Handel (33 page)

Since practically every Handel oratorio has now been given a staged revival, it may soon be possible to assess the whole issue more justly. His English libretti contain stage directions, several of which he transferred to his ‘foul scores' (to use a contemporary term for a manuscript first draft) but this does not mean that either the poet or the composer intended these to be executed literally. There is every difference between thinking dramatically, as Handel's long operatic experience had conditioned him to do, and creating a work that will function credibly on stage. Nor was it, surely, a question of his looking forward to an age when his oratorios
might
be given in the theatre, and composing with this in view. He remained a great dramatic composer to the end of his life; even in
Messiah
, perhaps, indeed, especially in
Messiah
, there is the sense of a highly visual imagination at work, and there is no reason to suppose that had the opportunity arisen,
after his abandonment of opera in 1741, of re-entering the Italian lyric field, he would ever have rejected it. Yet the oratorios (we may except
Semele
and
Hercules
, English operas laid out in significantly theatrical terms) are unconvincing as theatre for the fairly obvious reason that none of them was intended for representation. This has not deterred the directors, however.
Judas Maccabaeus
after all, which is practically devoid of action, has been staged in recent years, while in 1833 at Dusseldorf, Mendelssohn, to whom Handelians owe a profound gratitude, undertook an
Israel in Egypt
performance assisted by
tableaux vivants
and preceded by choruses from Lotti and Weber, accompanying colour transparencies of Dürer and Raphael paintings.

Despite the evident popularity of the two revisions, a rumour seems to have got about during the early weeks of November 1732 that Handel's talent had somehow run dry. A production, in pasticcio form, of Leonardo Leo's
Catone in Utica
suggested, to those who imagined they were hearing Handel rather than Leo, that he was more or less finished. Among these was Lord Hervey, who wrote to Stephen Fox: ‘I am just come from a long, dull and consequently tiresome Opera of Handel's, whose genius seems quite exhausted. The bride's recommendation of being the first night could not make this supportable.' However, he liked the new mezzo-soprano Celeste Gismondi, ‘Celestina': ‘she seemed to take mightily, which I was glad of. I have a sort of friendship for her, without knowing why.' Gismondi, making her London debut, had begun her career as a buffo soprano in Naples, where Handel probably heard her during his 1729 journey through Italy. Married to an Englishman named Hempson, she was destined for only a brief career before dying of a lingering illness in 1735.

A brilliant novelty in the shape of a Neapolitan soubrette was not a strong enough attraction to draw patrons from the Little Theatre across the street. The Arnes had now moved to Lincoln's Inn Fields, but John Frederick Lampe was still busy presenting English opera. His
Britannia
evoked an anonymous eulogy in the
Daily Post
which began:

The writer was only partially mistaken,
for in truth Handel had nothing new prepared for the start of the season, which saw revivals of
Alessandro
and
Tolomeo
. It was only on 20 November 1732 that he completed the score of
Orlando
, which reached the stage at the end of the following January.

No more typical case of the composer's favourite device of
reculer pour mieux sauter
, something that seems continually to mark his career during the 1730s and 1740s, can be found than
Orlando
, a work which proved that, far from nearing exhaustion, his genius had undergone a startling renewal, resulting in a piece whose freshness and originality give it a high place not only in Handel's oeuvre but among eighteenth-century operas in general. That attentiveness to detail, exuberant variety of texture and warmly understanding treatment of character, which show Handel at his most imaginative, permeate the whole finished structure from first to last and it is the harshest of ironies that, as we shall see, a work fashioned with such inspiration and care should have been substantially wasted on its audience and perhaps also on its interpreters. We are about as far removed here from the ambience of the traditional Academy opera of the previous decade as it is possible to imagine. There are no dispossessed monarchs, no machinating usurpers, no armies or battles, and even the love-versusduty trope for the hero is subtly modulated. The use of magic as a significant plot element does not merely indicate a sentimental return to the world of
Rinaldo
or
Amadigi
, though the dramatic profile of
Orlando
recalls both these works. Enchantments of various kinds are used less crudely here than in the earlier operas, and bear a greater relevance to the abstract moral universe encompassing the plot.

The ultimate source of Handel's libretto was Ludovico Ariosto's romantic Renaissance epic
Orlando Furioso
, first published in 1516. Handel would already have known this as a popular quarry for Italian theatre poets, but may have been encouraged to read it – or reread it – by William Huggins, promoter of the
Esther
performances, who later issued a set of notes to the poem. The result was three of the composer's finest operas, written in as many years. For an operatic version of one of
Orlando Furioso
's main narrative strands, Handel turned to the work of his former Roman associate Carlo Sigismondo Capeci, librettist of
La Resurrezione
, and also, at second hand, of
Tolomeo
. His
L'Orlando ovvero la Gelosa Pazzia
had been written for Domenico Scarlatti in 1711.
Two of the original characters in the drama were removed and Antonio Montagnana's magnificent bass voice was given more than adequate scope in the newly interpolated role of the magus Zoroastro, who begins the opera. Apart from Claudio in
Agrippina
he is in fact the most influential character Handel ever allotted to an operatic bass. Where normally such figures on the Baroque stage were restricted to being either commentators, stooges or minor villains, Zoroastro, as has been pointed out, bears a marked, though wholly coincidental, similarity to his near namesake, Sarastro, in
Die Zauberflöte
. His presence on the stage at the end of the sombre overture in the ‘difficult' key of F sharp minor as the sage contemplator of eternal mysteries in the heavens in a solemn arioso establishes him at once as the moderating, visionary force in a drama which, as the printed libretto tells us, ‘tends to demonstrate the Imperious Manner in which Love insinuates its Impressions into the Hearts of Persons of all Ranks, and likewise how a wise Man should be ever ready with his best Endeavours to re-conduct into the Right Way, those who have been misguided from it by the Illusion of their Passions'.

Zoroastro's four fine arias, marking crucial moments in his intervention during the opera's course, underline through their texts this paradoxically moral quality intrinsic to the work. In some respects its spirit seems closer to the gravity of Tasso than to the brilliant romancing of Ariosto, in that far from being a mere confection of magic and pastoral, it celebrates the virtues of magnanimity and discriminating forbearance. The close of the drama, from both poetic and technical aspects one of the best Handel ever chose, lies not in the orthodox patterning of amorous couples but in the standing aside of Orlando and the shepherdess Dorinda to allow the love of Angelica and Medoro to prevail. Sublime renunciation underpins the joyful vaudeville finale, in which Orlando wishes the lovers happiness, they themselves look forward to peace and fidelity, and Dorinda, casting sadness aside, charmingly sings ‘I invite you all to my cottage for some further celebrations'. The story, incidentally, manages to retain its interest for us without the operation of malice or conspiracy as dramatic elements. It is the patient endurance of Angelica and Dorinda that is emphasized rather than the jealous machinations and sexual adventuring which so often motivate heroines in opera of this kind: the contrast between them is created by Handel himself.

Orlando's moral education through a fully staged psychological crisis forms the theme of the story. Zoroastro foresees glory for him, but first he must
learn
to be a hero – an arraignment, as it were, of the basic postures and premises of Baroque dramatic tradition. That he can strike these well enough emerges in his aria ‘Non fù già men forte Alcide', ironically martial in its scoring for horns since he is professedly forsaking arms for love, yet more ironically still the vicissitudes of the following scene force him to reassume this role in the stirring ‘Fammi combattere'. Thereafter he descends into total and violent insanity, culminating in a mad scene closing Act II, which even the most tepid of commentators can hardly fail to admire. The rhythms of the accompaniment gradually break down from dotted semiquavers to repeated quavers to long held notes, finally releasing the ultimate incoherence in passages of five beats to the bar; the skeleton of a rage aria ensues, quickly burning itself out in a vocal line punctuated by a single note, followed, with ghastly humour, by a parody gavotte and a pathetic larghetto; Orlando flares up again into the ultimate blaze of hysterical fury, only to be whisked away during the orchestral ritornello by the provident magus.

The hero's progress through the opera is anarchic and intrusive to the elegance and fluency with which Handel's score conveys the passions of Angelica, the amiable if somewhat absent-minded Medoro and the enchanting Dorinda, whose airs, such as ‘O care parolette' and the nightingale arioso ‘Quando spieghi i tuoi tormenti', are touched with a vernal innocence, even if the sophistication of her musical idiom in certain numbers makes her very much a modern girl. In the last analysis Handel's genius in
Orlando
transcends all the supposed limits of Baroque opera, turning it into a drama about young people confronting the challenge of their sincerest emotions, nowhere better expressed than in the trio ‘Consolati o bella', which ends the first act, when Angelica and Medoro, secure in mutual love, can find time to comfort the grief-stricken Dorinda, who must now realize that she has lost Medoro for good.

Orlando
, ‘extraordinary fine & magnificent', was first produced at the King's Theatre on 27 January 1733, with a modest run of ten performances, no less than seven of which were attended by the royal family. ‘I never in my life heard a better piece of musick nor better perform'd,' wrote the Scottish composer Sir John Clerk of Penicuik after attending the last performance.
He had studied in Rome with Corelli, so knew a thing or two about ‘Italians who sung with very good grace and action'. The audience that night was very thin, ‘so I believe they get not enough to pay the instruments in the orchestra'. A contemporary manuscript summarizes the Heidegger management's financial position during the 1732–3 season. It was probably designed as a calculation of total cash received and includes details of subscriptions, ticket sales, box rentals and money received from the royal family. Subscribers paid fifteen guineas each, but could pay in instalments and drop out at any time. Those who did not pay up were generally too grand to be treated as anything but bad debts to be written off: thus Lady Anne Hamilton owed £52 and the Duchess of Newcastle, at fifty nights, a massive £105. The Queen and Handel's pupils the Princesses contributed £520 and the King kept up his £1,000 bounty. The only singer mentioned is Strada, paid £565 on account over a period from March to September.

The overall calculation of gross receipt has been estimated at £8,100. On top of the problem of unrecovered subscriptions and fluctuating ticket sales, there were immense outgoings, including a 1,400-guinea fee in 1730–1 to Senesino, and payment for new scenery and costumes. Even if salaries to Handel and Heidegger are not taken into account, the total expense can hardly have been much less than £8,500. Ruin might often have seemed to lie just round the corner for Handel, but what invariably seems to have rescued him was a combination of sudden good luck with his own unquenchable spirit of venturesome initiative.

8

The professional lives of most eighteenth-century composers do not make for encouraging reading. Given the extremes of caprice in their employers to which they were constantly a prey, it is sometimes a wonder that they were able to write as they did or to get their music published and performed. Handel's is a unique case, in that he was never entirely dependent on a single employer, but at the same time he was not exclusively freelance as a career musician. His annual income was based on the pensions awarded him by Queen Anne and King George I. He was a court composer insofar as he gave lessons to the royal princesses and the Hanoverians continued to commission music from him for important occasions, a funeral, a battle, the celebration of a peace treaty and three royal weddings. He cultivated aristocratic patronage in the shape of Lord Burlington and the Earl of Carnarvon, and was grateful for the friendship of certain members of the peerage who formed the core of an important circle of enthusiasts for his music during the latter part of his career. Yet the nature of English society and cultural life during the early eighteenth century meant that if Handel had wished to avoid the necessity of pursuing an independent career for at least some of his London years, it would have been almost impossible for him to do this. Even when composing for Carnarvon he was not treated as a house musician and none of his published works is directly linked to a single patron. Handel's own independence of character, his generally sound commercial sense, his gift for spotting audience trends, niche markets and fluctuations in taste, all meant that he could easily combine his career on the fringe of the establishment with that of an entrepreneur in the vigorous musical market of Georgian London. What he presented and promoted was his own music rather than anyone else's. As so often, he seems to foreshadow the attitudes of a far later generation.
His dedication to promoting his own work irresistibly recalls the egocentric single-mindedness of a Wagner or a Berlioz. We have noted how much easier it was for Handel to countenance the activity of fellow composers from a distance than to endure it where he felt it threatened his own position. Thus, though he had been responsible for introducing the town to the work of younger masters such as Leo, Giacomelli and Orlandini, the recent Haymarket seasons had been dominated by his own operas to the extent that 1732–3 featured only one piece by another hand, the unsuccessful
Catone in Utica
. Who can blame the stars of the company, particularly those who, like Senesino and Montagnana, may have felt that they had an international reputation to maintain, for thinking, as they must have done, that the repertoire was rather too limited and for wishing to spread their wings in other directions? Senesino, in any case, can hardly have needed much excuse to quit the preserve of a composer with whom he had never truly been in accord.