Handel

by Handel- The Man

  For this and much else Poro gained instant favour. ‘Porus K of the Indies – New by Mr Hendel: it took much son confusa Pastorella &c’, notes Colman’s Opera Register, referring to the hit of the show, Erissena’s Act III air with its pastoral drone. Its composition, during December and January, had been overshadowed by the news from Halle of the death of Handel’s mother Dorothea at the age of eighty. The eulogy pronounced at her funeral in the Liebfrauenkirche by pastor Johann Georg Francke praised her intelligence, steadfastness and Christian piety, while also finding space to mention her son ‘Georg Friedrich, born 23 February in the year 1685, who stands in especial grace, by reason of his exceptional knowledge of music’. Handel himself was not present at the service and would have been unable to pay even the shortest of visits to Germany at this time. Writing later to his brother-in-law Michael Dietrich Michaelsen, he spoke of his own sense of loss. ‘Here I cannot restrain my tears from flowing. Yet it has pleased the Almighty, to whose Holy Will I submit myself with Christian resignation. Her memory will never be extinguished for me until, after this life, we are again united, which may the beneficent God grant through his grace.’ Handel it was who paid Dorothea’s funeral expenses and had Francke’s sermon and the customary memorial verses printed afterwards.

  Such especial grace as Handel might be thought to possess did not necessarily include generosity to his rival composers for the stage. The ongoing 1731 season which kept him in London featured hardly any operas other than his own and the same principal governed the new schedule for the autumn, opening on 13 November with a revival of Tamerlano. During the summer he had begun a new work, its libretto apparently derived from Jean Racine’s tragedy Bérénice which, presumably because he knew the French play, was provisionally entitled Titus l’Empereur. Only after writing the overture, one amply scored chorus and two airs did he set aside the project, turning instead to another of Metastasio’s dramas, Ezio, originally written in 1728.

  Interestingly, the libretto derives in part from a second Racine play, Britannicus, and is generally superior to those used by Handel for Siroe and Poro. With its tightly controlled interlocking of successive scenes, the plot, in this late imperial story of Aetius, Honoria and the Emperor Valentinian, goes through the familiar motions of love, duty and deception, using embarrassment as its principal source of dramatic momentum (interesting to note how often Metastasio makes one character put another on the spot). Once again Handel was busy with the scissors, snipping away the recitative passages, which London audiences must have found so tiresome, and rearranging the order of the arias so as to reduce the emphasis on certain soloists and throw others into fuller relief. Bertolli, as the seconda donna Onoria, had one of her numbers cut and another placed before instead of after an air for Varo the bass, presumably so as to ginger up the audience’s expectations regarding an important new acquisition to the company, Antonio Montagnana, who had first appeared at the Haymarket in the Tamerlano revival that opened the 1731–2 season (though in fact his opening aria in Ezio is unremarkable).

  Further reordering was made for Senesino’s benefit as the hero, notably at the end of Act II. In the original Ezio’s aria precedes one for Fulvia, his betrothed, followed in turn by arias for Valentiniano and the villainous Massimo. Probably as a sop to Senesino’s vanity, since Strada had wound up the previous act with a fearsomely virtuoso piece full of modern triplet passages, Handel placed Strada first, dealt with Massimo and the Emperor in a little episode of recitative, and finished off with an affecting F minor siciliano for Senesino. It is hard, nevertheless, to imagine that either he or the audience was exactly satisfied with Handel’s musical treatment of him, as the role, despite its traditionally heroic cast, is presented almost wholly without frills and flourishes. Of his seven arias the first is a tiny effusion without opening ritornello, the second, relying on a series of repeated sections, harks back to the Italian cantatas, and the third has the vocal line moving in unison with the orchestra for seventeen bars. It is only in the siciliano ‘Ecco alle mie catene’ that Ezio is allowed to dominate and his penultimate air, ‘Se la mia vita’, a splendid compensation for earlier disappointments, is one of Handel’s most ornately orchestrated vocal numbers, with paired horns, recorders and bassoons, and interjections from solo cello and violin (he had tried out a similar disposition in Poro).

  Much of the best music in the work goes, not to Ezio or to the petulant, slightly ineffectual Valentiniano, or even to Fulvia, a virgin nightingale, but to Massimo, Onoria and Varo. Massimo’s arias have a broad expressive range, from the foursquare simile piece with which he opens to his final remonstrance with his daughter, ‘Tergi l’ingiuste lagrime’, in which the orchestral accompaniment is reduced to a smattering of angular staccato punctuations, as though the composer were reluctant to allow such a thorough-paced traitor to ingratiate himself with us. That Handel fully understood the type of political manipulator he represents is shown ideally in ‘Se povero il ruscello’, in which his sly comparisons of Ezio’s growing popularity with the movements of a stream are complemented in the first section by an insinuating statement of a typically Handelian ‘purling brooks’ figure on the strings and in the second (describing the river in spate) by turbid flurries of descending scales. For her part Onoria gets one of the most attractive arias in all the operas, the radiantly pastoral ‘Quanto mai felici siete’, an enchanting rustic dance reminiscent of Telemann in one of his Polish or Moravian moods, an idea taken up later on with equal freshness by Varo, dilating on the ups and downs in the fortunes of shepherds and monarchs.

  If the audience wanted a full display of Montagnana’s enormous technical command, which brought him (little though he was later to deserve it) the finest of the composer’s operatic bass roles, they got it here, in the amazing cadential leap of a twelfth to bottom F, and in the glorious ‘Già risonar’, with its trumpet solo, the first bass number in any Handel opera since Rinaldo to exploit vocal agility and a wide tonal range, freeing the voice part from absolute dependence on the orchestral bass line. Yet Ezio flopped – ‘Clothes & all ye Scenes New – but did not draw much Company’. Fabri and Merighi had left for Italy, and their replacements, the husband and wife Giovanni Battista Pinacci and Anna Bagnolesi, were neither of them ideal. The opera enjoyed only five performances, but Handel quickly followed it with another new work, one which drew enthusiastic audiences.

  ‘I went to the Opera Sosarmis, made by Hendel, which takes with the town, and that justly, for it is one of the best I ever heard,’ wrote Lord Percival in his diary. He was probably unaware that Sosarme, re di Media had started its career as Fernando, re di Castiglia, adapted anonymously for Handel from Antonio Salvi’s Dionisio, re di Portogallo, written for the Pratolino stage in 1707. After composing the opera’s first two acts, Handel had suddenly decided to shift the setting of its story of rebellion and dynastic intrigue from medieval Portugal to ancient Media. I am unconvinced by the theory put forward by modern Handel scholars that this had something to do with England’s need to preserve its traditional alliance with the Portuguese. There is nothing in the original libretto which could possibly have caused offence: rather the contrary, since the Hispano-Portuguese union ending the opera felicitously recalls the recent marriage between King Joāo V and a Spanish infanta. A somewhat more convincing idea suggests that pushing the action even further into the past would help to muffle any potentially embarrassing resemblance to current political developments in Britain itself. In a plot featuring a son in opposition to his father and the machinations of an elderly politician, could not the audience have detected allusions to King George II’s quarrel with his son Frederick, Prince of Wales, and sniffed out a parallel between the scheming counsellor Altomaro and that master parliamentary operator Sir Robert Walpole? For the time being, however, the reasons behind Handel’s switch remain mysterious.

  Sosarme has all the faults and virtues of Poro and Ezio, and shows yet again how much the composer relied on the stimulus of a really good libretto
. The pity is that Salvi’s text had to be so heavily cut in order to suit Handel’s requirements, though enough survives to remind us of the Florentine poet’s gift for flexible dramatic verse, a powerful sense of situation and an ability matched by few other contemporary theatre poets to delineate credible human characters. As in Ezio the hero is folded rather too gently into the substance of the drama, in which his stance is that of an ardent romantic as opposed to a warrior hero. In the latter posture he only emerges halfway through the second act in ‘Alle sfere della gloria’, whose broad, leisurely musical paragraphs, sumptuously scored for oboes and strings with two horns, set up a heroic confidence echoed later on by the delightfully catchy ‘M’opporrò da generoso’, its distinctive colouring created by a rare use of colla parte oboes within bustling quaver patterns on the strings.

  The women are treated with that utter certainty of aim and expression which Handel almost always brought to his heroines. In Erenice, Sosarme’s prospective mother-in-law, Salvi had created a maternal figure somewhat more sympathetic than either the ambitious Gismonda or the tigress Matilde. Her wavering hopes and fears, embodied, for example, in the structure of her ‘Vado al campo’, its sense of urgent resolve underlined by the absence of ritornello and the pulse of the drumbeat bass, very quickly become our own. At moments like this, and in the anguished pathos of ‘Cuor di madre’, punctuated by violin solos, we can see just how unfair is the charge levelled at opera seria that it lacks an adequate sense of continuous drama.

  Anna Strada as Elmira was rewarded with what is surely one of the strongest of Handel’s later soprano roles. Like Durastanti before her and Susanna Cibber later on, she was evidently the kind of singer the composer liked best, not so much a flashy vocalist as an artist whose sensitivity and expressiveness suited themselves ideally to the full range of Handelian effects. We are told that he took such care in composing for her that ‘from a coarse singer with a fine voice, he rendered her equal at least to the first performer in Europe’. How many other composers of the day would have dared to introduce a prima donna with an air on the scale of an exquisite miniature like ‘Rendi’l sereno al ciglio’, a mere fifteen bars accompanied by strings alone, without continuo? He had done something of the sort before with Cuzzoni, and like her ‘Falsa imagine’ (though this was not Strada’s first appearance) the little aria became an instant favourite. It is Elmira who begins and ends both Acts I and II, the latter counterbalancing A minor and A major in the plaintive opening arioso and simile aria in which she likens her errant brother to a bird returning finally to its nest, with the help of insinuating triple time string figures. Impossible to avoid feeling, whatever the librettist’s contribution, that Handel must have appreciated a dramatic design which threw Strada, rather than Senesino, into such powerful relief though he flattered them both with the serene enchantments of ‘Per le porte del tormento’, perhaps his most attractive operatic duet.

  Sosarme’s success was more or less contemporary with events in the English musical world, which may have given Handel a certain additional satisfaction. His old rival Giovanni Bononcini had remained in London after the break-up of the first Academy, as he was already under the protection of Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, ‘with a salary of five hundred pounds a year, a sum no musician had before from any Prince, nor ought to have’. He had composed little following the notorious Astianatte, but at any rate found an appreciative patron in the Duchess, at whose private concerts ‘no other Music was performed to the first people in the kingdom than the compositions of her favourite master, executed by the principal singers of the opera’. Each was, however, proud and temperamental, and in 1731 they quarrelled irredeemably over the extras Bononcini added to his bills. He left her service for good, perhaps in a mood like that in which he had once dared to snub the Emperor Joseph I with the words: ‘There are many sovereign princes and only one Bononcini.’

  At the same period a scandal had broken, which was to discredit him utterly in the eyes of many of his London admirers. The Academy of Ancient Music was a concert club, founded by some of Handel’s friends and acquaintances, which met at the Crown and Anchor tavern in the Strand and, besides giving excellent recitals, amassed an extensive music library from the members’ donations. In 1728 Maurice Greene, newly appointed to the Chapel Royal post left vacant by the death of Croft, introduced a madrigal, ‘In una siepe ombrosa’, to one of the Crown and Anchor concerts as a work by Bononcini. Three years afterwards the club library acquired the newly published Duetti, Terzetti e Madrigali by Handel’s old Venetian associate Antonio Lotti, and what was everyone’s surprise to find ‘In una siepe ombrosa’ included in the book.

  Bononcini’s initial response was an outraged denunciation of Lotti as a plagiarist, claiming that he himself had written the madrigal thirty years earlier for the Emperor Leopold. Application to Lotti himself by the club produced a declaration of authenticity, which Bononcini declined to answer. A second letter to Venice elicited Lotti’s affidavit, under seal of a public notary, with testimony from four witnesses who had either seen it in rough draft or sung it before it went to press, and from the author of the text, Paolo Pariati. As a venerable member of the Venetian musical establishment Lotti cannot have needed to pass off so unremarkable a piece as his own: Bononcini’s reasons for doing so may have been connected with the sort of contemptuous arrogance for which he had become noted. Greene meanwhile stuck to his guns and, on seeing his friend dishonoured, withdrew to set up a rival society with the violinist Michael Festing at the Devil Tavern, further down the street, ‘and the joke upon this occasion was that Dr Greene was gone to the Devil’. Bononcini finally quitted London for Paris in October 1732, never to return.

  Whatever his pleasure in seeing his rivals discomfited and his opera successful, Handel’s triumphs were alloyed by a piece of musical piracy which was to have momentous consequences, not only for the direction ultimately taken by his own career, but for the concert life of eighteenth-century London as a whole. On 23 February 1732, eight days after the new opera’s première, a private performance of the Cannons oratorio Esther (or The History of Hester, as Lord Percival calls it) took place. This was given at the Westminster house of Bernard Gates, who many years earlier sang bass solo in Queen Anne’s birthday ode and the Utrecht Jubilate, and was now Master of the Chapel Royal Children. Gates himself, according to the printed libretto, ‘join’d in the Chorus’s, after the Manner of the Ancients, being placed between the Stage and the Orchestra; and the Instrumental Parts (two or three particular Instruments, necessary on this Occasion, excepted) were performed by Members of the Philharmonick Society, consisting only of Gentlemen’. The all-male cast was drawn from among Gates’s choristers, the part of Esther being taken by John Randall, later professor of music at Cambridge, and the oratorio was ‘represented in action’. Two further performances followed at the Crown and Anchor, organized by William Huggins, who provided the costumes. Handel was present on one of these three occasions, probably the first of them since it was on his birthday. The idea may originally have been to honour him by presenting a work which few people, apart from the Duke of Chandos and his friends, for whom it was originally composed in 1718, would have had the chance of hearing. It was a hit for all concerned, as Percival noted: ‘This oratoria or religious opera is exceeding fine, and the company were highly pleased, some of the parts being well performed.’ The Academy of Ancient Music later adopted the pleasing habit of celebrating the composer’s birthday with an Esther revival.

  Bernard Gates, however, had other, slightly less laudable intentions in presenting Handel’s first English oratorio to a wider public. He had already flourished his Handelian colours against Greene’s Bononcinian partisanship in the wake of the Lotti madrigal affair, and the Esther performances seem to have constituted a further demonstration of loyalty. A more exalted enthusiast in the shape of Anne, the Princess Royal, was soon eager to hear the music. Since she could hardly be expected to go to a Fleet Street tavern, the Kin
g’s Theatre was chosen as a suitable venue, but the solo roles would need to be taken by stronger voices than those of the Chapel Royal choristers. On 2 May Handel duly offered a revised and expanded Esther, including music from the Coronation Anthems and other works, and featuring stars from his current company, Senesino, Strada, Bertolli and Montagnana. The Italian singers coped valiantly, if not altogether successfully, with the English text. ‘You would have sworn it had been Welch,’commented one audience member, who was disappointed to find ‘this Sacred Drama a mere Consort, no Scenary, Dress or Action’. Handel, he noted, was ‘plac’d in a Pulpit, I suppose they call that (their Oratory)’ with the soloists ‘in their own Habits’. The chorus may or may not have included Chapel Royal men and boys. An advertisement in the Daily Journal was careful to emphasize the decorum of the occasion: ‘NB There will be no Action on the Stage, but the House will be fitted up in a decent Manner for the Audience.’