Handel (17 page)

The most memorable of this whole Cannons collection is that classic Handelian palimpsest ‘As pants the hart', a setting of verses from Psalm 43, based partly on the Biblical text and partly on Tate and Brady's metrical paraphrase. Handel had already set this, around 1712, as a Chapel Royal verse anthem, and would make four further versions of it, the latest in 1738. In its Cannons form, dated to 1717, ‘As pants the hart' becomes a cantata, starting with a two-movement sinfonia for oboe, bassoon and strings, its introduction using the composer's favourite device of a rhythmic motto whose repeated statement serves to anchor the entire movement. The contrast at the heart of the work is between collective spiritual experience among ‘the multitude' and a private, meditative atmosphere of mystical yearning created by the soloists, especially in the tenor's exquisite accompanied declamation over violin arpeggios,
‘Now when I think thereupon'. Justly admired in its own day, this superb anthem triumphantly demonstrates Handel's gift for blending a variety of musical styles, German, Italian and English, to shape a uniquely personal idiom.

All the works of the Cannons period suggest that Handel's major preoccupation at this time was with forms created by the special conditions of contemporary English religion and aesthetics. During the years 1715 to 1718 an interesting series of short operas, or ‘masques' with dancing, were given at the theatres in Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields, and Handel must surely have seen some of these. One of them,
Apollo and Daphne
, to music by Pepusch, had a libretto by John Hughes and it is tempting to suppose, on grounds of comparison, that it was this piece which inspired one of Handel's best-loved dramatic works, the serenata
Acis and Galatea
, probably produced at Cannons during the summer of 1718.

The libretto, traditionally ascribed to Gay, but perhaps also worked over by other writers in the Burlington circle (there are touches of Pope and strong traces of Hughes) is, however artificial, among the finest ever written in English, a worthy successor to Tate's unjustly maligned
Dido and Aeneas
and Congreve's
Semele
. Its treatment of the myth of Acis, Galatea and Polyphemus, drawn from Theocritus via Ovid, is supple, economic and remarkably consistent, matching decorous pastoral imagery with touches of humour and achieving a dignified serenity at its half-tragic, half-visionary close. In its terse vignettes of Augustan classicism, the poetry is often strikingly memorable, in moments such as:

or:

or:

All four characters in the cast are exceptionally well drawn within the limits prescribed by the piece and receive correspondingly subtle portrayal in Handel's music. Acis is the heroic extrovert, rushing foolhardily to meet his death, and cautious Damon is his perfect foil. Polyphemus, full of galumphing amorousness, is a proof, if any were needed, of Handel's ability to be funny without labouring the point. But the masque really belongs to Galatea and all its most sensuous passages are hers.

Much has been made by certain commentators of Handel's supposed attempts to relate his overtures to the prevailing mood of the dramas they introduce. For the most part there is little in such a theory – consider, for instance, the opening of
Saul
, that most tragic of all the oratorios, which begins with what is, to all appearances, a cheerful four-movement symphony or concerto for orchestra in Handel's most expansive manner.
Acis and Galatea
is rare among the composer's works in having a sinfonia whose associations with the story seem to be programmatic. The brio of the opening allegro (containing an Italianate string figure of a falling sixth, which turns up in the last chorus) is suddenly, shatteringly checked by a sledgehammer chord after which the oboe's plaintive minor can only be the voice of the bereaved Galatea.

The whole character of the masque (it is emphatically not,
pace
Novello vocal scores and English choral societies, an oratorio) is thus reflected at the outset. An attractive succession of arias for the two lovers and their pastoral mentor, clinched by a jolly duet, leads us deceptively enough through a world of Meissen statuettes and Watteau
fêtes champêtres
, but this is not the acquiescent world of Bach's
Hunting Cantata
or Vivaldi's
La Senna Festeggiante
. The shepherds, so joyously rustic over their bagpipes at the opening, now become the masked, vatic celebrants of classical tragedy as they launch into one of the most startling uses of a chorus by any composer, the resistless, monumental ‘Wretched lovers'. Built on the contrast between a series of imitative entries, slow, sombre, minatory, and the nervous,
fretful anticipations of Polyphemus's arrival depicted in patterns of hurrying semiquavers, the music reaches a spectacular climax in the fusion of both ideas in the closing bars, where the initial pulse becomes a grim staccato stamp in which all the voices join before the piece dissolves in descending figures evoking anarchic gloom.

The last section of
Acis and Galatea
reinforces its claim to be Handel's finest composition of the decade. Polyphemus, that very English cyclops, is not punished for venting his jealous fury on Acis, but morality is assuaged by something altogether more sublime in its abstraction, Galatea's belated use of her powers to give her dead lover immortality as a river. The choral threnody for Acis, ‘Mourn all ye muses', has the newly acquired grandeur of ‘Wretched lovers', and the chorus finally establishes its indispensable dramatic presence via the interjections of ‘Cease, Galatea, cease to grieve' thrown into the nymph's Purcellian lament. Nothing else in the work, however, quite rivals ‘Heart, the seat of soft delight', a piece to whose perfectly distilled erotic melancholy no words can do justice. The bouncing minuet finale is thus not so much a paean of exultation as a celebration of enduring hope and love triumphing over death. From here to the concluding choruses of
Messiah
and
Theodora
is a shorter step than we might imagine.

Here, as elsewhere in the piece, we catch echoes of Italy – Polyphemus's ‘Cease to beauty', for example, is based initially on an aria in Giovanni Legrenzi's
Il Totila
, which Handel may have recalled from a Venetian score – intermingled with memories of the
Brockes Passion
(the bass line of Damon's ‘Consider, fond shepherd' is actually modelled on ‘Nehm mich mit, verzagte Scharen'), borrowings from
Agrippina
and the cantatas, and foreshadowings of native Englishness in ‘Happy we'. Handel's eclecticism was seldom more potently displayed, yet the ultimate artistic triumph was created by tension of another sort than stylistic. The work calls for four soloists, a five-part chorus (no alto line) and a standard Handelian band of strings (without violas), oboes (doubling flutes) and continuo. It has been given as a fully staged opera, most notably at Drury Lane in 1842 under Macready's direction, and as a monster oratorio with additional choral forces, at the Crystal Palace in 1871; ballet was added in 1829 when it shared the bill at the Haymarket with a danced version of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony;
its orchestration was revamped by Mozart and Mendelssohn, among others. Yet the evidence of Pepusch's list of the Cannons music and certain features of Handel's scoring and autograph manuscript suggest that the original
Acis
may have been given by only twelve performers, the soloists doubling as chorus and seven instrumental players. A performance according to these specifications inevitably lays emphasis on the contrast between the slenderness of Handel's resources and the increasingly lofty and expansive scope of the musical expression throughout, enhanced by a refinement in the instrumental writing, particularly for woodwind, which any re-orchestration merely stifles.

Acis and Galatea
is as significant in Handel's artistic career as his other dramatic work for Cannons, the oratorio
Esther
, or ‘The History of Hester' as it was called by one early enthusiast, but the two pieces are widely different in quality and consistency. Whereas
Acis
reflects a gathering confidence,
Esther
, with the most complex performance history of any Handel work, remained in an embryonic state throughout the composer's life and he was still busy modifying it (though not necessarily with any idea of improvement) in 1757, two years before he died. There is thus no authoritative text, since the autograph is an inadequate guide, lacking the overture and the last page, but including some of the attractive additions made for the 1732 revival.

No one seems quite certain when
Esther
was performed, but a recently discovered manuscript source carries the note ‘The Oratorium Composed by George Frederick Handel Esquire in London 1718', so perhaps it was written either at Burlington House or at Chandos's town residence in Albemarle Street, where there were good keyboard instruments for Handel's use, and given its first hearing either in London or at Cannons, more or less at the same time as
Acis.
The two may indeed have formed part of a dual commission from Chandos himself and it is interesting to consider whether it was he, Handel or Pepusch who initially conceived the idea for the first English dramatic oratorio.

The libretto is probably by the same Scribblerian team, Pope, Arbuthnot and Gay, who worked on
Acis.
Later advertisements attributed it to Pope, who was not at pains to deny it, and later still it was credited to Arbuthnot, but the general textual and dramatic quality suggests that several hands stirred this rather coarse,
lumpy pudding. Its origins are firmly rooted in Racine's play, written for Mme de Maintenon's school at Saint Cyr in 1689, and welding Greek and French classical traditions together by the introduction of choruses sung by mixed voices offstage. Inspired as they may have been by this and by its English adaptation by Thomas Brereton published nearly thirty years later, the librettists made no attempt whatever to emulate the dramatist's mastery of structural and thematic unity, offering instead a series of characters and episodes corresponding in outline with the familiar biblical narrative but lacking in any sort of continuity or interaction. This last fact, indeed, together with the notable absence of stage directions from Handel's autograph and the unconvincing nature of recent staged revivals, leads to the conclusion,
pace
modern enthusiasts and Handel's later ideas for a staged performance, that the original was not conceived in directly theatrical terms.

Musically, the effect is that of a piece assembled in a hasty and haphazard fashion, and suggesting a period of composition brief even by Handelian standards. Little attention is paid to balance and proportion, and much of the score resorts to the familiar technique of recycling earlier material, in this case some of the finer moments of the
Brockes Passion
, including the concerted opening ‘Mich vom Stricke' which turns up as ‘Virtue, truth and innocence' and the poignant arioso ‘Mein Vater', which, as Haman's last despairing plea to Esther, is one of the few transferred numbers to function properly in its new context. In many other works the composer's influence on the dramatic logic and pacing of the libretto is immediately apparent, but here he submitted tamely enough to its inconsistencies, perhaps either because he was not in direct contact with the Scribblerians while at work on
Esther
or because he was reluctant to offend them by tampering.

The 1732 revival added several freshly composed numbers, including ‘Breathe soft, ye gales' with its lush scoring for paired recorders, oboes, bassoons and strings, divided at first over contrasting continuo support of organ, harpsichord, theorbo and harp, with cello and bass, all forces ultimately combining to provide the sort of rich texture which sets at naught the twentieth century's attempts to Wagnerize Handel's orchestral writing. Extra brass and timpani were brought into the final chorus, and the overture was filled out, but this and a rehashed libretto by Samuel Humphreys made little difference to the lopsided atmosphere of the original.
This is not to say, of course, that individually the various pieces, old and new, fail with the listener. The sure-fire quality of mature Handel diffuses itself through choruses like ‘Shall we the God of Israel fear?' and the unique rondo finale, in which, with a leisurely aplomb, the composer again demonstrates his mastery of large, elastic choral structures. For the time being, however,
Esther
, like
Acis and Galatea
, was destined to remain a private entertainment for a noble patron, and it was to Italian rather than English musical drama that Handel's attention now turned once more.

5

Though opera at the Haymarket had languished from the Jacobite summer of 1715 onwards and died out altogether two years later, it was unlikely that it would disappear from the London stage for very long. The taste and the money were both available to fuel any new initiative, and late in 1718 an ambitious project was set in motion by a powerful group of noblemen and gentlemen to revive Italian opera at the King's Theatre on a scale designed to reflect the highest contemporary standards in production and performance.

The Royal Academy of Music was conceived as a joint stock company, with each subscriber guaranteed £200 of the £10,000 stock. A venture of this kind was not unique in the annals of English theatre – Shakespeare had been involved in a similar arrangement at the Globe over a century earlier – but the project was clearly influenced by the new financial culture, which had mushroomed in London during the previous twenty years and would soon result in the market mania of the South Sea Bubble. The idea was in principle a good one. With properly regulated financial backing, opera would be given a chance to establish itself under the tutelage of a moneyed aristocratic elite whose good taste and international contacts would ensure sufficiently high production values. ‘It seems very strange', wrote the anonymous author of the original ‘Proposall for carrying on Operas' (perhaps Sir John Vanbrugh or Dr Arbuthnot) ‘that this great and opulent City hath not been able to support Publick Spectacles of this sort.'