for them. Heidegger and Senesino clashed over the professional involvement of Polani, a board meeting was held and the directors, particularly Blathwayt and Arbuthnot, were at pains to appease their newest star acquisition, while Rolli hovered in the background, mingling diplomacy with guile. The disputed opera eventually reached the stage the following February as Arsace, with additional music by the theatre’s cellist Filippo Amadei, the discomfited Polani having quit the field.

  The Academy’s triumph seemed assured by the arrival that autumn of Giovanni Bononcini. This admired Italian master, a consummate operatic professional with a gift for agreeable melody, was hardly the petit-maître whom some of Handel’s biographers have chosen to portray. From a family of musicians (his father Giovanni Maria was a distinguished composer) he quickly became popular throughout Italy as a master of both opera and oratorio. The fluency and tunefulness of his aria style adapted themselves easily to the changing taste of early eighteenth-century audiences, but success had made him conceited and arrogant. A native Modenese, he had trained in Bologna under Giovanni Paolo Colonna, an influential figure in the rich musical tradition centred on the Accademia Filarmonica and the basilica of San Petronio. After a spell as a cellist and composer at Rome he went to Vienna to furnish operas for the court for nearly sixteen years. It was during a second Roman period, beginning in 1713, that Bononcini made the acquaintance of Paolo Antonio Rolli, already well known as an Arcadian poet, and the pair collaborated on the opera Astarto for the newly reopened Teatro Capranica. When the work was revived in 1719 one of those present at rehearsals was the Earl of Burlington, then on his second Italian tour, and it was his invitation that brought Bononcini to London. Rolli made Burlington the dedicatee of his published libretto for a new version of Astarto, which opened the Academy’s second season on 19 November 1720.

  Astarto was an instant success, with twenty performances in all, and the Academy audience took Bononcini to its heart. ‘In two words,’ wrote Giuseppe Riva to Agostino Steffani, ‘this is music which goes directly to the heart, without too many twists and turns . . . Certain people, enchanted with Handel, would like to say something against it, but they find it hard to swim against the stream.’ The presence of a genuinely talented composer of international repute, with the psychological advantage, among the singers, musicians and theatrical hangers-on, of being Italian, must have given Handel considerable pause. He was never one easily ‘to bear a kinsman near the throne’. Composers are scarcely more gracious than any other artists towards their peers and one of his less attractive characteristics was a resentment of anybody who threatened to challenge him on his own ground. Hardly a single instance exists of him having a kind word to say about any of the considerable native talents, Maurice Greene, John Stanley, William Boyce and others, flourishing in London during his lifetime. Even Thomas Augustine Arne, the most genuinely accomplished English musician of the mid-eighteenth century, elicited nothing from Handel in the way of articulate approbation. As for foreign-born masters, it was all very well to admire Telemann or Rameau from a distance, but the presence of Bononcini on his very doorstep was enough to raise the hackles of the habitually competitive Saxon, though there is no direct evidence of any open hostility on his part.

  Perhaps some awareness of a potential rivalry between the two composers may have prompted one of the Academy’s patrons to suggest that the next new opera on the seasonal programme should be set by the pair of them, with the cellist Filippo Amadei providing the remaining act of the three. There is a possibility that the directors, several of whom were racing men, may have fancied the notion of backing one musician against another, but the fondness of Baroque composers for competition (witness, for example, Bach and the wretched Louis Marchand) makes it more likely that either Handel or Bononcini or both first conceived the project, calling in Amadei to do the first act, whose beauties would easily be forgotten once the two giants took the field.

  The subject chosen (with Rolli as librettist) was one on which Bononcini had already composed two operas, the story of Romans against Etruscans in the days of the early republic. Act I concerns ‘How Horatius Kept the Bridge’, Act II Mutius Scevola’s baffled assassination attempt on Lars Porsenna and Act III the flight of Cloelia and the female hostages. It sounds almost too pious to say that Handel’s setting of the final act is better than Amadei in the first and Bononcini in the second, but such indeed is the case. Amadei’s music is short-breathed, naïve and rather old-fashioned, and Bononcini’s act, while sensitive, idiomatic and vivid at such moments as Mutius’s burning of his hand, demonstrates his incapacity to sustain melodic lines for long enough to give them an interesting shape. Gratifyingly placed for the singers though these arias are, and sensuously pretty though many of them may be, it is Handel’s music that demands more serious attention.

  Everything about Act III of Muzio Scevola suggests a determined effort by the composer to establish his supremacy and to leave the audience suitably impressed. The whole act is permeated by an attention to details of colour and balance which, since like the others it has its own overture, gives it a disproportionate grandeur of design. The shop window aspect of the work is sustained throughout by Handel’s evident desire to contrast his various singers as sharply as possible. Thus Boschi’s richly rewarding aria, as Porsenna enjoining the unpleasant moments to fly faster than the winds, with its turbulent cellos reinforced by bassoons (the middle section, coloured by the intrusion of a solitary oboe, is a restatement of the old Octavia motif ) is followed by an expressive adagio intended to show Senesino in his most ingratiatingly pathetic vein. The act, what is more, contains a pair of duets, one in a jubilant 12/8 and the other in a languishing 3/4, separated by an extensive recitative. The structure in each is carefully differentiated, with the voices in the first (for Berselli and Robinson) only coming together after twelve-bar solos, and those in the second (for Senesino and Durastanti) altogether more closely blended.

  Muzio Scevola’s première took place on 15 April 1721, with a further nine performances during the season. Rolli addressed a fulsome dedication to the King, declaring that ‘liberty would have gone to ground in woods and cottages if she had not found a glorious refuge in Your Majesty’s happy realms . . . Compare this kingdom to the Roman republic and see in how many respects both are alike, whether in the glory of their arms, the fabric of their laws or the honour given to learning’, and it is not difficult to catch the implied political analogies between the Romans who ejected Tarquin and the
Whigs who chased out James II and suppressed the first Jacobite rising. Gay, less obsequious, penned an epigram:

  Who here blames words, or verses, songs, or singers,

  Like Mutius Scaevola will burn his fingers.

  Writing to Count Flemming at Dresden, the Hanoverian courtier Fabrice described the loud huzzas of the first-night audience at the announcement of the birth of a son to the Princess of Wales and added, detailing the three composers, that Handel ‘easily triumphed over the others’. To which Flemming later sent the patriotic rejoinder: ‘I am very glad also that the German has been victorious in composition over all the other musicians.’

  ‘Boncio’, as his Italian friends nicknamed Bononcini, was nevertheless continuing to gain popularity, especially among an aristocratic caucus which, for reasons either political or personal, was resolutely alienated from the royal family. As a Catholic he was naturally favoured by Jacobite sympathizers with the cause of James Edward Stuart, exiled pretender to the English throne. Though James’s effort to raise a rebellion in Scotland in 1715 had been successfully foiled, the Jacobite threat to Hanoverian security remained. A further attempt in 1719, supported by the bellicose King Charles XII of Sweden as part of a lingering territorial quarrel with Hanover over two German duchies, and by Spain, with whom Britain and France were currently at war, was seen off when government troops defeated a mingled force of Highlanders and Spaniards near Inverness. Such disturbances are well worth noting when we consider how concerned the Academy operas are with marching armies, unsettled kingdoms, ambitious usurpers and scheming nobility.