In writing her two letters to Riva, Robinson had been careful not to ask for his direct intervention with Handel, suggesting that the go-between should be the influential figure of King George I’s mistress Sophie von Kielmansegg, Lady Darlington. The Italians always seem to have kept their distance from the German composer, whom they distastefully referred to as ‘the Man’ or ‘the Bear’, and in their extant correspondence there is hardly a single reference to his operas. Bononcini, the man at the centre of all their calculations, had fallen temporarily from grace with the King’s Theatre directors during the second half of 1722, when he seemed to be throwing in his lot too obviously with the Tory and Jacobite aristocracy. Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster, who had commissioned him to write an anthem for the recent funeral of the Duke of Marlborough, was soon afterwards arrested and exiled for his share in a Jacobite invasion plot, while the Duchess of Buckingham, a Catholic sympathizer with the Pretender’s cause, chose Bononcini to set the choruses in Marcus Brutus, a political tragedy written by her late husband. When the Academy directors dismissed the composer before the start of the 1722–3 season, the official explanation was ‘his most extravagant demands’, but it is more likely to have been this very public association with anti-Hanoverian elements among the aristocracy.
Perhaps for the same reason, the services of Paolo Rolli as theatre poet had also been dispensed with and Nicola Haym was reinstated in his place. Haym’s next task, after collaborating with Handel on Ottone, was to adapt the text of Caio Marzio Coriolano, originally written for Antonio Caldara in 1717 and now given to the third of the musical triumvirate engaged to provide new operas for the King’s Theatre. Attilio Ariosti, older than either Handel or Bononcini, could boast a more diverse career path than theirs, as not just a peripatetic musician but also a diplomat in holy orders, not unlike his distinguished contemporary Agostino Steffani. Officially a friar of the Servite order and often known as ‘Padre Attilio’, he may in fact never have been properly ordained, and the various portraits of him, including a particularly dashing likeness painted when he was about thirty, suggest that he kept both feet firmly planted in secular society.
A stay in Berlin at the Prussian court was followed by seven years in Vienna working for Emperor Joseph I, who also made use of him as a diplomat among various German and Italian states. Ariosti’s first visit to London in 1716 was as a virtuoso on the viola d’amore, who also offered a formidable example of his skill as an opera composer in Tito Manlio, premièred at the King’s Theatre the following year. Given the chance to open the Royal Academy’s first season in 1720 with Numitore, he declined, suggesting that the libretto be presented to Giovanni Porta instead. Only now, three years afterwards, was he ready to come forward with a new opera. Starring Senesino in the role of the wayward Roman general, Cuzzoni as his betrothed and Durastanti as his mother, Coriolano, ‘said to exceed any thing of the kind ever seen upon the stage’, was justly popular with the Haymarket audience. Ariosti’s skill as a writer of dramatic recitative was displayed to advantage in the Act III prison scene (the type of episode that always drew praise for Senesino) described by a later eighteenth-century commentator as ‘wrought up to the highest degree of perfection that music is capable of and is said to have drawn tears from the audience at every representation’.
If the Academy’s productions were providing, in classic style, more bills than dividends and the directors were starting to shake fists at defaulting subscribers, the artistic and social triumph of opera in London was now complete, though the croak of experienced warning could already be heard from voices such as that of the theatre’s own architect. Writing to his friend the publisher Jacob Tonson to thank him for ‘the best Sider I ever drank since I was born’, Vanbrugh added, ‘I Suppose you don’t care a farthing for the Towne, if you did; you’d look into it now and then. I can’t blame you however, for you Spend your Life I believe, much as I wou’d do, had I made a good Voyage to the Messissippy. I’ll tell you at the Same time that in Spight all the Misfortunes & losses, that have occasion’d more crying and wailing, than I believe was ever known before; the Opera has been Supported at half a Guinea, Pit and Boxes, and perform’d 62 times this last Season.’ It could scarcely last, but meanwhile, in the currently favourable climate of Anglo-French relations plans were made for the company, under Bononcini’s direction, to go to Paris. The agreement between King George and his cousin, Regent Orleans, involved taking the entire production outfit, dresses, sets, singers, orchestra and all, to France for a month. A pity that details of these performances (which did not involve Handel personally) are so sketchy, since the concept of an international tour was then relatively unfamiliar and it must have been interesting to see the effect of mainstream Italian opera on the xenophobia which then, as later, was such a feature of French musical culture.
Handel and Haym had been preparing a new piece, based on an adaptation of Matteo Noris’s Flavio Cuniberto, originally set by the Venetian composer Partenio in 1682. The plot is one of Noris’s less eccentric, taking place in Lombard Italy so often favoured by contemporary librettists (six Handel operas have similar settings) and pairs the love of Guido and Emilia (Senesino and Cuzzoni) with the secret amour of Teodata and Vitige (Robinson and Durastanti in a breeches part) temporarily thwarted by the roving passions of King Flavio. A further plot element, the rivalry of Emilia’s father Lotario with Teodata’s father Ugone for the governorship of Britain, may have appealed to composer and librettist on the basis of some contemporary political episode whose significance is lost on us. There is a possible parallel between the Ugone–Lotario fracas and the growing contention between Sir Robert Walpole and Lord Carteret which, though Carteret was not dismissed as Secretary of State for the South till the following year, was certainly familiar to at least one of the Academy directors, Newcastle, and surely to others in the audience.
Flavio is one of Handel’s most tightly organized operas. A pervading sense of humour, apparent in the almost self-parodying mannerisms of the overture and enduring throughout the drama, conditions the response to a text a less lively artist would have treated far more soberly. It is difficult, in any case, to accept Noris’s intentions as having been wholly serious. Successive situations – Ugone entering with a red welt on his cheek where Lotario has slapped him, the concealed passions of Vitige and Teodata, the almost imbecile benevolence of Flavio himself, everything culminating in a denouement of delightful absurdity – suggest that the writer was sending up the genre in a way Handel appreciated even if his audience did not.
Most, though not all, of the elements in the formula do their work adequately. Lotario’s death in a duel removes the bass from the opera before the end of Act II (Boschi presumably sang his coro part offstage) and Ugone is steadily reduced to a cipher. Otherwise the characters are admirably laid open to Handel’s witty and perceptive treatment of them. Emilia is a consistent study in pathetic charm: four of her arias are in slow tempi and two of them feature the flute accompaniment whose timbre Handel liked to match with the soprano voice (the first, ‘Quanto dolci, quanto care’, in a favourite rhythmic pattern of triplets and dotted notes in 3/4, is an exquisite sketch of simple, almost childish happiness ultimately demanding some kind of nemesis). Guido’s music is calculated to display Senesino’s expressive powers at their fullest, while at the same time quietly mocking the various conventional postures adopted in the respective arias. Flavio himself is throughout a facile creature, and Handel here cleverly reinforces the impression of the simple-minded despot whose lookalike can be found in Tamerlano and Serse.
The scoring is sensitive to the need to preserve a light texture for a drama whose postures are so often the reverse of admirable or heroic. There are no horns or trumpets, but one of the versions of Ugone’s ‘Fato tiranno e crudo’ includes an independent bass line for ‘violoncello e cembalo’, a solo oboe colours the middle section of Guido’s Act II aria, and Flavio’s ‘Di quel bel che m’innamora’ in Act I i
s enriched by a dialogue of solo oboe and violin.
As a whole Flavio is an artistic triumph, but its very alertness to nuance and ambiguity has prevented it from joining Giulio Cesare or Alcina among Handel’s more popular operas; none of its roles is a vocal firework display and no character is allowed to steal the show. The recitatives are uncommonly interesting (especially Act III Scene iv, a rare example in Handel’s work of an accompanied passage of dialogue) and it would require a director and conductor of considerable refinement and intelligence to capture the appropriate spirit of this sophisticated work. As in Agrippina, Handel does not laugh at the characters themselves. The absurdity, given point by the authentically Handelian sense of deadpan humour, lies not in what these people feel, but in the circumstances that produce the feelings.
Though the directors tried to get a royal grant of an extra £200 on top of the bounty the King already allowed them and although, in November 1723, a fortnight or so before the new season’s opening night, they made their tenth five per cent call on subscribers, Handel’s own affairs were in good shape. During the summer, as we know from parish rate books, the composer took the lease of a fine new house, No.25, Brook Street, Hanover Square, from the slater and speculative builder George Barnes, who had begun developing a plot of land on the former Conduit Mead. Handel paid a charge of £60 a year on the house (later dropping to £50), a substantial rent, but one evidently worth paying for a property in the town’s most modish and salubrious residential quarter. In a literal sense he was living above the shop, since here his scores and tickets were sold, his copyists were at work, and rehearsals took place. The address nevertheless conferred an instant gentlemanly status, cheek by jowl as it lay with the Grosvenor estate which absorbed Brook Street’s western end.
Thanks to an inventory taken after Handel’s death in 1759 we can get some idea of his intimate surroundings and judging by the state of the furniture things cannot have altered much since he first moved in. The garrets under the roof were used to store objects such as ‘an Old Sadle’ and ‘an Old Grate’ (the word ‘Old’ occurs continually) and the ‘2 pr Stairs Closset’ contained ‘2 Old Globes & Frames & Chimney board’. The front room on the second floor was fitted up as a bedroom, complete with red curtains, tongs and poker for the fire and ‘a Round Close Stool & white pann’. It was probably here that Handel himself slept, since the back bedroom was far more simply furnished. There were card tables in the dining room and another in the next room on the first floor, where the presence of ‘A Stove Compleat bellows & Brush’ suggests that at least one familiar German domestic feature was never parted with in forty-eight years’ residence in England. Downstairs in the back parlour the inventory seems to imply that Handel used it both as a study and dressing room, since we find an easy chair, a swing glass, ‘2 Wig block fixt’ and a linen press in company with ‘a Wallnuttren Desk’ and a deal bookcase, with ‘In the Clossett a Large Nest of drawers’. The kitchen, as we might expect, has absolutely everything from ‘an Iron Plate Warmer’, ‘a Fish Kittle Compleat’ and ‘2 Stue panns & Covers’ to ‘a Choping board’, ‘a Spice Drawer’ and ‘about 30 pss of Earthen and Stone Ware & a Towel Rowl’. All the household goods were ultimately bought up by Handel’s servant John Duburk, but as there is no mention of musical instruments they must already have been removed by the legatees in the composer’s will.
Handel owned two harpsichords, one of them the fine Ruckers now at Fenton House, and his keyboard virtuosity had been a byword among English musicians ever since his arrival in London. It was during these early years of the Royal Academy venture that he published his first group of harpsichord suites, largely as a result of a pirated selection having been issued under the imprint of Jeanne Roger in Amsterdam in 1719. The real buccaneering had probably been undertaken by John Walsh, as we can tell from the engraving of the plates, but though Walsh himself, by sheer competitive push, was ultimately to become Handel’s publisher, it was to the firm of John Cluer, responsible for printing all the operas from Giulio Cesare to Siroe, that the composer now turned for an official edition. In a preface to the eight suites, issued on 14 November 1720, Handel says, ‘I have been obliged to publish some of the following lessons because surrepticious and incorrect copies of them had gone abroad. I have added several new ones to make the Work more usefull which if it meets with a favourable reception I will still proceed to publish more: reckoning it my duty with my small talent to serve a Nation from which I have receiv’d so Generous a protection.’
Some of the music of the Suites de Pie`ces pour le Clavecin (First Set) was probably composed during the period spent in Hanover after Handel’s return from Italy, some of it may belong to the Burlington years and one or two movements can be stylistically related to his spell of teaching in Hamburg during the early months of 1706. The form of these works is the familiar assemblage of dance movements, allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue, best known to modern keyboard players in Bach’s French and English suites, alternated with extended fugues, toccata-like preludes, themes with variations and in one case a full-scale French overture. Their characteristically diversified styles reflect the same mélange of national traditions we noted in Handel’s lost childhood commonplace book: echoes of Fischer and Kerll in the shorter movements are answered by those of Pachelbel in variation sequences like the famous ‘Harmonious Blacksmith’ set of no. 5 in E or the Frobergerish introspection of the F minor prelude to no. 8, and contrasted with the jolly Italian sinfonia offered as the second movement of no. 2. It is going a little too far to detect the beginnings of Handel’s Englishness in gigues that may have been written in Italy, but that which ends the F sharp minor suite has suggestions of that most English of moments in Acis and Galatea, the duet ‘Happy we’.
Handel’s keyboard music has never succeeded in gaining the sort of popular regard enjoyed by that of Bach or Scarlatti, and labels like ‘easy’ and ‘conventional’ are all too readily applied. If he was such a phenomenal improviser as Burney, Hawkins and others would have us believe, where is the proof of his virtuosity, or is it a case of his having jealously carried his secrets with him to the grave? The attraction of these pieces lies rather in their melodic and rhythmic affinities with the musical medium that interested him most, the world of lyric drama. The decorations opening the second suite are like the warbling divisions of a Nicolini or a Senesino, and the frowning grandeur of the G minor’s overture raises the curtain on what is, in design if not in conscious intention, a dramatic sequence of alternating mood pictures, culminating in a superb though wholly traditional passacaglia.
6
Discords in the State
‘It seems to me that he is a little mad,’ Count Flemming had written to Melusine von der Schulenburg. To Handel’s contemporaries there was always something remote and awe-inspiring about the way in which his genius worked, and his career is marked by moments of torrential creative energy, which produce a spate of stupendous achievement. One of the most extraordinary examples of this occurred during the period between February 1724, and February 1725, the twelve months that saw the composition of Giulio Cesare, Tamerlano and Rodelinda. Several factors must have assisted the process, including the potentially competitive nature of Handel’s work at the Haymarket alongside Bononcini and Ariosti, the sense of his having formed a genuinely appreciative public for himself and an awareness of the fund of professional experience upon which he could now draw. Something may also have been due to his working relationship with Haym, who was prepared to respect the composer’s demands and whose adaptations, if they did not always overcome the technical problems posed by the original texts, for the most part made good dramatic sense.
Bononcini, after his period of exclusion, had rejoined the Academy towards the close of the 1723 season with his pastoral opera Erminia, a new version of a work presented in Rome four years previously. His Farnace was chosen to open the autumn opera programme, beginning in November after the theatre had been substantially refurbished, but the
piece failed to please, as indeed did Ariosti’s Vespasiano, an ill-advised attempt at assimilating the Bononcinian lyric style. By the end of February 1724, following an Ottone revival, Handel presented his newest offering, a work which in our own day has become one of the most admired and frequently performed of all his operas, the tragicomic masterpiece Giulio Cesare in Egitto.
Its compositional process, beginning the previous summer, had involved several major revisions and reassignments, partly owing to the changing availability of singers for the forthcoming season. Working with two or possibly three versions of a text by Francesco Bussani, first set by the Venetian composer Antonio Sartorio in 1677, Nicola Haym, doubtless at Handel’s bidding, developed the characters of Pompey’s widow and son, Cornelia and Sextus, and played down the typical Venetian cast of extras, cutting out the comic nurse Rodisbe and reducing Curio and Nireno to mere loyal feeds (they disappeared entirely in later revivals). From Bussani’s already complex plot, centred on Cleopatra’s love for Caesar and her acquisition of the throne from her preposterous brother Ptolemy, he retained the poignant and dramatically arresting scene before Pompey’s tomb, and introduced the historical incident of Caesar’s swim across Alexandria harbour.
The result, as modern performances (however musically and visually questionable) have shown, is one of those works which, whatever is done to it, refuses to lie down. Most producers make the mistake of assuming that because the story demands the appearance of a crowd of Caesar’s followers as he crosses the Nile, the spectacle of Ptolemy anachronistically surrounded by his harem and the apotheosis of Cleopatra amid the nine muses in a vision of Parnassus, the stage in Giulio Cesare must be crowded in best MGM fashion. Yet, as in Verdi’s Don Carlos and Aida, the great public moments are there precisely in order to imply an ironical contrast with the central intimacy of the private drama a handful of characters is playing out in the foreground. If Handel’s operas, like those of almost every other eighteenth-century composer, are primarily focused on the singer as vocal artist, they are also concerned with the credible presentation of human feeling. The merit of Giulio Cesare lies in the subtlety with which the composer is able to vary his presentation of those emotions and shape vital, intensely fallible human figures from the posturing creations dreamed up in a Baroque fantasy version of Roman history, a mixture of Plutarch, Corneille, Venetian romance and the crotchets of Cuzzoni, Robinson, Senesino and the rest.
Handel Page 17