Handel (29 page)

Tolomeo
's epigonic qualities are not simply owing to our hindsighted sense of its marking a terminal point in a remarkable episode in the history of English musical taste. There would be other operas, with Handel as their composer, as good as
Rodelinda
and
Radamisto
, and it was not as though his Muse was deserting him. Here, however, Handel's autograph score suggests he was working under pressure, with characters and motives in this vague ‘tragical-historical-pastoral' mélange appearing like phantoms of their powerful forerunners in the brave old pre-Faustina days.
The cut-down nature of the drama, a series of attractive airs linked by sparse recitative, makes it difficult to conceive of
Tolomeo
in valid theatrical terms.
^*(l)
Very engaging some of these numbers undoubtedly are, though the temperature seldom rises higher than a kind of Bononcinian prettiness we last caught sight of in
Floridante.
The most famous of them, ‘Non lo dirò col labbro', a little number like something from a Neapolitan intermezzo, is one of those Handel arias that survived the general neglect of his operas through having new words attached to it by the Victorians, becoming known as ‘Did you not hear my lady come down the garden singing?'. Tolomeo himself, a more languishing and ineffectual figure than was usual even for Senesino, has a string of elegant mood pieces, including the by now almost obligatory F minor siciliano and the genuinely moving ‘Stille amare', in which, after an accompanied recitative following his drinking poison, the effects of the bitter draught are portrayed in a B flat minor air, the rests in its string accompaniment creating the effect of a slow, gasping relapse – the vocal line, indeed, peters out on an unaccompanied E flat. It need hardly be added that Elisa (the Faustina role) has in fact saved his life by substituting ‘
un letargico umor
' for the poison. Alessandro, meanwhile, has rescued Seleuce from worse fates, she and Tolomeo launch into the second of their two duets (one of the few Handelian operatic couples to be so favoured) and the coro, in its customary wreaths of magnanimity and self-congratulation, returns us neatly to the horns and the F major of the opening.

Let us end with a view of the Academy in its last days by one of the audience. In April 1728 the French traveller Pierre Jacques Fougeroux, in the company of two friends, arrived in England for a prolonged tour of London, the Home Counties, East Anglia and the Midlands. His meticulous letters include, besides observations on country houses such as Blenheim and Wilton, Newmarket races, Stonehenge, football, prostitution, English cooking and the ubiquitous smell of coal in the capital, a detailed account of the King's Theatre music.
He notes significantly the ‘
prix exorbitant
' of £1,600 exacted by Senesino for his salary and considers Faustina, despite her ‘
gosier charmant
' to have ‘
la voix assez grande mais un peu rude
'; he preferred the
douceur of
Cuzzoni.

His rather doubtful enumeration of the orchestra stands at twenty-four violins (led by the Castrucci brothers), a lute, three cellos, two double basses, three bassoons ‘and sometimes flutes and trumpets'. For the continuo there were two harpsichords, one of them played by ‘
Indel allemand grand joueur et grand compositeur
' and the lute, assisted by a cello in the recitative. Fougeroux noted, incidentally, what he considered the unpleasant manner of abruptly cutting off the recitative chords but praised the playing of the violinists in the airs. As a good Frenchman he deplored the absence of ballet in the operas (he saw
Admeto
,
Siroe
and
Tolomeo
), machines and choruses, and equally appreciated their overtures, which must indeed have reminded him of home. As for the theatre itself, he found it small and badly decorated: there were the usual mirrors and candles for house lighting, but instead of a splendid confection of glass drops there were ‘
vilains chandeliers de bois
' on cords, reminding him of rope dancers. A footnote to his deprecating remarks on the scenery implies that a little bell rang whenever it had to be changed.

After
Tolomeo'
s seventh performance on 21 May there were three revivals of
Admeto
. With the last of these, on 1 June, the Royal Academy of Music seemed, for the time being, to have suspended its activities at the King's Theatre, Haymarket. It was by no means the end of the noble enterprise, but when Senesino, Cuzzoni and Faustina all left England that summer and soon afterwards took up engagements in Italy and Vienna there was little obvious likelihood that any of them would return. Though the partisanship in the cause of the rival prima donnas was still very much alive, there was suddenly nothing in the shape of a flesh-and-blood diva for either side to adore. ‘As to Musick affairs, I can't find any body who knows what we are to expect of that kind this winter,' wrote an Academy patron to the Duke of Richmond. Fashionable London would surely not be happy without an opera season, and it was up to Heidegger and Handel to fill the gap.

7

The years 1729 to 1741 form a crucial epoch in Handel's artistic career and certain of the works composed during this period were never to be equalled, even in the last great oratorios, for their originalities of expression and form. His operas broaden their range thematically, becoming more experimental in their approach to the genre as a whole. Pieces such as
Israel in Eygpt
,
L'Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il Moderato
, the two Dryden odes and
Saul
achieve a lucidity of personal utterance to which
Messiah
offers a natural culmination, and the heart of Handel's unique achievement as a composer (an achievement whose sources continue to baffle those who look too narrowly in music for mainstreams and traditions) lies in these extraordinarily intense, crisis-ridden years of the 1730s. Later works like
Semele
,
Theodora
and
Jephtha
, awing in their architectonic complexity, are not so much the destined perfecting of experimental attempts carried out during the previous decade as consolidations upon ideas already fully developed by Handel. Had blindness not substantially stifled creativity, it is obvious that the composer, already responsible for putting his favourite medium to imaginative uses without parallel in the music of the age, would have gone on to ‘things unattempted yet' in the field of lyric drama.

His journey to Italy in search of singers for the new venture involved a tour of some five months (February to June 1729) and, in bringing him into direct contact with the newest kind of operatic writing, it inevitably marked his compositional style. Too much, however, has been made of the differences in manner between the Academy operas and the works of the 1730s, just as it has been asserted too often that Handel was a conservative in refusing to allow himself to become a carbon copy of Hasse, Leo, Vinci or any of the other masters now gaining popularity in European theatres. The truth is that Handel took what he wished to of the newer modes and retained,
as he saw fit, elements of the other currents feeding his vast eclecticism. Thus an opera like
Orlando
(1733) can incorporate both an aria like Dorinda's ‘Amor è qual vento', whose opening is resolutely newfangled, and the triumphantly old-fashioned ‘Già lo stringo', with its ritornello blossoming exuberantly at the close like something from a Venetian opera of the previous century.

The ‘new style' has always been termed Neapolitan, since many of its foremost practitioners, such as Leo and Pergolesi, were born in the kingdom of Naples, but it also put down roots in the lively operatic culture of Venice, whose greatest composer of the day, Antonio Vivaldi, had a powerful influence on the fundamental outlines. Calculated to flatter the talents of a rising generation of virtuoso singers, the musical textures were lightened, there was less obvious ‘science' and counterpoint, and a greater reliance on the type of repeated quaver bass lines which the Germans call
Trommelbass
(drum bass) to buoy up the syncopated rhythms in which the younger composers dealt. The orchestral continuo group of keyboard and bass instruments lost its independence and the nature of modulation grew more abrupt, something which in later years, so Hawkins tells us, Handel used to compare jokingly to a card game, crying, ‘Now A is trumps, now D!' The character of the semiquaver divisions given to the singers for display also changed and new cadences clinched the melodies.

For the average concert-going, disc-buying music lover, the one work in this style at all well known is Giovanni Pergolesi's
Stabat Mater
, in which many of its strongest mannerisms are exhibited. It is worth, for example, matching the ‘Inflammatus et accensus', with its typical syncopated melody, against Handel arias such as ‘My vengeance awakes me' in
Athalia
, ‘Thy sentence, great king' in
Solomon
, or, more directly than either, ‘Tiranna mia bella' in
Lotario.
Perhaps the ideal new-style piece, so much so that at certain moments it hardly sounds like Handel at all, is the delectable ‘Voglio amare' from the second act of
Partenope
, an air that Burney, who knew about such things, called, in 1789, ‘so smooth and free from wrinkles that it is difficult to imagine it to be near sixty years of age'. The germ of its melody may have originated in an idea for a sarabande, but Handel instead floats this gawky, rather childlike tune over a soft drum bass to an andante-allegro marking.

‘Airs of a modern cast' had in fact been part of Handel's stock-in-trade almost since
Rinaldo
days.
He is unlikely to have been significantly affected by Vivaldi's manner while in Venice, for the simple reason that there was not much of the older man's music around for him to hear, but, if not Vivaldian, then there is something very Venetian about ‘Non vo legarmi il cor' in
Il Pastor Fido.
Still more marked in this sense is a piece like ‘La speranza è giunta in porto' in
Ottone
, or ‘Da tempeste il legno infranto' in
Giulio Cesare
(the source of the latter has not yet been identified but its opening bars are so Vivaldian in cast that a lost Vivaldi aria may yet prove to be their germ). After the production of the pasticcio
Elpidia
at the Haymarket in 1725 the impress becomes a direct one, pervading all the Faustina operas and at its most blatant in an air like Rossane's ‘Lusinghe piu care' in
Alessandro
, where phrase after phrase might have come hot from a Venetian stage success of the current season. The point has thus been well made that it was Handel and nobody else who familiarized London audiences with the latest operatic fashions, not merely through an assimilation into his own work, but through the seven pasticcios he presented during the 1730s. It may be that through these pasticcios, what is more, we can reconstruct his second Italian journey, since the original opera productions that gave him the librettos mostly took place during the spring and summer of 1729.

Handel's journey to Italy in February 1729 did not necessarily begin in hope. The previous autumn had seen Heidegger returning empty-handed from an effort to re-engage some of his former stars and add the new castrato sensation Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli, to the line-up for a projected new season. On 18 January 1729 a meeting of the Academy directors was convened ‘in order to consider some Proposals that will then be offered for carrying on Operas'. Among those present was John, Lord Percival, who noted in his diary: ‘We agreed to prosecute the subscribers who have not yet paid: also to permit Hydeger and Hendle to carry on operas without disturbance for 5 years and to lend them for that time our scenes, machines, clothes, instruments, furniture etc. It all past off in a great hurry, and there was not above 20 there.' The patrons of the new venture, headed by the virtuoso Lord Bingley, allowed Heidegger £2,200 for hire of the theatre, scenery and costumes. Handel was to be paid a salary of £1,000, the annual subscription was set at £15 and a total of £4,000 plus benefits was set aside for singers. King George II would continue to pay the royal bounty of £1,000, but it was his daughter and Handel's pupil, the strong-willed,
music-loving Anne, Princess Royal, who became patron of the new Academy scheme.

Poisonous as ever, Rolli detailed the various stages of what he called the
eidegrendeliano
(Heideggerhandelian) project to Senesino, in such a way as to imply that Handel was determined not to re-employ him and that, in line with the directors' wishes, he would go all out for Farinelli instead. From the tone of his letters it is patent that Rolli knew the extent of his correspondent's typical castrato vanity and that he was enjoying himself by playing on it to the full. A remark such as ‘news has recently arrived from Venice . . . that all throng to the theatre at which Farinelli is singing, and that the theatre where you and Faustina are is nearly empty' speaks volumes for the degree of Rolli's integrity towards the man whose interests he claimed to be serving. Still worse is a further section of the same letter, which appears directly calculated to set Faustina (then singing with Senesino at the San Cassiano theatre) against Handel. Rolli concludes, licking his lips, ‘I shall be curious to know how he will behave with you and with the celebrated prima donna; who, I fear, in her anger against the unfaithful man, may have him
thrown into the Canal
.'

The poet's fantasy was not gratified. If Senesino greeted Handel coldly enough at first on his arrival in Venice in March, the two were quickly reconciled, and it may well have been this gesture which paved the way for the castrato's successful return to the London stage the following autumn. At Venice Handel was given an introduction to Joseph Smith, English consul and Canaletto's patron, and must have met up once again with Owen MacSwiney, who was to be a great help in finding and reporting on new singers for him. It was the carnival season and the opera companies were in full swing. At the San Giovanni Grisostomo they were giving Leonardo Leo's
Catone in Utica
, and at the San Cassiano Handel heard Faustina, Senesino and a young castrato, Domenico Annibali, whom he was to sign up seven years afterwards for London, in Orlandini's new opera
Adelaide
, to a libretto by Salvi, originally for the Bavarian Elector's marriage celebrations. Handel kept his wordbook and used it for the first opera he composed on arriving home. While still in Venice he followed Heidegger in trying to enlist the services of Farinelli. The young singer, however, ‘would never see him in particular, or ever return'd him a visit, tho' Mr Hendel was three times at his door to wait on him'. He had ‘more than once express'd an unwillingness to go to England,
for fear our Air should hurt his Voice'. The smog and damp of London was always uncongenial to visiting Italians,
^*(m)
but soon enough Farinelli would be ready to risk them both, with notable consequences for opera in the English capital.