Handel

by Handel- The Man

  the Viceroy, who likes Bernacchi well enough, told him that he was determined to have him remain for the coming year. Bernacchi replied that he would agree, on condition that all his stipulations should be fulfilled; among which were that the Merighi should stay, and that Carestini, his enemy of the rival party, should be dismissed. The Viceroy gave orders to the impresario that all this should be done, and that the contract should be signed. The ladies and gentlemen of Carestini’s party at once made a fuss, and went in a body to the Viceroy, protesting that they should not be absolutely deprived of Carestini. The Viceroy now found himself in a difficult position, and ordered the impresario to set about settling the affair, saying that he wanted no part in it . . . When Bernacchi heard about this, he went to the impresario saying that he was a man to make conditions and not one to accommodate himself to them; that he would not stay in a country where he was not liked, and that he would have no part in such foolishness . . .’

  If Handel wanted Bernacchi, difficult as he was, he would also have to settle for Merighi, rumoured, in whatever sense, to be the castrato’s mistress; it was a good bargain, since she was a fine singing actress. ‘Taken in the Lump’, Owen Swiney reported to the Duke of Richmond, Handel’s projected ensemble ‘will far exceed your late one and cou’d the Faustina creep into it . . . could exceed in Worth any other company assembl’d from all the Singers in Italy put together’. Turning northwards with these two and Strada contracted, he may have stopped off at Bologna, home of Annibale ‘Balino’ Fabbri, a fine dramatic tenor in the Borosini mould, whom he now added to the company, and probably visited Parma, where he heard Geminiano Giacomelli’s Lucio Papirio Dittatore in May and picked up the wordbook of a recent carnival success by Farinelli’s brother Riccardo Broschi, Bradamante nell’isola d’Alcina, to a libretto by an unknown hand. Crossing Germany he stopped at Halle to visit his family as he had promised Michaelsen in a letter written while he was at Venice. Once again the news of his arrival reached Johann Sebastian Bach – this time Wilhelm Friedemann was sent from Leipzig with an invitation – and once again Handel cheated future generations of music lovers by declining owing to lack of time, a fact that seems to have made no difference to Bach’s continuing esteem for him.

  He arrived in England on 29 June, but the singers were only gathered together in October. On the 10th of that month he took Anna Strada, the first of them to arrive, to Kensington Palace to give a concert as a taster for the royal family. ‘The Harpsichord was played on by Mr Handell, and their Performances were much approv’d.’ Princess Amelia wrote breathlessly to her governess: ‘We had yesterday twice the new Singer her name is Strada it is a charming voice and [I/we] think her beyond her predecessors. She is mighty good and easie and hath exactly the way of talking of Cozzony. The others ant yet come but indeed if they prove but half as good we shall be very happy this Winter.’

  For Handel there was the problem of finding a theatre poet. Just after the return from Italy, his most able collaborator and adaptor Nicola Haym died at the house in Wardour Street where he lived with his common-law wife, a singer known as ‘the Baroness’ and their son Jack. Some months after his burial in the churchyard of St Anne’s Soho, the auction sale of Haym’s considerable collection of books, pictures, coins, medals and music drew huge crowds to Cock’s Rooms in nearby Poland Street. A figure of some cultural eminence and versatility had departed and Handel would surely have felt the loss.

  Rolli was certainly not anxious to fill the vacancy. His letters during this period seem to exult in the likely debacle of the eidegrendeliano Academy and all its works. With Bononcini theatrically inactive (though still in London) Ariosti recently dead and no obvious focus left for Italian cultural chauvinism, the poet was reduced to a sneering commentary, transmitted to Riva and Senesino, on events as they unfolded at the King’s Theatre in the throes of beginning a new opera season. ‘Now learn’, he told Riva, ‘that the famous Rossi, Italian author and poet, is Handel’s bard.’ This was probably Giacomo Rossi, who had written the text for Rinaldo in 1711 and was now called upon to tailor Salvi’s Adelaide, the text of Orlandini’s opera Handel had recently heard at the Venice carnival. The name of its principal character, Ottone, was changed to Lotario, doubtless because the audience might think this latest opera was simply an old one réchauffé. The score, dedicated essentially to profiling new stars, Strada, Bernacchi, Fabri and the others, was completed on 29 November 1729 and given its first performance just over a fortnight later.

  The Norwich Gazette reported: ‘We hear the Operas will be brought on the Stage the Beginning of December, with great Magnificence, the Cloaths for the Singers, Attendants and Soldiers, being all imbroidered with Silver, and seven Sets of Scenes entirely new. And ’tis said that they will begin with a new Opera call’d Lotharius.’ There are in fact ten scene changes in Lotario, but two of these, a prison and a throne room, could be furnished from the Academy stock leased to Heidegger. Among the others, suggestively ornate, are ‘a square in Pavia with a triumphal arch’ and ‘the city walls of Pavia, with a drawbridge, towers and a rampart; afar off, military pavilions in Lotario’s camp’. Despite this, the opera was a failure, as even Mrs Pendarves had to acknowledge. She supposed it might be because ‘the opera really is not so meritorious as Mr Handel’s generally are, but I never was so little pleased with one in my life’. Rolli and Bononcini took a more plainly sardonic view, but the former had to admit that, apart from Bernacchi who was not a favourite with the audience, the new Haymarket line-up was a considerable success.

  The failure was ultimately Handel’s own and it is difficult to find much to say in Lotario’s favour. The fact that there is a more obvious element of melodrama in this opera than in several of its predecessors adds little interest to a work constructed along such traditional lines (usurping tyrants and distressed heroines in Lombard Italy) with fewer airs of real quality or interest than practically any work Handel had produced since Il Pastor Fido. Most of the good music went, not to Bernacchi or Strada as hero and heroine, but to Fabbri and Merighi as King Berengario and Queen Matilde, characters whose moral flaws had an obvious interest for Handel. Fabbri’s arias, especially ‘Vi sento, vi sento’ in Act III, the fragmented quality of its rhythms mirroring Berengario’s emotional collapse, all have a sturdy, muscular expressiveness lacking in the generally rather grey material given to Bernacchi. Excellent actress as she was, Merighi got the most rewarding role of all in the scheming, vengeful Matilde, first cousin to Gismonda in Ottone. Her richest dramatic moment comes not so much in any of her arias, or even in the magnificent accompanied recitative ‘Furie del crudo Averno’, as in a prison scene almost as complex in the nature of its action as the locus classicus in Fidelio. Having sent the captive Adelaide a choice of poison and a dagger if she refuses to marry the milksop Idelberto, or a crown and sceptre if she agrees, Matilde herself appears just as Adelaide, true to heroic form, is about to swallow the poison. Thereafter the scene runs as follows:

  MATILDE So you still live, proud lady, despising both my gifts.

  ADELAIDE Ah, no, I cherish this one, which I raise to my lips.

  MATILDE Drink then. Your survival offends me too deeply.

  While she starts to drink, Idelberto enters with a naked sword, driving back the guards and threatening to kill himself if Adelaide takes the poison. Furious at such a check to her plans, Matilde hurls poison and sword to the ground as her henchman Clodomiro (sung by the Hamburg bass Riemschneider, to whom Handel gave three fine arias) arrives with the bad news that Lotario’s army has won the battle. In a brilliant flourish of savage sarcasm, whose opening phrases Handel was later to use for a poignant episode in Jephtha, Matilde tells Idelberto that he’d better stay behind to dart amorous glances at Adelaide, while the middle section is reserved for a fling at the heroine, still in chains and likely, if the frantic Queen has her way, to stay there.

  The new company was behaving no better than usually. Lord Hervey, Pope’s ‘Sporus’, told his friend Ste
phen Fox of a quarrel between Strada and Merighi over whose name went foremost in the libretto: ‘The latter, in the first flush of her resentment on the sight of this indignity, swore nothing but that Parliament should make her submit to it. You think this is perhaps a joke of mine; but ’tis literal truth, and I think too absurd to be imputed to anything but Nature, whose productions infinitely surpass all human invention, and whose characters have so indisputably the first place in comedy.’ Both singers, however, were favourites with the audience, as even Rolli had to admit, though he was surprised at Fabbri’s popularity. ‘Would you have believed that a tenor could have such a triumph here in England?’ There was a lesson for Handel in this, and the success of ‘Balino’ foreshadowed that of the great John Beard in the oratorios of the 1740s.

  Bernacchi, Riemschneider and the pretty Roman mezzo Bertolli, who specialized in travesti roles, did not go down so well, and the two former, indeed, survived for a solitary season before leaving England for good. Lotario itself, ‘poor dear swan’, fell a victim to what Mrs Pendarves calls ‘the ill-judging multitude’, a decisive factor in Handel’s shifts of direction throughout the decade, but his new operas for the next couple of seasons brought the public back again, typifying a pattern that was to become familiar in subsequent years. Again and again we hear the composer’s admirers, as often as his enemies, wondering whether his skills are altogether used up, and as constantly Handel recovers himself to produce a masterpiece that astonishes with its liveliness of invention and resourcefulness.

  Disappointing as Lotario is, its immediate successors, Partenope, Poro, Ezio and Sosarme mark a brilliant revitalization of dramatic creativity. Partenope, produced with new scenery and costumes on 24 February 1730, is infinitely engaging, one of those pieces, like Acis and Galatea or Semele, which make us love the composer as much as the work. It is an anti-heroic comedy of the utmost refinement, which ought to be in the repertoire of any opera house ready to mount Die Fledermaus, L’Elisir d’Amore or Die Entführung aus dem Serail. The libretto, incorporating several new aria texts, adapts a popular drama by Silvio Stampiglia, which Handel had first encountered in Venice during the 1707–8 carnival season in a setting by Antonio Caldara. Stampiglia’s text, originally written in 1699, became justifiably popular with Italian opera composers, achieving nearly forty separate musical treatments (including Antonio Vivaldi’s pasticcio Rosmira fedele*(n)) twenty-three of them written before Handel made his own version. He had long meditated this, but the original Academy rejected it, probably because the ironic or mock-heroic tone of the drama was not consistent with the management’s serious aspirations. Owen Swiney, indeed, had warned the Duke of Richmond against having anything to do with Partenope. ‘It is the very worst book (excepting one) that I ever read in my whole life: Signor Stampiglia endeavours to be homourous and witty in it . . . I am very sure ’twill be received with contempt in England . . . if ’tis to be done, ’twill bring more scandal & lesse profit than any opera that has been yet acted to the Hay-Market Theatre.’

  In Stampiglia’s drama the legendary founding of Naples by Queen Parthenope is used as the martial background to an amorous intrigue of increasingly enjoyable absurdity. Partenope herself, wayward and imperious, is loved variously by the tenor Emilio, Prince of Cumae, whom she has also conquered in battle, Arsace, who has been followed to her court by his rejected sweetheart Rosmira disguised as the warrior Eurimene, and Armindo, Prince of Rhodes (sung by Bertolli, thus heightening the prevailing sense of comic ambiguity). Rosmira’s sheer pluck and determination, summed up for us in the jaunty aria da caccia, its horns cantering along in 12/8, with which she finishes Act II, eventually win the day, but not before she is forced to reveal her identity when Arsace answers her challenge to a duel by making the condition that the pair of them fight stripped to the waist. Had Swiney looked more closely at the Partenope libretto, he might perhaps have grasped its moral message, scarcely blunted by the farcical denouement or obscured by the deftness with which Stampiglia sets up the complex relationships between his six characters. In the figure of Armindo, Handel’s opera celebrates the triumph of a contented soul, philosophically accepting the zigzags of destiny, sincere, candid and modest, an embodiment of civilized ideals.

  Partenope’s sophistication and variety of comic nuance make it one of Handel’s most enchanting operas. The masterly characterization and assured sense of pace and tone are sustained through a deliberate lightening of orchestral texture in the airs and an infusion of that Italianate sophistication which Handel could call up whenever it suited him. It is not only the enchanting ‘Voglio amare’ that bears the stamp of Venice and Naples. In the rhythms of Partenope’s ‘Spera e godi’, for example, Emilio’s ‘La speme ti consoli’ or the triplets of Armindo’s ‘Nobil core’ we catch at a kind of unquenchable optimism and high spirits which, like the melodies themselves, belong distinctively to that sunlit Parthenopean world, with its lazzaroni, its singers and comedians, at which Handel had taken his last look the previous summer. Was there perhaps some particular significance for him in the reverberations of the title and in the work as a whole? Certainly, like Serse, Flavio or Ariodante, Partenope is an opera that tells us more about its composer than others by Handel. Wit which is dry but never cynical, a readiness to appeal to our humane sympathies on behalf of their most unlikely recipients, an indulgent sense of the overriding effects of embarrassment, all these lend a subtler shading to figures like Arsace, pathetic in both ancient and contemporary senses, and the often infuriating Partenope herself, and contribute to the splendid theatricality of the quartet at the opening of Act III or the trio ‘Un cor infedele’, where the unresolved amorous entanglement between the two, complicated as it is by the justifiable interference of Rosmira, forbids all three voices ever to blend together.

  The new opera was followed by revivals of Giulio Cesare and Tolomeo, performances of the latter alternating with those of Ormisda, a pasticcio arranged by Handel from airs by the latest Italian masters. This proved to be the most popular of the season’s new offerings, notching up thirteen evenings against Partenope’s seven. Not everyone, however, was pleased with Ormisda’s success. Mrs Pendarves declared that ‘Operas are dying, to my great mortification. Yesterday I was at the rehearsal of a new one; it is composed of several songs out of Italian operas; but it is very heavy to Mr Handel.’ She would have been more pleased with the news that Senesino was returning to London. Apparently undeterred by gloomy communications from Rolli as to declining standards in the Haymarket, he had finally agreed a contract for a 1,400-guinea salary. The 1730 autumn programme opened with a Scipione revival, in which the castrato ‘charm’d much’ and King George and Queen Caroline attended on four successive nights. They and their family were out in force for the sixteen performances of Handel’s new opera, Poro, re delle Indie, first presented on 2 February 1731 and based, like Siroe, on a text by Pietro Metastasio.

  It was barely twelve months since the libretto, originally entitled Alessandro nell’ Indie, had received the earliest of its many settings, by the much-admired Neapolitan composer Leonardo Vinci. Handel presumably altered the title to avoid confusion with the Alessandro of 1726, dramatizing earlier episodes in the conqueror’s Indian campaign, and when given at Hamburg in 1732, a year after its English première, Poro was advertised as Triumph der Grossmuth und Treue, oder Cleofida, Königin von Indien, with recitatives in settings by Telemann.

  The libretto is the usual Metastasian formula of heroism and gallantry among six characters distinguished by the polish of their poetic utterance, but the plot, turning on Queen Cleofide’s exploitation of Alexander’s love in order to further Porus’s political cause, throws the opportunism and treachery of the central figures into unpleasant relief. Perhaps it was to modify this prevailing impression, and not simply because Riemschneider’s replacement, Commano, was of little account, that Handel reduced the substantial role of the villainous Timagene to the only bass principal in any of the operas who is not awarded an
aria. The text as it stood in any case disquieted the composer, and shows alterations were not limited to the customary excision and compression of recitative, but involved the cutting and the transplanting of arias in a revision that grew more radical as the drama progressed.

  This does not, in fact, result in any startling improvement upon the original. Alessandro is an altogether feebler variation on his vigorous avatar of 1726 and the obligatory second pair of lovers, Erissena and Gandarte, become tiresome through superfluity. The interest of Poro is heavily weighted in favour of the music and there is hardly a dull number in the piece. Handel’s selective attitude towards the newer styles is shown by his readiness to accommodate them alongside fashions of a distinctly elderly cut without any obvious sense of incongruity. Cleofide, for instance, is introduced in a number decidedly reminiscent of Vinci and Leo, ‘Se mai turbo il tuo riposo’, especially in its continuing absorption of fresh material and plangent chromaticisms in the middle section: yet in the opera’s penultimate scene, threatening suicide, she sings a tiny sixteen-bar aria making effective use of some hallowed Handelian clichés over a simple ground bass recalling Purcell to an English ear. Touches of Neapolitan intermezzo colour Erissena’s ‘Chi vive amante’ just as surely as Alessandro’s ‘D’un barbaro scortese’ sounds continually ready to turn into the most traditional Baroque fugato while never quite succeeding.

  Such stylistic freedom carries over into the composer’s handling of formal operatic conventions. The overture, focusing on widely spaced intervals, ignores the usual concluding minuet and hurries us instead straight into the drama via a simple shift to the relative major, introducing an accompanied recitative as the defeated Porus rushes across the battlefield amid the scattered remnants of his army. Though several of the arias are extremely short and two at least are not cast in da capo form, Cleofide’s ‘Se troppo crede al ciglio’ has a gigantic thirty-six-bar middle section with divided strings. The most striking touch, however, was offered to Handel on a plate, as it were, by Metastasio. In Act I Poro and Cleofide have sworn a mutual fidelity in corresponding arias. A few scenes later, with the appearance of Alessandro, Cleofide, true to the spirit of the opera, flirts with the conqueror, well aware that she is making her lover jealous. Once Alexander has left, nobly implying that love is a passion unknown to him, the pair turn on each other and launch straight into a duet in which each ironically quotes the words and music of the earlier protestations of faith.