While you in rip’ning, like a medlar rot,
At best a Gorgon’s face, and Siren’s throat,
Help your decaying lungs, and chew eringo [seaweed, a noted aphrodisiac]
Thou little awkward creature! – can you stringo?
to which the latter ripostes:
To do you justice tho; – I think – ’tis known
That you to please, imploy more pipes than one.
The height of coarseness is reached in Faustina’s reference to Sandoni’s difficulty in making love to Cuzzoni owing to her excessively large vagina. The two women box and tear one another’s headdresses, to an excited chorus of peers and tupees (beaux in smart wigs). ‘The Queen and The Princess again engage; Both Factions play all their warlike Instruments; Cat-calls, Serpents and Cuckoos make a dreadful din; F-s-na lays flat C-z-ni’s nose with a Sceptre; C-z-ni breaks her head with a gilt-leather crown: H-l, desirous to see an end of the battle, animates them with a kettle-drum; a globe thrown at random hits the high-priest in the temples, he staggers off the Stage . . .’
While the state tottered at the Haymarket, England received the news of King George I’s death at Osnabrück on 11 June 1727. The coronation of his heir the Prince of Wales as King George II and of the Princess as Queen Caroline was to be a well-publicized and elaborate ceremonial, with no expense spared. Handel had every reason to expect that his music, in whatever form, would be incorporated in the service. The new King and Queen were unstinting in their support for him and he had recently been engaged as music master to their daughters, with an annual salary of £195. Some of his later harpsichord pieces were written as lessons for the youngest of the princesses, Louisa, while her sister Anne received a generous tribute from the master himself, when he told the organist Jacob Wilhelm Lustig that after he left Hamburg for Italy ‘no power on earth could have moved me to take up teaching again – except Anne, the flower of Princesses’.
A note by King George III in Mainwaring’s biography makes it clear that Handel was indeed the royal family’s composer of choice, as opposed to ‘that wretched little crooked illnatured insignificant Writer Player and Musician . . . Dr Green’, Maurice Greene, on whom the commission should properly have been bestowed. The King adds that Handel ‘had but four Weeks for doing this wonderful work’. Parker’s Penny Post told its readers a week before the ceremony, ‘Mr Hendle has composed the Musick for the Abbey at the Coronation, and the Italian Voices, with above a Hundred of the best Musicians will perform; and the Whole is allowed by those Judges in Musick who have already heard it, to exceed any Thing heretofore of the same Kind: it will be rehearsed this Week, but the Time will be kept private, lest the Crowd of People should be an Obstruction to the Performers.’ The secret, of course, got out and the rehearsal at the Abbey was attended by ‘the greatest Concourse of People that has been known’. Forces included a choir of about forty voices and an enormous band of 160 or so players. If the Parker’s correspondent is to be credited, the thirty-six Chapel Royal singers, including Handel’s erstwhile soloists Gates, Hughes and Weeley, were joined by singers from the opera.
The success of the anthems was unconnected with their original performance at the Coronation Service, whose order, devised by Archbishop Wake, conflated Tenison’s crowning of George I in 1714 and the ceremony used by Sancroft at the accession of James II in 1685. Lord Hervey waspishly notes that ‘the Coronation was performed with all the pomp and magnificence that could be contrived; the present King differing so much from the last, that all the pageantry and splendour, badges and trappings of royalty, were as pleasing to the son as they were irksome to the father’. Forecast of a spring tide and dangers of flooding in Westminster Hall had put off the ceremony by a week, from the 4th to the 11th, but the extra time thus allowed for rehearsal did little to straighten out the confusions inevitable among the vast musical forces in the Abbey. Wake’s notes in his copy of the service order tell the story succinctly enough. Against the first anthem, Purcell’s I was glad, he writes: ‘This was omitted and no Anthem at all Sung . . . by the Negligence of the Choir of Westminster.’ At the Recognition the choir should have launched into The King shall rejoice, but according to another source they embarked on Let thy hand be strengthened. What probably happened was that the Chapel Royal singers got going in one gallery while the remaining voices set off on a different tack in the other. Wake laconically observes, ‘The Anthems in Confusion: All irregular in the Music’ and goes on to note that at the Anointing, through yet another blunder, Zadok the Priest knocked the hymn out of the way.
Despite this we can appreciate the evident enthusiasm of the performers. Handel’s confidence in approaching his task was absolute, as indeed was his certainty as to the choice of texts which, apart from Zadok the Priest, were left to his discretion by the King. When the bishops presumed to suggest appropriate passages, Handel ‘murmured and took offence, as he thought it implied his ignorance of Holy Scriptures: “I have read my Bible very well, and shall chuse for myself.”’
The absolute sureness of aim and perfectly calculated control of effect throughout the Coronation Anthems gave them an immediate popularity and they were given regularly in English choral concerts during Handel’s lifetime. At least one, Zadok the Priest, that gloriously simple burst of D major acclamation, with a glance towards Italy in its opening allusion to the string arpeggiando in the 1707 Nisi Dominus, became an established element in all subsequent British coronation ritual. Varying his choral and orchestral layers (no trumpets or drums in Let thy hand be strengthened and a scrupulous husbanding of these resources elsewhere) Handel is equally careful to shift the tonality so as to avoid too much D major tub-thumping. Let thy hand, for example, is in G, with a meditative E minor larghetto in ‘Let justice and judgment’, strangely mournful in its suggestion of the vanity of admonishing the King to ‘let mercy and truth go before thy face’. Finest and most expansive of all four is the sumptuous My heart is inditing, into whose opening section the various components are worked one by one, the individual voices singing over a light Trommelbass string accompaniment and the brass and timpani saved up for a thrilling arrival to round off the movement in grand style. A germ for this movement is a borrowing from Telemann’s Harmonischer Gottesdienst. The anthem expands, via the stately progress of ‘Kings’ daughters were among thy honourable women’, into a garland for Queen Caroline, for whose coronation it was intended, and whose attire, Hervey tells us, ‘was as fine as the accumulated riches of the City and suburbs could make it’.
A Coronation opera was now in order and by a singular coincidence Handel had already composed just such a piece some six months earlier. The new season had opened with an Admeto revival and the last of Ariosti’s London operas, Teuzzone, a Zeno drama set in ‘Peckin, one of the Principal Cities of China’; the Handel novelty was Riccardo Primo, Re d’Inghilterra, first performed on 11 November 1727.
Handel’s reasons for withholding the piece are further complicated by the revisions made to the last two acts, which imply an attempt to adapt it to the new situation created by George I’s death. The suggestion has been made that the heroic figure of Richard the Lionheart was in any case supposed to represent George II as Prince of Wales, but there is no evidence to support this. Whatever the truth, the autograph (or, to use Burney’s habitual expression, ‘the foul score’) is one of the most confusing ever left to us by Handel, and a fascinating display of the composer’s working methods. The entire manuscript has passage after passage of text crossed out and new words substituted for no apparent reason. Cancelled music includes several arias, one of them an enchanting birdsong number with flauto piccolo, and a closing duet for Costanza and Riccardo, as well as scenes containing a character called Corrado who disappears in the final version.
The libretto, loosely linked with history (Richard’s queen, Berengaria, here appears as Costanza), involves Coeur de Lion’s exploits on Cyprus and derives, via a Rolli adaptation, from Francesco Briani’s drama Isacio Tiranno se
t by Lotti for the S. Giovanni Grisostomo season of 1710 and perhaps passed on to Handel personally by the composer. Rolli’s inexpert juggling with the text results in a notably uneasy relationship between recitatives and arias, clumsy and vague transitions in the actions and one or two downright unconvincing situations.
All this does much to spoil what is otherwise one of Handel’s most appealing works. Burney’s comment that ‘the last act of Richard is replete with beauties of every kind of composition’ applies equally well to the other two. Throughout, the orchestration is supremely imaginative, its sensuous textures contrasting sharply with those of the ‘basic band’ in Admeto, two-thirds of whose arias are supported by oboes and strings. This may well have been owing to Handel’s awareness of the need for some additional means of persuasive advocacy for a work so much less obviously self-propelled than its predecessor. The overture, one of Handel’s best, has independent oboe and bassoon parts, flutes, including a traversa bassa, characterize Costanza, already sharply defined by her identification with F minor, Riccardo directs the siege of Limassol to a background of paired trumpets (three are required in the ensuing chorus) and an alternative setting of Pulcheria’s ‘Quando non vedo’, replaced before the first performance, exists for two chalumeaux, members of the clarinet family.
Despite its inconsistencies, the recitative is handled with typical sureness of touch. We have to wait until Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride for anything as spirited as the opening scene, which replaces the last movement of the overture with a splendid tempest on Limassol beach, with a timpani part (given dynamic markings in English by the composer) and a dialogue between the shipwrecked Costanza and Berardo growing out of the subsiding storm. Two of the arias, at any rate, spring spontaneously from the recitative: Pulcheria’s ‘Bella, teco non ho’ is a successful attempt to silence Costanza with the first words of the aria, and Costanza’s ‘Lascia la pace all’alma’ is merely a natural consolidation of what she has just been saying to the evil Isacio.
The apportionment of roles to singers is an interesting reversal of what Handel had contrived for Admeto. Faustina as Pulcheria became the youthful ‘vezzosa e vaga’ figure, and in Costanza Cuzzoni was given a character of genuine weight, almost another Rodelinda in the wifely loyalty suggested by her name. Boschi as Isacio had a far more important part to play in the drama than almost any he had been awarded earlier in the Academy operas, and two fine arias to prove it. As for Senesino, he was required to do little more than simper and bluster as the cardboard eponym, most conventional of the four protagonists.
Handel’s borrowing habit was as deeply ingrained as ever. Though Admeto, interestingly enough, contained hardly any music based on other sources, Alessandro had used material from Agostino Steffani’s opera on the same subject, as well as hints from Handel’s mentor and rival Reinhard Keiser and snatches from Roman cantatas. In Riccardo Primo a new fount of ideas had been tapped for the first time. The year of the opera’s première, 1727, had also seen the completion of the initial instalment in a major series of cantatas published by Georg Philipp Telemann under the title Harmonischer Gottesdienst. These tuneful chamber works for solo voice, a single instrument and continuo were to become a major resource for Handel throughout his career. Their melodic inspiration, first invoked in a revival of Floridante, is detectable everywhere from Alcina and the Coronation Anthems to Samson and Solomon. Telemann appears to have been untroubled by his friend’s recourse to these pieces, since he adapted Riccardo Primo for performance in Hamburg in 1729, adding his own newly composed sub-plot. The mutual regard established on their first meeting in Halle nearly thirty years earlier was built to last and it is possible that Telemann saw Handel’s continued pilfering in terms of the oblique compliment that in some sense it was.
After eleven performances Riccardo Primo was shelved, never to be revived until 1964. It was a respectable run, but it could not save the Academy. Mrs Pendarves told her sister: ‘I doubt operas will not survive longer than this winter, they are now at their last gasp; the subscription is expired and nobody will renew it. The directors are always squabbling, and they have so many divisions among themselves that I wonder they have not broken up before; Senesino goes away next winter, and I believe Faustina, so you see harmony is almost out of fashion.’ Around the time of the Astianatte fracas in June the directors had made several rather querulous appeals to the subscribers, but we can scarcely blame the Academy’s financial supporters for an increasing reluctance to lay out money on exorbitant stars. Opera was no longer a novelty, the wave of interest in the rival divas had broken, Bononcini had retired once again to his patroness and the whole thing had become a deuced expense.
The success of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which played to packed houses during the early months of 1728, had little to do with the Academy’s relapse, despite what has often been stated. As an associate and admirer of Handel’s, Gay was not out deliberately to ruin his old acquaintance of Burlington days, and though his pioneering comic masterpiece pulled in a substantial proportion of Haymarket regulars, this was merely another large hole knocked in an already foundering ship. Much of the precision in Gay’s parody is inevitably lost on those who appreciate the work simply for its ‘popular’ flavour: one wonders how much of the burlesque element Bertolt Brecht, for example, could relish. Hogarth’s painting of the Gaol Scene effectively underlines the formal parallels, with Macheath as the Senesino figure between Polly and Lucy as Cuzzoni and Faustina (or vice versa) against a backdrop that could easily pass for one of the prison scenes in the King’s Theatre stock.
Perhaps the most important contribution to the development of Handel’s art made by The Beggar’s Opera was its revelation of an English public that liked hearing English words to English tunes. Ballad opera was now set going as a genre, with countless variations on Gay’s original. Via Charles Coffey’s The Beggar’s Wedding it established itself in Germany in the Singspiel format, which would reach its apogee in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Die Zauberflöte. In Samuel Johnson’s The Village Opera, the simile aria, already parodied by Gay, gained a magnificent absurdity:
My Dolly was the Snow-drop fair,
Curling Endive was her Hair;
The fragrant Jessamine her Breath;
White Kidney-Beans, her even Teeth.
Two Daisies were her Eyes;
Her Breasts in swelling Mushrooms rise;
Her Waist, the streight and upright Fir;
But all her heart was Cucumber.
Colley Cibber wrote the attractive Chuck or The Schoolboy’s Opera, in which Chuck, with his friends, bunks school, but bribes the schoolmaster Dionysius to commute a threatened beating by offering him a ‘new-mill’d Crown’.
Handel pressed inexorably on with a new opera, provisionally titled Genserico and centred on the figure of the fifth-century Vandal leader Gaiseric, whose libretto was probably adapted for him by the trusted Nicola Haym. After writing the overture and half a dozen arias, he set it aside in favour of another Haym adaptation, based this time on a work representing the very cutting edge of new Italian theatre poetry. First produced on 17 February 1728, Siroe used a text by the greatest of the opera seria poets and one of comparatively few librettists who have had a decisive influence on the nature of operatic form. It is difficult to think of many other writers in the eighteenth century whose international reputation equalled that of Pietro Metastasio and whose fame declined so swiftly with the changes in taste brought about by the rise of Romanticism. Chilly and limited as we may find Metastasio’s classicism (embodied at its most precious in his surname, a Hellenizing of the workaday Italian Trapassi) there is no denying the profound impression made on contemporaries by his single-mindedness as a theatre poet determined to raise his professional role from that of a hack versifier to a dignified arbitrator preoccupied with artistic standards. His dramas, despite their mechanical solutions, at any rate codified opera seria conventions, cutting away trifling underplots, tightening up th
e story element, and forging a much stronger link between character and moral decision. Their clean lines and scrupulous observance of the exit aria rule made them favourites with singers and composers alike, and it is no surprise to find that practically every operatic composer from Handel to Mozart (La Clemenza di Tito is rebuilt Metastasio) set these texts again and again.
There is no space here to investigate the reasons why not a single one of all these settings should have achieved the classic status of, for instance, Gluck and Calzabigi’s Orfeo ed Euridice. Sufficient to note that none of Handel’s three such efforts is among his best work, though each is of course an efficient piece of craftsmanship. Siroe, a pseudo-historical Persian tale, is the least successful of them. The score is strangely colourless, as though the lofty aridities of the poetry had somehow unmanned the composer. Once again, by simple contrast with the effects in Riccardo Primo and, in turn, with the sobrieties of Admeto, we can see how very far from stereotyped or haphazard is Handel’s approach to the orchestra. Here there is nothing but oboes and strings, and in Act III the oboes do not play at all between the opening sinfonia and the final coro.
Though alert to the libretto’s various dramatic challenges, Handel was evidently impatient of the restrictions imposed by the very long passages of recitative, already cut down by Haym. It is tempting to think that Siroe’s ‘Deh, voi mi dite, o Numi’ at the beginning of Act II was broken off through sheer irritation at the rigidity of the textual structure. The text itself has in any case its full measure of Metastasian strengths and weaknesses: on the one hand, a tightly knit intrigue, skilfully interlocked situations and strong characters, on the other the usual exit convention, huge swaths of dialogue unlikely to interest a London audience unless it was prepared to pore carefully over its wordbooks and a plot which, for all its nods in the direction of Aristotelian purity, conveys little of that element of chance that has played such a vital part in good drama from Aeschylus down to our own day.
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