Handel

by Handel- The Man

  Cleopatra herself is a prime example. Though English audiences knew her best as the dignified heroine of Dryden’s popular tragedy All for Love, Handel and Haym are somewhat closer to Shakespeare in their portrait of an ambitious and undaunted woman guided unerringly by the truth of her feelings and devoted to love. The proof that Handel the man was far from being ‘sexless and safe’ is here in the music, with its acute psychological penetration and glowing sensuality. Cleopatra is worked lightly enough into the drama, after most of the other principals have already appeared, with a flippant E major aria full of teasing trills and mordents, as she tells her effete brother: ‘Don’t despair! who knows, if you’re unlucky with the kingdom, perhaps you’ll be lucky in love.’ After exulting in the power of her beauty (disguised as Lidia, a court lady, she was wooed and won by Caesar) – ‘a pretty woman can do anything,’ she cries – Cleopatra next figures in an invocation to hope based on ‘Let flocks and herds’ from the 1713 Birthday Ode, exuberant but tinged with languorous expectation.

  It is in Act II that Handel achieves his master stroke. Cleopatra’s seduction of Caesar is not, after all, quite complete. Now she presents him with a carefully stage-managed erotic vision of herself as Virtue ‘assisted by the nine Muses’ on Parnassus. Handel’s orchestration of this, to a leisurely sarabande melody, is incomparably seductive: on stage the band comprises oboe, bassoons, strings (including a viola da gamba arpeggiando), harp and theorbo, in the pit the basic orchestra supplies the gentlest of comments, as Cleopatra takes up the theme, with the full accompaniment, as sensuous as anything contrived by Mahler or Strauss, in ‘V’adoro, pupille’. As Caesar rushes to embrace her, the scene shuts and she disappears.

  The Queen’s tragic dignity of utterance when, later in the opera, she believes her hero to be dead, offers a direct contrast to the ravaged matriarchal grandeur of Cornelia. If Anastasia Robinson had ever felt hard done by in earlier works, she had no reason to complain here, in a role Handel endowed with a Roman nobility surely designed to counterpoint Cleopatra’s Egyptian guile (though the two women, far from being rivals, are allies against Ptolemy from the outset). The shift in mood throughout Cornelia’s four arias mirrors the movement of the opera itself from crisis to resolution. Her initial misery leads to a baffled suicide attempt, following an air accompanied by a jagged string figure of dotted semiquavers, broken off at the end of the first section by her determination to do away with herself. Though her plangency finds a further outlet in the expressive E minor siciliano duet with Sextus, it is significantly cut into by Ptolemy’s general, Achillas, in Act II, at a point when this vein has been sufficiently emphasized, and her subsequent arias are cheerfully optimistic.

  The dazzling vocal and orchestral textures of Giulio Cesare won the opera an instant acclaim – though interestingly it was later noted that ‘both the composer and the performers seem to have acquired even more reputation from the recitatives than the airs’. Besides handing out plums to Senesino, Cuzzoni and Robinson, Handel saw to it that Boschi, as Achillas, got a rather more substantial share in the drama than some of his earlier roles had allowed him and provided in Ptolemy a study in cynical villainy for Berenstadt. Making a farewell appearance, as Sextus, was Margherita Durastanti, who was to quit the London musical world later that year with a benefit concert at which her song of adieux, to words attributed to Pope, ended:

  But let old charmers yield to new;

  Happy soil, adieu, adieu!

  Retiring £1,000 the richer from this one evening, she would nevertheless return some years later, as a proof of Handel’s enduring confidence in her dependable musicianship.

  It is difficult for us nowadays, in an age which can reproduce a carefully processed performance several thousand times, to appreciate the effect on English audiences of the outstanding professional artistry the King’s Theatre could now offer its patrons. Not only the singers but the band as well, featuring the kind of internationally renowned orchestral player whose services Handel, a stickler for the highest standards, could always obtain, represented a consistent level of excellence any European company would have envied. The response from some of the more sensitive spectators was not confined to hailing Cuzzoni with a ‘Brava, brava!’ or a ‘Cara, cara!’ but found an outlet in poetry. The Post-Boy of 7 March 1723, for example, advertised an anonymous Epistle to Mr Handel, Upon His Operas of Flavius and Julius Caesar. If, with its moments of bathos and a line or two cribbed from Dryden, it was not especially good poetry, the effusion tried at any rate to express a widespread sensation. The unknown poet suggests that Handel can reconcile political factions and bring the nation together:

  Our Souls so tun’d, that Discord grieves to find

  A whole fantastick Audience of a Mind.

  Though of course there are dissenters, followers of Bononcini and Ariosti, but look at the result:

  In Place of promis’d Heaps of glitt’ring Gold,

  The good Academy got nought – but Cold.

  Where cou’d they fly for Succour, but to You?

  Whose Musick’s ever Good, and ever New.

  To suggest that Handel’s effect on the Academy audience was to make it more harmonious fell distinctly wide of the mark. Partisanship was too much of a fashionable novelty to be smoothed away merely by a single theatrical success and the Lancashire Jacobite John Byrom, among the less enthusiastic spectators at the first run of Giulio Cesare, put the case succinctly:

  Some say, compared to Bononcini,

  That Mynheer Handel’s but a Ninny;

  Others aver that he to Handel

  Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle;

  Strange all this difference should be

  ’Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee.

  Other sources bear witness to the squabbles among the directors, to the intense public interest in the factionalism on behalf of singers and composers, and to the rising mania for anything to do with the opera.

  It was not only Durastanti, however, who bowed out. Anastasia Robinson now left the company as well and, significantly for Handel, Bononcini mounted his penultimate Haymarket opera Calfurnia. According to Giuseppe Riva he had already made up his mind to leave after the coming season, for which the Academy did not in any case re-engage him. Departing for Paris with Cuzzoni in the early summer, he was tempted back to London with the offer of a £500 a year pension by the wayward and more than slightly disreputable Henrietta Spencer, Duchess of Marlborough. In return for such a handsome fee she demanded, according to one contemporary source, that he should ‘not compose any more for the ungrateful Academy, who do not deserve he should entertain them, since they don’t know how to value his works as they ought’. This salaried sulk on Bononcini’s part may have seemed an unwise career move, but the Italians had already been convinced that some sort of intrigue was afoot to topple their Boncio. ‘According to all appearances’, wrote Riva’s friend Zamboni, ‘there will be a violent party against him and not one among those in the Academy can be called his friend.’ For those who patriotically deplored the fuss being made over a parcel of squalling foreigners, these changes must have suggested an encouraging likelihood that the town would come to its senses soon enough. Ambrose Philips, under the impression that Cuzzoni’s trip to Paris meant that she was going for good, felt emboldened to address her as though she were somehow responsible for tampering with the national character:

  Leave us Britons rough and free,

  Leave us as we ought to be.

  Somebody had the idea of recasting Sir John Suckling’s ‘A Session of Poets’ in the form of a session of musicians, which appeared as an anonymous pamphlet towards the end of the 1724 season, and presents an interesting conspectus of contemporary opinion on the London musical scene. Apollo settles on the opera house as an appropriate venue for his court, and Boschi and Berenstadt, by virtue of their loud voices, are nominated as the ushers. All the town musicians arrive, from ‘the Op’ra Orchest’ and the playhouse bands to waits, organists, dancing masters and t
he fiddlers from riverside taverns. The composers then present themselves one by one, and are dealt with by the god strictly according to their deserts: Pepusch is slily criticized for his preoccupation with academic degrees, Galliard, Ariosti and poor mad Thomas Roseingrave are gently though patronizingly brushed aside, the Scottish violinist William Corbett is banished, with heavy irony, ‘to cleanly Edinburgh’ (the city was noted at the time as one of Europe’s dirtiest) and Greene and Croft are damned out of hand for dullness. Geminiani gets a fairer hearing:

  And since his Fame all Fiddlers else surpasses,

  He set him down first Treble at Parnassus,

  and Jean Loeillet is implicitly commended for his modest good-fellowship:

  A supper for some Friends I’ve just bespoke,

  Pray come – and drink your Glass – and crack your Joke.

  The preference shown to Haym as opposed to Rolli, distinguished only for his ‘scoundrel Op’ra Words’, suggests that the writer must have been in the know as to the nature of the Haymarket factions. Bononcini, scornful to the last, appears with the Robinson on his arm, but his music simply succeeds in sending everybody to sleep. It is, of course, Handel who, by implication ‘since but one Phoenix we can boast, he needs no name’, wins the coveted bays:

  For who so fit for universal Rule

  As he who best all Passions can controul?

  This sort of pamphleteering underlines the exposed position into which Handel’s gifts thrust him throughout his English career. The assumption is a naïve one, which depicts him as the uncontested king of London musical life, and he was now beginning to discover the true perils and responsibilities of fame, talent and success in a city where the public’s reserves of caprice were as unlimited as its supply of cash. Professional jealousy was incessant and it is clear that certain composers, such as Pepusch and later Charles Avison, a severe critic, were genuinely blind to certain aspects of his genius, which we now take for granted. Others, notably Maurice Greene, felt actively threatened by him and since Handel, unlike the heroes of his operas, was not given to playing the generoso rivale, the resentment is likely to have been mutual.

  He was taking no chances with the new operas for the 1724–5 season. True victories are those quickest followed up and the triumph of Giulio Cesare was an ideal springboard. Zamboni, writing to a friend in September, a month or so before the opening night, looked forward to a bumper season. Besides Senesino and Cuzzoni at the top of their form, the company, having shed Durastanti, had gained a good replacement in Anna Dotti, who had arrived from Paris presumably as an offshoot of the abortive foreign touring negotiations of the previous year. Berenstadt had gone back to Italy, where, like others of his kind, he dabbled in picture dealing while continuing his singing career, and his place was now taken by the versatile alto castrato Andrea Pacini.

  The casts of the new Haymarket shows were further enriched by the acquisition of Francesco Borosini, one of the greatest tenors of his day. Yet another Modenese, he had been a popular singer at the imperial court (becoming, incidentally, a director of the Kärntnerthor Theatre) and was an exciting find for Handel who, as well as creating two outstanding new roles for him, recast the part of Sextus for a tenor in the revival of Giulio Cesare the following year. Borosini appears to have arrived, what is more, with the libretto of one of his more recent successes in his pocket. Zamboni tells his friend Gaburri that ‘the first opera will be Bajazet, set to music by Handel’. In fact, Handel had completed a draft score, based on Haym’s adaptation of Agostino Piovene’s Il Bajazet, before the new tenor appeared. The text had originally been set by Francesco Gasparini in 1711,*(k) but now Borosini produced a new version of it, with music by the same composer, expressly written for him and premièred in Reggio in 1719.

  A member of a leading family of Veneto nobility, Piovene had produced his popular libretto on the story of the Mongol conqueror Tamburlaine and Bajazeth, the Turkish emperor, based on an already extant text by Antonio Salvi with additional love interest worked up from Ducas’s Byzantine history, in 1710. To the Reggio version Borosini, notable in a cast that included such past and future Handelians as Antonio Bernacchi, Faustina Bordoni and Diana Vico, had caused a special scene to be added, as the title page tells us: ‘the poetry is by the noble Venetian Piovene, apart from the last scene, which was composed by Zanella, a famous Modenese poet, and founded on an idea of Signor Borosini’s.’ The idea was evidently the spectacular onstage death agony of the wretched Bajazet, dying gasps and all, a relative rarity in Baroque opera and one which is not carried all the way, since the unfortunate sultan actually leaves the stage to die.

  Tightened up by Handel, Haym and the Reggio adaptors, Tamerlano (note the change of emphasis indicated by the London title) emerges as one of the strongest of the Academy’s libretti. As the only Handel opera of the 1720s to be predominantly tragic (the happy ending implied by the coro is softened by the glumness of the music), it is also his only work of this period to be firmly rooted in the world of French neoclassical drama. Apart from Ducas, its main literary source is indeed a French tragedy, Tamerlan ou la Mort de Bajazet by Jacques Pradon, famous as a jealous competitor with Racine and a tool of the factions that brought about the initial failure of the latter’s Phèdre, and the spirit of the original play has heavily conditioned the atmosphere of the opera.

  It is an atmosphere very different from those of Giulio Cesare and Ottone, a sparse, bare, dark, indoor world, whose sense of hopelessness and claustrophobia, as though we were viewing it through an infinite corridor, has a far closer kinship to the sort of drama produced in our own century than to the age of Zeno and Metastasio. There is a startling absence of that element of spectacle and occasion, which punctuates so many of the earlier operas, no marching armies, bird-haunted groves, jolly symphonies and dances, scenes of transformation, combat or seduction. Nor are the women, those Handelian catalysts who set the tone of each opera, characters in the mould, say, of Teofane, Gismonda or Cleopatra. Theirs is not even the majestic theatricality of a Zenobia or a Cornelia. Princesses both, Asteria and Irene are humanized to a point at which their plainness speaks more powerfully than any magniloquent gesture.

  These stock figures of opera seria take life from the composer’s firm grasp of dramatic consistency, as do the four male protagonists. Tamburlaine himself, swaggering and decadent, has all too evidently created the air of violence and corruption which overwhelms the refinement of somebody like Andronico, a Senesino sighing-lover role given a deeper irony by his articulate impotence, the baffled intellectual at the tyrant’s court. Leone, the Boschi bass, has the task of emphasizing, as a marginal commentator, the crushing futility at the core of this extraordinary work. As for Bajazet, it is he who from the outset dominates the opera and offers a superb illustration of Handel’s ability to portray human suffering. Monumental in quality though much of his music is in its quasi-religious vein (two of his arias, significantly, are derived from La Resurrezione and another is from the Brockes Passion), he remains the archetypal father and ruler, gradually stripped of power and authority until allowed to die in circumstances as poignant as King Lear’s. The music for this episode shows Handel working in the medium of which he had been a master since the days of Teseo and Amadigi, a free-flowing accompanied recitative, in which ungoverned emotion temporarily annihilates form and tonality. The scene looks forward, in its depiction of passionate despair, to moments like Dejanira’s madness in Hercules or ‘Deeper and deeper still’ in Jephtha, and seems to have been well appreciated from the first.

  Handel’s manuscripts reveal the extraordinary care he took over this and other aspects of a work that drew on his utmost creative resources. Another example of his attention to balance and detail is the moment in Act II when Asteria, in order to save her father and her lover, has agreed to marry Tamerlano, though he is already betrothed to Irene. Bajazet, Andronico and Irene turn from her in horror as she ascends the throne, but she then discloses that she planned to stab Tamerlano as
soon as he came near. The angry tyrant sentences father and daughter to death, and leaves Asteria to face the recriminations of the others. Each responds to her appeal in a brief air beginning with the word ‘No!’ and Asteria finishes the scene alone, with a grand da capo piece designed to give full play to Cuzzonian versatility. With its controlled key scheme (the three exit arias are in E minor, E major and G major respectively) and deliberately condensed forms (no ritornellos except to usher the characters off ) this is one of those points that triumphantly validate the artificiality of opera seria. It recalls, of course, the triumph scene in Agrippina, where the characters ruthlessly drop away from Ottone one by one, and both episodes justify the use of that exit convention which was to become standardized in the mechanical dramas of Metastasio.

  Haym dedicated Tamerlano to the first Duke of Rutland, a talented amateur violinist who had introduced the Haymarket orchestra’s leader, Stefano Carbonelli, to England. The opera was a success, though it never succeeded in joining Rinaldo and Giulio Cesare among Handel favourites, and Anna Dotti as Irene caused unintentional laughter among the audience, as Lady Bristol told her husband: ‘You know my ear too well for me to pretend to give you any account of the Opera farther than that the new man takes extremely,’ she wrote, ‘but the woman is so great a joke that there was more laughing at her than at a farce, but her opinion of her self gets the better of that. The Royal family were all there, and a greater crowd than ever I saw, which has tired me to death, so that I am come home to go to bed as soon as I have finished this.’ Cluer published the score, with Handel’s own corrections and figurations, ‘and to render the Work more acceptable to Gentlemen and Ladies every Song is truly translated into English Verse, and the Words engrav’d to the Musick under the Italian, which was never before attempted in any Opera . . .’