Something had happened here that had not taken place since the second part of Acis and Galatea fifteen years before, and the two works draw upon similar resources for their respective strengths. There is the same sense of cleanness and clarity in the overall design, the same idea of formal elements, aria, chorus, recitative, serving one another instead of existing as mere independent shapes and, most important, the same quality of a personal style, which selects and concentrates on features drawn from a varied mass of musical traditions while ignoring others. As in Acis, Handel is saying something new, and it is scarcely accidental that each is based on the inspiration of an English text. The quality of Samuel Humphreys’s reliable adaptation of Racine’s Athalie, whose irresistible sense of dramatic purposefulness and flawless plotting so appealed to Handel, is matched by the freedom and suppleness of English poetry. Emptier of Augustan cliché than the Morell libretti of the 1740s and superior to the banalities of Humphreys’s Deborah text, Athalia, in the relationship between its verbal and musical languages, underlines Handel’s stylistic sensitivity to the nature of the medium in which he found himself working.
This triumphant absence of pedantry in Handel, the ability to impress a personal homogeneity on a handful of intriguingly disparate elements, shows more clearly in Athalia than in many of his later oratorios, perhaps because it was composed within the orbit of his last great operas. Thus an air like Athalia’s ‘My vengeance awakes me’ has (as we noted in the previous chapter) the typical rhythmic bounce of a ‘modern’ aria in the Porpora style, yet its very sophistication of musical idiom, with suggestions of lethal elegance masking nervousness in the harmonies and accompaniment figures, is ideally suited to the Clytemnestra-like Queen herself. No finer example of the composer’s ideas of balance and definition is given us than the context of this flamboyant outburst, placed between the boy Joas’s artless ‘Will God whose mercies ever flow’, scored for strings without continuo, and the duet ‘My spirits fail’, which carries us from Athalia’s hectic B flat allegro straight into a slow F minor, which in its turn becomes an andante solo for Josabeth over a wandering bass line.
Such a radiantly dramatic quality in the pacing and layout of the various numbers is emphasized by the choral element whose significance had been established by Deborah. The choruses in Athalia are the better for not being allowed to swamp the action and for being altogether more thoughtfully constructed. The idea of contrasted religious or ethnic groups, which was to reach its apogee eleven years later in the presentation of Jews, Persians and Babylonians in Belshazzar, is here developed amid the sensuous textures of the sequence following Athalia’s magnificent arioso in Act I Scene iii, in which she recounts her dream (Racine’s famous ‘Songe d’Athalie’) to Mathan, the priest of Baal, and his followers. As he was to do in ‘Forever thus stands fix’d the doom’, the uncannily similar chorus sung by the pagan Romans in Theodora, Handel gives the Baalites, in ‘The gods who chosen blessings shed’, a kind of jaunty winsomeness that is indefinably English in manner, its foreshadowings of Vauxhall or Ranelagh pastoral and the work of younger men like Boyce and Stanley accentuated by a felicitous scoring for horns. Orchestration, indeed, does much of the necessary work of underlining traditionally ‘pagan’ associations: Mathan’s ‘Gentle airs, melodious strains’ is accompanied by one of those cello solos that are such a trademark of 1730s Handel, and Athalia’s ‘Softest sounds no more can ease me’ has an obbligato violin line (altered to solo flute before the first performance) serving to heighten our sense of the Queen as having reached a point at which serenity will be impossible to regain.
The fullest weight and dignity in the music of Athalia is reserved for the Jewish choruses, in which the debt to classical drama demonstrated by Racine’s play is magnificently acknowledged. The chorus is here both commentator and participant, punctuating Josabeth’s ‘Tyrants would in impious throngs’ with its rhetorical outbursts, shaking a colossal fist at the court Baalites with a sturdy fugal Hallelujah and stirring the blood with their festal affirmations in ‘The mighty power in whom we trust’ which opens Act II. Here, as elsewhere in the work, Handel underlined the sense of confident determination on the part of the worshippers in the temple of the one God by his spacious eight-part choral writing. The apparently loyal Whiggery of their ‘bless the true church and save the king’ needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, however, since elsewhere in the oratorio the whole political issue of rightful heirs and successors to the crown suggests that Handel and Humphreys were well aware of a strong Jacobite constituency in their Oxford audience, even if they did not sympathize with it.
Handel concluded his Oxford series with a performance of Deborah on Thursday, 12 July and presumably returned to London immediately afterwards. The intended honour towards him of a doctorate of music was not accepted, but the university was no doubt pleased to see in Athalia a grateful tribute from the composer. So too thought the Abbé Prévost, anglophile author of Manon Lescaut, who issued, from London, a weekly review Le Pour et Le Contre, in which he noted that ‘Mr Handel went to Oxford, but they were surprised to see him refuse the marks of distinction which were proposed for him. Such modesty alone could bear comparison with his talents. He did not fail to express his lively gratitude to the University, and to contribute to making the ceremony . . . more brilliant.’ Prévost was intelligently appreciative of Handel’s genius but others in Oxford looked back on the whole affair with misgivings. Hearne approvingly cited ‘an old man of Oxford’ who ‘observed to me, that our late Oxford Act was the very worst that ever was’, and the anonymous author of a ballad opera on the occasion portrayed undergraduates and dons who had ‘squandered away all my ready Rhino . . . to make a gaudy Appearance for four or five Days this Publick Act’ and wishing that ‘I had been helping build the new town in Georgia, rather than in this cursed Place’.
In the end the students and their ‘toasts’ take precisely this way out to escape their creditors. No such expedient lay open to Handel. Instead, a London bristling with professional challenges awaited him. His new company, chosen with typical regard for specific musical qualities, brought back Margherita Durastanti, a seasoned Handelian now well into her forties but still apparently in good voice, and introduced two outstanding castrato singers, part of that distinguished series Handel invited to London between 1719 and 1741. The Lombard soprano Carlo Scalzi, much admired by Metastasio, had enjoyed considerable success in Venice and Naples, but was destined to stay only a year in England, where nobody but Handel seems greatly to have esteemed him. A more interesting acquisition, in view of his reputation and subsequent career, was Giovanni Carestini, a marchigiano from the Ancona district, that rich breeding ground of fine voices. He made his first stage appearance at the age of sixteen (Farinelli, his exact contemporary, began a year earlier) and was later to star in the historic performances of Johann Josef Fux’s coronation opera Costanza e Fortezza at Prague in 1723. Burney describes him as ‘tall, beautiful and majestic. He was a very animated and intelligent actor; and having a considerable portion of enthusiasm in his composition, with a lively and inventive imagination, he rendered everything he sung interesting by good taste, energy and judicious embellishments. He manifested great agility in the execution of difficult divisions from the chest in a most articulate and admirable manner.’ An imaginative artist with a good stage presence and a considerable vocal range, he was just the sort of performer calculated to interest Handel, though the details of his subsequent career, with its flourishes of boastfulness and ‘insolence’, suggest that he was as temperamentally difficult as Senesino.
‘It’s not just a story,’ wrote Rolli in one of his epigrams, ‘that those two champions Scalzi and Carestini have come over for Handel, for that great man never sits down to table without a dish of two fat capons. But to send away this capon Senesino is a mistake liable to ruin Handel, for my Senesino is reckoned the cock of all the British hens.’ Part of the castrato’s continuing allure was indeed a certain dubious sexual at
traction, but whatever Carestini’s ability to match Senesino’s success with le britanniche galline, the disingenuous Lady Bristol’s judgement of the new Haymarket company was probably shared by a good many aristocratic opera-goers that season. ‘I am just come home’, she told her husband, ‘from a dull empty opera, tho’ the second time; the first was full to hear the new man, who I can find out to be an extream good singer; the rest are all scrubbs except old Durastanti, that sings as well as ever she did.’
Armed with most of Handel’s former line-up, the Opera of the Nobility opened its first season in splendid style with a new piece by the prestigious Porpora, Arianna in Nasso, on 29 December 1733. Its popularity, registered in a run of thirteen performances, established Porpora as a rival on the scale of Bononcini. The London Italians once again had a respectable focus for their cultural chauvinism and the arrival, a few months later, of Francesca Cuzzoni to join the outfit gave the ultimate state-of-the-art touch to the enterprise. Handel nevertheless had his own new work ready in time for the head-to-head battle of the opera companies. It was a simple enough matter for him to prepare his own Arianna in Creta, based on a libretto by Pietro Pariati originally set by Leonardo Leo for the Rome carnival five years previously, with interpolated aria texts from an earlier Leo piece on the same subject.
None of Handel’s dramatic works is so bad that we would rather not hear it performed again. Arianna is to him what Alzira and Il Corsaro are to Verdi, stilted and mechanical when viewed as a configuration of notes and staves, but full of crude, resistant life when heard in performance. There are a few notable set pieces: the fine overture follows the same pattern as Ezio’s in introducing Act I with an instrumental item following the raising of the curtain (in this case the much-admired ‘Minuet in Ariadne’); there is also a splendid fight with the Minotaur, which grows directly from the ritornello material of Teseo’s ‘Qui ti sfido, o mostro infame’. A musical and dramatic peak is gained at the beginning of Act II in the hero’s dream scene, where five pages of the score show Handel abandoning formal considerations for the sake of pace and authenticity. A few of the arias have genuine distinction. Arianna’s ‘So che non è più mio’ in Act II shows Handel’s interest temporarily reviving in the evident care he has taken over the accompaniments and this impetus is continued in the following aria, ‘Qual Leon, che fere irato’, with its virtuoso bassoon and viola parts, and paired horns adding a gloss to the texture. There is a great deal of rather flashy coloratura, especially for Strada and Carestini in the Ariadne and Theseus roles.
Hawkins’s verdict as to ‘the Ariadne of Handel, in which, excepting the minuet at the end of the overture, there is scarce a good air’ seems more or less correct, particularly when we remember that the previous year had produced Orlando, and that Ariodante and Alcina were soon to follow. Brooding over the score is the spectre of Handel’s wish to beat Porpora at his own game, something he had tried earlier with Bononcini in Floridante, and which consistently clogs his style, so though the music is new, we seem to have heard most of it somewhere before. It might pass muster as the worthy offering of an Italian composer in the later Venetian manner of Lotti and Gasparini, but as a piece by the creator of the Academy masterpieces or even of the flawed brilliance of Poro and Sosarme, it demonstrates the overpowering waywardness of Handel’s talent.
None of Arianna’s shortcomings had the least effect on its popularity, enhanced by the novelty of Carestini. Colman’s Opera Register mentions it as ‘a new Opera & very good & perform’d very often – Sigr Carestino sung surprisingly well: a new Eunuch – many times perform’d’ – seventeen times during this season, with revivals the following November and December. We cannot discount an element of succès de scandale either at the Haymarket or at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, since the whole issue of competition was focused so strongly on the ever-widening rift between the Prince of Wales and his parents. Lord Hervey summed up the matter in his memoirs:
The King and Queen . . . were both Handelists, and sat freezing constantly at his empty Haymarket Opera, whilst the Prince with all the chief of the nobility went as constantly to that of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The affair grew as serious as that of the Greens and the Blues under Justinian at Constantinople. An anti-Handelist was looked upon as an anti-courtier, and voting against the Court in Parliament was hardly a less remissible or venial sin than speaking against Handel or going to Lincoln’s Inn Fields Opera. The Princess Royal said she expected in a little while to see half the House of Lords playing in the orchestra in their robes and coronets; and the king (though he declared he took no other part in this affair than subscribing £1,000 a year to Handel) often added at the same time he did not think setting oneself at the head of a faction of fiddlers a very honourable occupation for people of quality.
Handel had, of course, been music master to Anne, the Princess Royal, and her loyalty to him was one of the causes of Prince Frederick’s patronage of the Opera of the Nobility. The Prince’s animus against his sister was increased by her impending marriage to the Prince of Orange, Stadholder of the Netherlands. ‘A miserable match, both in point of man and fortune, his figure being deformed and his estate not clear £12,000 a year,’ says Lord Hervey, adding that ‘Her Royal Highness’s opinion was . . . whether she would go to bed to this piece of deformity in Holland, or an ancient maid immured in her royal convent at St James’s’. The Stadholder was hunchbacked and halitotic, and the Princess was fat and pock-marked, but their innate common sense and a Civil List jointure of £80,000, financed by the recent sale of crown lands in St Kitts and Nevis, made it a mutually acceptable match. The attendant rejoicings were shared in by everyone except Frederick, incensed at his sister’s marrying before him.
The behaviour of the engaged couple retained a dignity made the more touching by the King’s arrogant treatment of the bridegroom, who fell ill on the morning before the proposed wedding ceremony and had to remove, first to Kensington and thence to Bath. In March 1734 preparations originally scheduled for the previous November got under way once more, and the Daily Journal advertised ‘amongst other publick Diversions that are prepared for the Solemnity of the approaching Nuptials . . . a Serenata, call’d, Parnasso in Festa . . . some what in the Style of Oratorio’s. People have been waiting with Impatience for this Piece, the celebrated Mr Handel having exerted his utmost Skill in it.’
On the evening of 13 March the entire royal family, including the Prince of Wales, who had been studiously polite to the Stadholder so as to annoy the King and Queen, attended the first of Handel’s two nuptial offerings, Il Parnasso in Festa, performed at the Haymarket by the opera soloists. A festa teatrale of the sort later exemplified by such occasional pieces as Gluck’s Le nozze di Ercole ed Ebe and Mozart’s Ascanio in Alba, the work has suffered much the same species of oblivion as Deborah and for substantially similar reasons, since much of the music is recycled Athalia. Neglect has been comparably undeserved. Though the sketchy plot, an omnium gatherum of classical deities and demiurges celebrating the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis, is unlikely to interest us, the chance to hear again Athalia’s stirring, ample choruses is surely not to be rejected, and the freshly composed items, including a finale alternating a solo for Carestini as Apollo with choral interjections, are wholly delightful.
At seven o’clock the following night came the wedding itself, in the Inigo Jones chapel at St James’s, approached ‘by the Light of Flambeaux’ through an enormous covered gallery leading from the palace. Fond of making a splash, the King had laid on a splendid occasion, heightened by the magnificence of the Prince of Orange’s retinue and of his gift of a necklace worn by the Princess ‘which was so large that 22 diamonds made the whole round of her neck’. George behaved very well, but Queen Caroline and the other princesses, according to Lord Hervey, caused the procession to the chapel to ‘put one rather in mind of an Iphigenia leading to the altar than of a bride’. After the vows (the ceremony was conducted by Bishop Gibson in his capacity as Dean of the Chapel Royal) ‘
a fine anthem compos’d by Mr Handell, was perform’d by a great number of voices and instruments’.
To students of Handel the anthem, a rerun of movements from Il Parnasso in Festa in whose use we can detect either an unmitigated cynicism or else a wish that the old Athalia numbers should not be forgotten, is altogether less interesting than the circumstances attached to its commission. For it seems that this had originally, during preparations the previous October, been given to his old rival Maurice Greene, ‘the humpback organist of St Paul’s and the King’s Chapel, the chief undoubtedly of our English composers now living’, as Lord Egmont calls him. Evidently Handel secured the commission because of the royal family’s general penchant for his work, but at a time when he was in need of friends the fact is likely to have cost him a useful ally or two in the musical world.
Yet, as we might expect, his sociable nature and somewhat eccentric charm, as well as, presumably, the possibility that he might be ready to sit down to an extempore performance, was collecting a circle of devoted and emphatically partisan acquaintance. Further down Brook Street lived Mrs Mary Pendarves, soon to marry a music-loving Irish clergyman and become Mrs Delany. From her letters during this period we catch a charming glimpse of the unbuttoned composer relaxing among friends. ‘I must tell you of a little entertainment of music I had last week,’ she writes to her sister, ‘. . . I never was so well entertained at an opera. Mr Handel was in the best humour in the world, and played lessons and accompanied Strada and all the ladies that sang from seven o’clock till eleven. I gave them tea and coffee, and about half an hour after nine had a salver brought in of chocolate, mulled white wine and biscuits. Everybody was easy and seemed pleased, Bunny staid with me after the company was gone, eat a cold chick with me, and we chatted till one o’ the clock.’ Among the guests were Lord Egmont’s son and daughter-in-law, and their relative Anne Donellan, to whom Handel was to bequeath fifty guineas. Biography is best confined to facts but there is something irresistible to the imagination in the idea of Mrs Pendarves and her brother Bernard ‘Bunny’ Granville sitting down to pick at their ‘cold chick’ after the guests’ departure, and indulging in a pleasurable post-mortem on the evening.
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