Handel

by Handel- The Man

  Such features are more obviously marked in Atalanta than in several of the operas surrounding it, though the Covent Garden company remained fundamentally the same (apart from the substitution of Conti for Carestini) from 1734 until 1737. Based on Belisario Valeriani’s libretto La caccia in Etolia, originally set by Fortunato Chelleri for the Ferrara opera, the story is a light-hearted treatment of the spirited courtship of Atalanta and Meleager, and the format owes much to the type of comedy cliché reflected on a rather less sophisticated level in Il Pastor Fido, making use of contrasted couples in a pastoral setting and rounded off with ceremonial festivity. Beard and Negri, as Aminta and Irene, the secondary pair, were given altogether more superficial material than in Ariodante, where they sang Lurcanio and Polinesso, and this is typical of the work as a whole, in which the studied contrast of various elements creates the ideal divertissement for bored and fractious royalty. In fact, Frederick and Augusta did not attend the première. The prince ‘order’d a play at Drury Lane, which carry’d away most of the Company’, but the absence of bride and groom was made up for by the King George, Queen Caroline and five of their children ‘accompanied with a very splendid Audience’.

  Slight though Atalanta is, each of its three acts contains arresting features. Both Conti and Strada, as the protagonists, were given spectacular entrances, the former at the very beginning of the opera in the arietta ‘Care selve’, designed to exhibit his ‘new, graceful and pathetic style of singing’, and the latter halfway through Act I, as Atalanta leading the shepherds in pursuit of the wild boar, which she slays in Meleagro’s presence. Rather like Norma, Atalanta is hardly ever off the stage from the moment she first appears and the brilliance of her arias, culminating in ‘Bench’io non sappia ancor’, with its play upon rhythmic alternations, shows how carefully Handel had nurtured Strada’s talent so as to project it to maximum advantage. As Meleagro Conti was allowed to display more than a mere soulful elegance: both in ‘Non saria poco’, which ends Act I, and in ‘Tu solcasti il mare infido’, just before the concluding jubilations, his virtuosity, evidently based on his agility in negotiating divisions, with the assistance of an impressive upper register (he is the only castrato for whom Handel wrote a top C) glitters through the light-textured orchestration.

  As a pair, the two characters inhabit the opera more fully than many another Baroque couple. Their encounter in Act II, growing out of a rustic chorus of Atalanta’s followers accompanied by antiphonal oboes and horns over the strings, forms a continuous movement, with Atalanta’s ‘Lassa! ch’io t’ho perduta’ springing directly from her last words in recitative and a superb duet, starting in arioso style without ritornello and only gradually turning into a fully organized piece as embarrassment develops and Atalanta mocks Meleagro’s desperation.

  The audience were probably much less excited by this than by the rousing trumpet overture, featuring the talents of Valentine Snow, with its Telemannesque allegro and extended gavotte. The poet Thomas Gray was present on at least one Atalanta night and described the firework effects to Horace Walpole. ‘Conti’, he adds, ‘I like excessively in everything but his mouth which is thus; but this is hardly minded when Strada stands by him.’

  It was not as if all this enthusiasm were going to save Handel. The violinist Matthew Dubourg at Dublin was told by a friend that

  . . . the two opera houses are, neither of them, in a successful way; and it is the confirmed opinion that this winter will compleat your friend Handel’s destruction, as far as the loss of his money can destroy him . . . On Tuesday last, we had a new opera of Handel’s; and at the appearance of that great prince of harmony in the orchestre, there was so universal a clap from the audience that many were surprized, and some offended at it. As to the opera, the critics say, it is too like his former compositions and wants variety – I heard his singer that night, and think him near equal in merit to the late Carestini, with this advantage, that he has acquired the happy knack of throwing out a sound, now and then, very like what we hear from a distressed young calf . . . As to the Operas, they must tumble, for the King’s presence could hardly hold them up, and even that prop is denied them, for his majesty will not admit his royal ears to be tickled this season. As to music, it flourishes in this place more than ever, in subscription concerts and private parties, which must prejudice all operas and public entertainments.

  If he and the Nobility managers were facing the realities of economic disaster in the phenomenon of two opera companies trying to survive on the patronage of a small public in a city where opera-going was still identified with foreignness, decadence and Popery, Handel nevertheless found several things to cheer him during the summer. Allusion to a country retreat in a letter to his friend Lord Shaftesbury at the end of June suggests another visit to Tunbridge Wells, and in August he wrote to his brother-in-law Michaelsen with congratulations on his niece Johanna Friederika’s marriage to Dr Flörcke, professor of law at Halle University, sending a gold watch, a chain and two seals as ‘un petit présent de Nopces’ for the bridegroom, and a solitaire diamond ring ‘de la première Eau et de tout Perfection’ for the bride. In September he was confirmed as music master to the Princesses Amelia and Caroline at £200 per annum, and the following month an outstanding castrato joined the Covent Garden company in the person of Domenico Annibali, star of the Dresden court opera.

  The new season, destined to prove, in most other respects, so disappointing, began in festoons of royal patronage. The Prince and Princess of Wales appeared at an Alcina revival, seated in a box adorned with white satin and ‘a flaming heart between two Hymenaeal Torches, whose different Flames terminated in one Point, and were surmounted with a Label, on which were wrote, in Letters of Gold, these Words, MUTUUS ARDOR’. Atalanta was revived on the Princess’s birthday, 20 November, ‘in order to give their royal Highnesses a view of ye Fireworks’ and Annibali’s debut was planned with Poro, always a favourite with the royal family.

  Mrs Pendarves rightly praised the strengths of the company – ‘Strada, that sings better than ever she did; Gizziello, who is much improved since last year, and Annibali, who has the best part of Senesino’s voice and Caristini’s, with a prodigious fine taste and good action’ – and looked forward to Handel’s two new operas. ‘He was here two or three mornings ago and played me both the overtures, which are charming.’ The first of the pair, Arminio, though finished on 14 October 1736, was not brought on until 12 January 1737, perhaps because the Poro revival had had to be postponed as Strada had gone down with influenza. Despite the admiration of Handel’s friends and unflagging support from royalty, the new piece was not popular and sustained only five performances.

  Few commentators on Handel have ever cared for Arminio. The libretto, by Antonio Salvi, originally for Pratolino performances in 1703, based on the story of the German hero Arminius – Hermann – as treated by Tacitus, is adequate, though it never grabs the imagination with quite the force of the same author’s Rodelinda or Ariodante. The characterization is patchy, failing to offer Handel an opportunity to explore a really wide range of emotions. Arminio, his wife Tusnelda, and Sigismondo (the Conti role) are each very strongly drawn and receive a musical treatment that goes beyond a mere display of agility. Varo, the Roman general, and the German prince Segeste are allowed too easily to fade into insignificance, while Tullio, sung originally by the contralto Maria Caterina Negri, has the kind of commentator’s role more usually given to a bass.

  Handel was not sufficiently concerned to give the drama real momentum. The most arresting sequence occurs during the early scenes of the last act, where the absence of a middle section and da capo in two of the numbers and a sense, in Sigismondo’s ‘II sangue al cor favella’, of the action being pushed along by musical means, indicate the composer’s close involvement*(o) with the text. The structure of this aria is brilliantly unconventional: no introduction, five bars of the voice moving in unison with the first violins, unsupported by any bass, a further six bars during which the
word favella (speaks) is appropriately extended, and only in bar twelve the appearance of the continuo line. Even then the character is almost allowed to break down on the words salvarlo and svenarlo as he contemplates the choice between betraying Roman trust and killing Arminio. Thence the accompaniment lines fragment into a series of agonized semiquaver gasps as Sigismondo’s dilemma increases.

  There is little enough of such originality elsewhere. Apart from the twenty-four-bar oboe solo for Sammartini introducing Sigismondo’s ‘Quella fiamma’, most of the instrumental colour is saved for Act III, where two horns and flutes are featured, and the strings play mostly in separate parts. But Arminio’s main shortcoming is its lack of those good tunes we have a right to expect from Handel, whose gift for melody matches that of a Mozart, a Schubert or a Bellini. The opera is otherwise notable for containing no simile arias, for being one of only two Handelian dramas to open with a duet, and for containing the most fatuous of those portmanteau lines for which Salvi had such a dire penchant:

  Oh padre! O amore! oh sangue! O Arminio! oh sorte,

  oh Ramise! oh sorella! oh affetti! oh morte!

  The second of Handel’s new operas was doomed to a failure which seems to have had little connexion with the suffrage of the audience. Giustino was scheduled for performance on 16 February, and a run at Covent Garden was presumed to carry over into Lent, when performances were advertised on Wednesdays and Fridays. Somebody (Burney suggests the Lord Chamberlain but it was possibly Bishop Gibson) piously interfered and a ban was placed on all Lenten opera at Covent Garden – an obstacle the composer had never had to face during the Academy seasons. Handel was thus forced to cobble together a programme of non-dramatic works to fill the theatre until Easter. Parnasso in Festa, Alexander’s Feast and Esther were all revived, and Il Trionfo del Tempo was dusted down, given several additional numbers and rechristened Il trionfo del tempo e della verità. This was the label that would stick to the two Italian versions of the work, rather than the longer title originally bestowed by Cardinal Pamphilj.

  As on other occasions in Handel’s career, accident dictated precedent and the Lenten oratorio season established itself as a major element in his professional calendar. This was, as Burney says, ‘not merely on account of their gravity and fitness for that holy time, but to avail himself of the suspension of all other public amusements which were likely to divide the public attention and favour’. (Charles Jennens made a similar point in 1744.) Like Mozart, Handel was a working entertainer and had long ago realized that ‘we that live to please must please to live’. The improvised season, what is more, had its successful peaks, especially during the Alexander’s Feast performances, at one of which ‘the Prince and Princess of Wales were present, and seem’d to be highly entertain’d, insomuch that his Royal Highness commanded Mr Handel’s Concerto on the Organ to be repeated, and intends to Honour the same with his Presence once again . . .’

  Yet the loyal Handelians were distinctly perturbed by what they saw as the composer’s gradual collapse under the strain of hard work and fluctuating popularity. Mrs Pendarves’s niece wrote despondently to her mother on 8 March: ‘Music is certainly a pleasure that may be reckoned intellectual, and we shall never again have it in the perfection it is this year, because Mr Handel will not compose any more!’ There seems to have been a prevailing notion among friends and admirers that he was ready to relinquish creative endeavour for good since, some eight weeks after this letter, another anxious voice signalled alarm. The savant James Harris, brother-in-law of Handel’s friend Sir Wyndham Knatchbull, wrote to his cousin Lord Shaftesbury in a valedictory strain: ‘If Mr Handel gives off his Opera, it will be the only Pleasure I shall have left in ye musicall way, to look over his Scores, and recollect past Events – Here Strada used to shine – there Annibale – This was an Excell Chorus, and that a Charming peice of Recitative – In that I shall amuse my Self much in the Same manner as Virgil tells of ye Trojans . . . the war yr Lordp knows was renewed with double Earnestness & Vigour. May my Pleasure find ye Same Fate, & be lost by ye Return of that Harmony wch I have given over, Supported & carried on by ye Same Spirit & Resolution.’

  After six performances before the Lenten interdict Giustino was brought back for three more, two in May and one, as a species of last bid, almost a month later. Thereafter, save for the shadows of its melody which appear in L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, it sank without trace. It is impossible to guess what special possibilities Handel could have seen in Nicola Beregan’s libretto, originally written in 1683 for Giovanni Legrenzi and later revised by Paolo Pariati (Handel used a version made for Vivaldi in 1729). The plot, based vestigially on events in Byzantine history and tracing the rise to glory of the humble ploughboy Giustino, ultimately bidden to share the imperial dominion, is typical of seventeenth-century Venetian opera in its frantic efforts to alleviate the boredom of the spectators by incessant twists in the story and, as such, offers an interesting contrast with the simplified narrative outlines of Metastasian drama. Focal interest is by no means concentrated on Giustino and practically everybody has their moment; one heroine enters ‘pursued by a bear’, another is saved from a sea monster, the Emperor Anastasio indulges in a burst of jealousy, the Empress Arianna is followed by a hopeless lover, the brigand Vitaliano, who makes one of his appearances on a rope suspended from a tower and is identified (by means of a strawberry mark and the operation of a divine voice) as Giustino’s long-lost brother.

  Perhaps it was this very diversity that most appealed to the composer. Few of his operas display such a remarkable catholicity of style, and the various troughs of doodling and banality typical of an overburdened invention such as Handel’s during this period are counterbalanced by the untiring range of his resources. We can scarcely ignore the signs of exhaustion – his obsessive reliance, for example, on descending scales as a sort of binding agent in the statement of themes – but at the same time the opera’s diffuseness allows us to appreciate the wealth of its allusions. The polyglot Handel, who spoke, wrote and thought in a sophisticated babel of tongues, exercises a similar freedom in his music and an appreciation of this is central to our understanding of his work during the late 1730s when, besides showing himself to be an accomplished practitioner of modern styles, he worked back towards the origins of his own in the choral and operatic traditions of the previous century.

  Thus in Giustino we find recollections of his more orthodox Academy manner in the smooth siciliano measures of Anastasio’s ‘O fiero e rio sospetto’ and in the majestic tread of Giustino’s ‘Sull’altar di questo nume’, with its dotted quavers larghetto e staccato and sturdy melodic line. Cheek by jowl with these lie such successful essays in the style of Porpora as the simile arias ‘Zefiretto, che scorre nel prato’ and ‘Quel torrente che s’innalza’. Beside these in their turn Handel includes one of those little French sinfonias to which he remained loyal from Rinaldo to The Choice of Hercules, and at least one scene which, in structure and tone, recalls the Venetian operatic world from which its text ultimately derived. This is the moment at which Fortune, seated on her wheel and surrounded by genii, appears to Giustino asleep beside his plough. Fortune’s aria, with its contrapuntal imitations, its motto figure in the accompaniment, and its welding, via a recitative, with the subsequent chorus (based on the same material) recalls the style of Legrenzi’s own works with which Handel was fully familiar. Borrowings add to the eclectic mix, from Bononcini, Alessandro Scarlatti and Vivaldi among others.

  The opera reflects his apparently unquenchable enthusiasm for romantic narrative, seldom without a hint or two of picaresque adventure and comedy, but handled far more primitively here than in Orlando or Alcina. Finished at almost the same time as Giustino, Berenice, brought on at Covent Garden in May 1737, returns us immediately to the universe of strangled emotions among monarchs and courtiers, which provides the most familiar territory of Baroque lyric drama. Salvi was once again the author, subtitling his libretto ‘The Contests of Love and Politics’
, a phrase neatly included in the work’s closing coro, and mirrored in the amatory dilemmas faced by the Egyptian Queen Berenice, her sister Selene and their various lovers as a result of diplomatic bullying from Rome.

  Salvi’s plot has much to commend it, and the story opens with sensational abruptness as the heroine’s public and private lives clash head on. Two of the characters, Princess Selene and her clandestine admirer Demetrio, are presented sympathetically enough for the drama to be really theirs. The denouement, however, is more than usually artificial: some six or seven bars before the coro the villainous Arsace, responsible for most of the misery and deception in the story, having exulted at the thought of possessing Selene, suddenly experiences a twinge of pity for her and Demetrio, and is rapidly turned into the generous rival who cedes all his sentimental advantages. Salvi, as we saw in Rodelinda, could make an expert job of last-moment remorse, but Grimoaldo’s guilty change of heart is rather different from Arsace’s preposterous heroic flourish. erhaps the greatest flaw lies in Berenice herself who, far from engaging our compassion, seems motivated by self-will, sexual greed and peevishness, as she attempts to manipulate political realities by trampling on the emotions of those closest to her.

  This was surely not what Handel or Salvi intended. The interest of Berenice lies in the distinction with which it so consistently fails to transcend these limitations and in its various attempts to do so. Amid the music’s platitudes, shown at their worst in Arsace’s ‘Amore contro amor’, whose vacuous gesticulations bring it close to the realm of parody, we can sense the flickers of a response to a fast-moving and generally cohesive libretto which, ten years earlier, would have evoked a genuine quickening in the composer. Interestingly, it is the numbers most unabashedly recalling the idiom of earlier operas that breathe real life into the work, pieces such as Demetrio’s ‘No, soffrir non può il mio amore’, an exquisite elaboration of the materials of Teofane’s ‘Falsa immagine’ in Ottone, and his vigorous, elegant duet with Berenice, ‘Se il mio amor fu il tuo delitto’, with its reminiscences of the lighter moments of Partenope or Alcina, which closes Act I. Nothing in the work, however, quite lives up to the promise of the masterly overture, a worthy rival to that in Alexander’s Feast and featuring one of those gently paced triple-time airs whose delicate simplicity makes them uniquely Handel’s.