Handel

by Handel- The Man

  None of the twelve repeats the pattern of another or seeks, in refurbishing ideas from the operas, oratorios and keyboard pieces, merely to capitalize on the success of an already valid formula. Number 5, for example, bases three of its six movements on the overture to the Ode for St Cecilia’s Day, but here Handel, seldom content to let his concepts gather moss, tacks on a theatrical two-and-a-half-bar flourish to the opening and makes certain other small but subtle alterations to the plan of the other two, almost as if to say ‘you only thought you had heard these before’. He uses them, what is more, as a frame within which to present three fresh pieces, a delightful presto, like a little air in a Neapolitan opera buffa, a B minor largo, a sobering hand upon earlier jauntiness, with interlocking voices hankering for a resolution, and a robust Vivaldian allegro poised upon a vigorous bass line.

  The entire set is permeated by that tender lyricism which never deserted Handel. We are unlikely to reject its appeal to us in the stately tread of number 4’s opening larghetto or in the justly famous E major air with variation in number 12, but the eighth concerto, less characterful than some of its fellows, wins with the listener precisely through this gentle intimacy, permeating the wistful melodies of the allemande and the romantic siciliano, its textures thickened by rapturous contrapuntal embellishment on first and second violins.

  The essential Handelian wit, which renders him a true contemporary of Pope and Swift, and which made Wagner, after playing through Alexander’s Feast, describe him, with grudging admiration, as ‘the Rossini of his day’, is always present. There is something positively roguish, for example, about the opening of the fugue subject in the allegro of number 7 or the incongruous irruption of birdsong into the sedate dotted beginning of number 11. Related to this is the airy, protean sleight-of-hand with which he switches from one idiom to another, indulging in that favourite Baroque musical pastime of contrasting national styles. The Englishness of the gigue in the ninth concerto spills over into the bluff little twenty-bar movement of the tenth. The passagework of the first allegro in number 12 is authentically Italian, while the edgy, dotted zigzags of its closing fugue take us back to the organ loft of the Liebfrauenkirche at Halle, in an obvious homage to his teacher Friedrich Zachow, from whom the subject is borrowed. Wilder shores are visited in the peasant musette of number 6, and the third concerto’s boisterous polonaise (a rhythm Handel explored again in the English hornpipe ‘Now love, that everlasting boy’ in Semele) shows a touch or two of his friend Telemann’s penchant for Polish and Moravian dance measures.

  The significance of Opus 6 in relation to the rest of Handel’s work as one of the most easily accessible means of examining his interests and methods as a composer cannot be too highly estimated. There is a wealth of tuneful and accomplished English instrumental music of this period, much of it lying all too easily neglected in the long Handelian shadow, but none of it matches these concertos in their encyclopaedic inventiveness, that sense of spontaneous, improvisatory compilation with which Handel so loves to astound us. The noblest of all tributes to the work, offered by Arthur Hutchings in The Baroque Concerto, is worth reproducing here:

  Those who know it by heart carry with them a perennial source of joy and wonder – joy because no scores of the period, not even Rameau’s, are so exquisitely sensuous within the bounds of strength and sanity, and wonder because organic form, the fulfilment of great ideas in great style, is the most wonderful phenomenon both of the natural order and also of that order in which a divine hand is withdrawn so that the creature may share the experience of creation. How lavish a bounty is showered on the few from whom not even the perfection of form is withheld! – How much is denied to an artist who received a second share of endowments! A hundred years of orchestras, fifty years of concertos, the pains of living and working to perform and compose them well – all would have been justified if every one were lost, provided that we still had the Great Twelve. ‘There is the truth.’

  Two at least of the concertos were featured in the new vocal work Handel brought on at the end of February 1740. It was a setting of John Milton’s contrasted poems ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’, whose text had been arranged for Handel by two of his friends. The original idea for the piece came from James Harris, already a key member of the loyal Handelian circle including Lord Shaftesbury and Mrs Pendarves. He had made a draft libretto in the autumn of 1739 and Charles Jennens was keen to hurry him on while Handel was still enthusiastic, ‘for he is so eager that I am afraid, if his demands are not answer’d very soon, he will be diverted to some less agreeable design’. Harris got to work, Jennens then edited the draft, but it was Handel who made the final alternations between Milton’s happy and thoughtful moods, a balance that so effectively characterizes the work. Jennens, apparently at the composer’s request, then added a third part extolling the virtues of a temperate mean between mirth and melancholy, entitled Il Moderato. As an educated man, with a good reading knowledge of five languages, Handel may have known both poems already, but the impulse to set them to music was partly prompted by the success of Thomas Arne’s Comus, given at Drury Lane in 1738. The fresh, unaffected Englishness of Arne’s adaptation, which quickly became one of the most successful works of its age, made due impact on Handel, and Burney was later to point out its significance for our national music as a whole. ‘In this masque [Arne] introduced a light, airy, original, and pleasing melody, wholly different from that of Purcell or Handel, whom all English composers had hitherto pillaged or imitated. Indeed, the melody of Arne at this time, and of his Vauxhall songs afterwards, forms an aera in English music; it was so easy, natural and agreeable to the whole kingdom, that it had an effect upon our national taste . . . it was the standard of all perfection at our theatres and public gardens.’

  L’Allegro is Handel’s most fundamentally English creation, a companion piece to Gainsborough’s rustic scenes, to Kent’s incomparable garden at Rousham, to the landscape poetry of Cowper and Thomson, distilling the rural moment in a series of intensely observed vignettes and matching better-known musical instances like Haydn’s Seasons and Beethoven’s 6th Symphony. The pastoral vision is no longer that of the decorative nymphs and swains in the first part of Acis and Galatea but a far more localized world created initially by the wealth of detail in Milton’s two poems and carried over into Handel’s own experience of the countryside as a man whose imagination was fully attuned to the romantic sensibilities of the age. It is still an idealized picture, yet neither its sincerity nor its authenticity is ever in doubt. Within its lyrical, rapturous perspectives lies the consummation of that love of nature which permeates the operas – at the beginning of Serse, for instance, in the garden scenes of Ariodante or in the delicious peasant strains introducing Antigona in Admeto – and breaks into Acis with the appearance of that genuine hobbinoll Polyphemus.

  The English sound reverberates throughout the score. We hear it in ‘Mirth, admit me of thy Crew’, the bass hunting song with horn obbligato, the little air with carillon ‘Or let the merry bells ring round’, which develops into a lively jig, and in the accompanied recitative ‘Mountains on whose barren breast’. It tinges the nightingale aria ‘Sweet bird’ (well known to opera addicts as a Melba lollipop) and characterizes with pointed artlessness the tenor’s ‘Haste thee, nymph’, of which the singer Michael Kelly wrote: ‘I laughed all through it, as I conceived it ought to be sung, and as must have been the intentions of the composer: the infection ran; and their Majesties (George III and Queen Charlotte) and the whole audience, as well as the orchestra, were in a roar of laughter . . .’

  Yet, graphically pictorial as the whole piece is, from the bellman’s ‘Past ten o’clock’ on the strings in ‘Far from all resort of mirth’ to the distant curfew chime in ‘Oft on a plat of rising ground’, it is never banal. Recent performances have tended to obscure the complexity of Handel’s viewpoint by ignoring the crucial contrast created so skilfully for him by Jennens’s alternation of merriment and pensivenes
s, preferring to detach Allegro from Penseroso completely. In some sense they have compensated by reviving the Moderato numbers, which the mistaken good taste of hyper-literate England has suppressed. Without Moderato, whose text, though hardly Milton, is decent enough, we cannot fully appreciate the design and intention of the work in its eighteenth-century context. We lose in any case some fine music, including a single number that bids fair to be considered the most beautiful thing Handel ever composed, the duet ‘As steals the morn upon the night’. Of its oboe and bassoon dialogue, the fluid vocal lines and the sinewy grace with which the harmonies evoke the dawning light of reason, it is needless to write in praise.

  Some years after the first performance, however, Henry Fielding noted in the Covent Garden Journal that ‘when Mr Handel first exhibited his Allegro and Penseroso, there were two ingenious Gentlemen who had bought a Book of the Words, and thought to divert themselves by reading it before the Performance began. Zounds (cried one of them) what damn’d Stuff this is! – Damn’d Stuff indeed, replied his Friend. God sol (replied the other, who then first cast his Eyes on the Title-Page) the Words are Milton’s.’ Perhaps they were looking at Il Moderato, of which Jennens later wrote to Holdsworth that ‘I overheard one in the Theatre saying it was Moderato indeed, & the Wits at Tom’s Coffee House honour’d it with the name of Moderatissimo’.

  Though this offending third part was soon to be dropped, the work kept its place throughout the century as a popular favourite during oratorio seasons, and the critic Joseph Warton even went so far as to suggest that it was thanks to Handel that the Milton poems had reached a wider public. William Hayes, that doughty Oxford champion of the composer, put it best when he wrote: ‘For is there not a Scene which MILTON describes, were CLAUDE LORRAIN or POUSSIN to paint, could possibly appear in more lively Colours, or give a truer Idea of it, than our GREAT MUSICIAN has by his pictoresque Arrangement of musical Sounds; with this Advantage, that his Pictures speak.’

  That first Lincoln’s Inn Fields season revived Saul, Acis and Esther, but the unknown ‘G.O.’’s verses in the Gentleman’s Magazine, describing Handel filling ‘a thousand tubes with voice’ and featuring the apposite line,

  To form thee, talent, travel, art, combine

  also asked why British audiences paid more attention to inferior musicians. Johann Mattheson, publishing his Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte that year, implied that Handel was currently suffering neglect at a time ‘when the Court and Nobility, indeed the whole nation, have been more intent on the harmful war than on plays and entertainments’ and querulously berated the composer for forgetting their ancient friendship so far as not to send him an autobiographical sketch for inclusion in the book.

  During the late summer Handel set off for a trip to the Netherlands and Germany, accompanied by his friend the painter and caricaturist Joseph Goupy, who had designed the sets for Riccardo Primo and other King’s Theatre operas. Handel was apparently intending to take another cure at Aachen, ‘having lately found a weakness in his hand’. Otherwise little is known of the journey, except that on 21 September he made a brief visit to Haarlem. There, according to a local newspaper, he ‘inspected the ingenious, newly built organ and heard the organist Radeker play the same, whereupon he himself played it for half an hour with great skill and art’, admiring the instrument’s tone and the beauty of its case. Quite possibly, while in Holland, he visited his former pupil Anne, now Princess of Orange, with whom he had continued to correspond after she left England.

  Imeneo, the first of the season’s new operas, had been started as early as September 1738. Before it was staged Mrs Pendarves had got to know one of its arias, the intensely dramatic ‘Sull’arena’ for the bass role of Argenio, which she and her friends called ‘the Lion Song’ from its image of a wild beast in an amphitheatre, and Handel may have played this to them at a Brook Street music party. The score was redrafted, cut and shuffled on several occasions before finally reaching Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre on 22 November 1740. One of the shortest of Handel’s stage works, Imeneo was set to a libretto by Silvio Stampiglia originally designed (hence the allusion of the hero’s name) for a wedding serenata, composed by Porpora in Naples. The bridegroom on that occasion was Leonardo di Tocco, Prince of Montemileto, brother of the princess for whose nuptials Handel had composed Aci, Galatea e Polifemo. Like Stampiglia’s Partenope, and no doubt interesting to him for similar reasons, the story is a romantic comedy in a classical setting. The plot is of the simplest, concerning the love of Tirinto and Imeneo for Rosmene. She eventually chooses Imeneo, but the triumph of duty is somewhat muted and her closing duet with Tirinto in the 1742 Dublin revival (‘Per le porte del tormento’, no less) with its reminder that ‘there is no rose without a thorn’, seems to imply that though she really loves him they had better make the best of it.

  The score has a lightness and certainty of handling that show the composer developing that vein of sophisticated wit which sends such a powerful undercurrent through the operas from Agrippina onwards. Like those of Serse, its airs demand the appreciation of a livelier audience than London could then offer, and Rosmene’s ‘In mezzo a voi due’ or her sister Clomiri’s ‘E si vaga del tuo bene’ show us that Handel, even if he had paid a final visit to Italy a decade before, had never lost touch with its spirit. Tirinto’s ‘Sorge nell’alma mia’ has the same self-mocking heroic loftiness as Serse’s ‘Più che penso’, but the ultimate proof of Handel’s control of his resources, that synthesis of music and drama which guarantees his operatic mastery, lies in the trio that closes Act II. Rosmene’s wavering between her suitors is answered by their heartfelt pleas, and the varying dialogue is mirrored in the continuing shifts of orchestral balance in the accompaniment.

  The audience response was lukewarm at most. James Harris’s brother Thomas, attending the first night of ‘Mr Handel’s operetta’ and reporting the presence of King George ‘and all the St James’s royall family and a very good house’, noted ‘a great many good songs’ but acknowledged that ‘some of us wish again for oratorio’s’. Charles Jennens thought it ‘the worst of all Handel’s Compositions’. Imeneo failed, as Handel must have guessed it might. The appearance of a new castrato, Andreoni, and of the English soprano, Miss Edwards, was no sort of a draw, and the single repeat performance following the première on 22 November had to be postponed because Francesina was ill. Nothing daunted, Handel pressed ahead with a new opera, Deidamia, finished in November and brought on in the new year of 1741. Given only three performances, this too was a flop and with it the composer took his leave of the stage for good.

  Ironically the work reunited him with Paolo Antonio Rolli, presumably willing to bury his dislike of ‘l’Uomo’ and to make an honest penny by turning out a passable melodramma with comically equivocal overtones from the story of the youthful Achilles concealed on Scyros in female disguise by his anxious mother, Thetis. The element of sexual ambiguity in the tale, with the fledgling hero’s masculinity declaring itself malgré tout when shown some weapons by the wily Ulysses, made it a favourite with Baroque painters and poets. Several librettists, including Metastasio, had already produced versions of the Grecian legend by the time Rolli set his hand to it, but the text of Deidamia is more pointedly witty than any of these and seems to catch fire from Stampiglia. Perhaps this is how Handel wanted it: at any rate it is interesting that his last three operas all show a trend towards a lighter manner, and that Deidamia sometimes seems like an amused rejection of the grandiose postures of the Senesino and Cuzzoni era.

  The plot and characters, among them a wonderfully brash and innocent Achilles (sung, it should be noted, by a woman), a contrasted pair of heroines, the ingénue Deidamia and a soubrette part for Nerea, and the skilfully drawn castrato role of Ulysses, ought to have made this one of Handel’s liveliest dramatic works. Yet a glance at the score suggests that Deidamia is not an especially notable farewell to the lyric theatre and that the public verdict on it, whatever the causes, may for once have been j
ustified. Much of the writing is sub-standard and indicative of hurry and fatigue. What are we to make, for instance, of an air like Ulisse’s ‘No, quella bella non amo’, which might decently pass muster in any jobbing Italian opera of the day, but will scarcely answer our expectations of the mature Handel in its mechanical semi-quaver sequences? In certain numbers he seems almost to be guying the modern style by underlining its direst trivialities, while others, like Deidamia’s ‘Se il timore’, are a case of the-mixture-as-before, shamelessly dusting down well-tried clichés. No wonder Burney thought the whole thing ‘languid and antique’.

  Perhaps Handel, returning after so momentous a break, was browned off with opera, but the sparkle of Imeneo gives the lie to that. We can never know precisely why he abandoned the struggle for good, though there were plenty of contributory reasons. It is easy to imagine his exasperation at the public’s indifference, during what was probably the least successful season of his entire London career. Had there, perhaps, been a fresh Senesino or Caffarelli or a young Faustina in the offing, had Sallé danced or Mr Worman contrived a few special firework effects, the takings might have kept Deidamia in being. As it was, the new soprano, Monza, failed to please even the charitable Mrs Delany: ‘Her voice is between Cuzzoni’s and Strada’s – strong, but not harsh, her person miserably bad, being very low, and excessively crooked.’