Handel (35 page)

On Friday, at one in the afternoon, the degree ceremonies began, with the Sheldonian divided into special galleries for noblemen and doctors, inceptors in arts, strangers, ladies, gentlemen of the University of Cambridge and musicians. ‘In the rest of the Area were the Batlers, Servitors &c.' After addresses by the Senior Proctor and the Vice-Professor of Poetry, there came a series of ‘philological exercises' by undergraduates, including such topics as
Machina Orreriana
,
Vegetatio Halesiana
,
Morbus Anglicus
,
Carmine Heroico
and one by Bishop Gibson's son Edmund, of Christ Church, on the currently newsworthy
Colonia Georgiae deducta
. Of most interest to Handel would have been
Henricus Baynbrigg Buckeridge, e Coll. Div. Jo. Bapt. Sup. Ord. Comm.
on
Musica sacra Dramatica, sive Oratorium Carmine Lyrico
, a Horatian ode in elegant sapphics, apparently inspired by having heard a performance of
Deborah
. Through the mesh of rather awkward prosody in verses like:

Handelus
aurem. Musa procax, tace.

we catch, as with Pamphilj years before, or with Revd Daniel Prat's 1722 effusion ‘To Mr Handel, On His Playing on The Organ,' a sense of the novelty and excitement of a first contact with the composer's music, enhanced, in the case of Buckeridge listening to
Deborah
, by an awareness of its rugged, monumental grandeur.

The next day, after a concert arranged by the professor of music, Richard Goodson, there were further Latin orations from the various schools, including
An Flatulentia a Concoctione laesa oriatur
and
An Emetica conveniant in Apoplexia
,
after which Handel issued tickets for his evening benefit performance of
Esther
. ‘Some of the Company, that had found themselves but very scamblingly entertained at our dry Disputations, took it into their Heads, to try how a little Fiddling would sit upon them. Such as cou'dn't attend before, squeezed in with as much Alacrity as others strove to get out; so that e're his Myrmidons cou'd gain their Posts, he found that he had little Likelihood to be at such a Loss for a House, as once upon a time, Folks say he was . . . So that notwithstanding the barbarous and inhuman Combination of such a Parcel of unconscionable Chaps, he disposed, it seems, of most of his Tickets, and had, as you may guess, a pretty motley Appearance into the Bargain.' Hearne, still grutching into his journal about the whole business, noted of' ‘Handel and (his lousy Crew) a great number of foreign fidlers' that ‘NB his book (not worth 1d) he sells for 1s'.

Sunday brought performances of the
Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate
and two Coronation Anthems, and Monday featured further exercises and ceremonies, at which care was taken by the proctors to see that the newly made doctors were wearing the proper kind of boots. But Handel himself, as a master showman, had reserved his biggest musical treat till last. On Tuesday, 10 July ‘the Company in the Evening were entertained with a spick and span new Oratorio called
Athalia.
One of the Royal and Ample (i.e. a member of Christ Church) had been saying that truly, 'twas his Opinion, that the Theater was erected for other-guise Purposes, than to be prostituted to a Company of squeeking, bawling, out-landish Singsters, let the Agreement be what it wou'd.' Success was almost a foregone conclusion;
The Bee
reported that
Athalia
‘was performed with the utmost Applause, and is esteemed equal to the most celebrated of that Gentleman's Performances; there were 3,700 Persons present'.

It is always an exciting experience to examine Handel's manuscripts, so eloquent, in their blots and crossings-out, false starts and second thoughts, of the liveliness and spontaneity of the composer's creative processes. The foul score of
Athalia
, whose second page, for example, is so heavily marked by Handel's pen strokes that the paper has been almost furrowed through, is a wonderfully vivid testimony to the frenzied vigour with which his ideas poured on to the page. Few Handel premières can, in any case, have been so gratifying to audience and composer alike as this one, in its context of recent failures and frustrations.
Oxford was honoured with the presentation of a work outstanding in its artistic consistency, one of those pieces that give point to the notion of the 1730s as the most fruitful decade in Handel's career.

Something had happened here that had not taken place since the second part of
Acis and Galatea
fifteen years before, and the two works draw upon similar resources for their respective strengths. There is the same sense of cleanness and clarity in the overall design, the same idea of formal elements, aria, chorus, recitative, serving one another instead of existing as mere independent shapes and, most important, the same quality of a personal style, which selects and concentrates on features drawn from a varied mass of musical traditions while ignoring others. As in
Acis
, Handel is saying something new, and it is scarcely accidental that each is based on the inspiration of an English text. The quality of Samuel Humphreys's reliable adaptation of Racine's
Athalie
, whose irresistible sense of dramatic purposefulness and flawless plotting so appealed to Handel, is matched by the freedom and suppleness of English poetry. Emptier of Augustan cliché than the Morell libretti of the 1740s and superior to the banalities of Humphreys's
Deborah
text,
Athalia
, in the relationship between its verbal and musical languages, underlines Handel's stylistic sensitivity to the nature of the medium in which he found himself working.

This triumphant absence of pedantry in Handel, the ability to impress a personal homogeneity on a handful of intriguingly disparate elements, shows more clearly in
Athalia
than in many of his later oratorios, perhaps because it was composed within the orbit of his last great operas. Thus an air like Athalia's ‘My vengeance awakes me' has (as we noted in the previous chapter) the typical rhythmic bounce of a ‘modern' aria in the Porpora style, yet its very sophistication of musical idiom, with suggestions of lethal elegance masking nervousness in the harmonies and accompaniment figures, is ideally suited to the Clytemnestra-like Queen herself. No finer example of the composer's ideas of balance and definition is given us than the context of this flamboyant outburst, placed between the boy Joas's artless ‘Will God whose mercies ever flow', scored for strings without continuo, and the duet ‘My spirits fail', which carries us from Athalia's hectic B flat allegro straight into a slow F minor,
which in its turn becomes an andante solo for Josabeth over a wandering bass line.

Such a radiantly dramatic quality in the pacing and layout of the various numbers is emphasized by the choral element whose significance had been established by
Deborah.
The choruses in
Athalia
are the better for not being allowed to swamp the action and for being altogether more thoughtfully constructed. The idea of contrasted religious or ethnic groups, which was to reach its apogee eleven years later in the presentation of Jews, Persians and Babylonians in
Belshazzar
, is here developed amid the sensuous textures of the sequence following Athalia's magnificent arioso in Act I Scene iii, in which she recounts her dream (Racine's famous ‘Songe d'Athalie') to Mathan, the priest of Baal, and his followers. As he was to do in ‘Forever thus stands fix'd the doom', the uncannily similar chorus sung by the pagan Romans in
Theodora
, Handel gives the Baalites, in ‘The gods who chosen blessings shed', a kind of jaunty winsomeness that is indefinably English in manner, its foreshadowings of Vauxhall or Ranelagh pastoral and the work of younger men like Boyce and Stanley accentuated by a felicitous scoring for horns. Orchestration, indeed, does much of the necessary work of underlining traditionally ‘pagan' associations: Mathan's ‘Gentle airs, melodious strains' is accompanied by one of those cello solos that are such a trademark of 1730s Handel, and Athalia's ‘Softest sounds no more can ease me' has an obbligato violin line (altered to solo flute before the first performance) serving to heighten our sense of the Queen as having reached a point at which serenity will be impossible to regain.

The fullest weight and dignity in the music of
Athalia
is reserved for the Jewish choruses, in which the debt to classical drama demonstrated by Racine's play is magnificently acknowledged. The chorus is here both commentator and participant, punctuating Josabeth's ‘Tyrants would in impious throngs' with its rhetorical outbursts, shaking a colossal fist at the court Baalites with a sturdy fugal Hallelujah and stirring the blood with their festal affirmations in ‘The mighty power in whom we trust' which opens Act II. Here, as elsewhere in the work, Handel underlined the sense of confident determination on the part of the worshippers in the temple of the one God by his spacious eight-part choral writing. The apparently loyal Whiggery of their ‘bless the true church and save the king' needs to be taken with a pinch of salt,
however, since elsewhere in the oratorio the whole political issue of rightful heirs and successors to the crown suggests that Handel and Humphreys were well aware of a strong Jacobite constituency in their Oxford audience, even if they did not sympathize with it.

Handel concluded his Oxford series with a performance of
Deborah
on Thursday, 12 July and presumably returned to London immediately afterwards. The intended honour towards him of a doctorate of music was not accepted, but the university was no doubt pleased to see in
Athalia
a grateful tribute from the composer. So too thought the Abbé Prévost, anglophile author of
Manon Lescaut
, who issued, from London, a weekly review
Le Pour et Le Contre
, in which he noted that ‘Mr Handel went to Oxford, but they were surprised to see him refuse the marks of distinction which were proposed for him. Such modesty alone could bear comparison with his talents. He did not fail to express his lively gratitude to the University, and to contribute to making the ceremony . . . more brilliant.' Prévost was intelligently appreciative of Handel's genius but others in Oxford looked back on the whole affair with misgivings. Hearne approvingly cited ‘an old man of Oxford' who ‘observed to me, that our late Oxford Act was the very worst that ever was', and the anonymous author of a ballad opera on the occasion portrayed undergraduates and dons who had ‘squandered away all my ready Rhino . . . to make a gaudy Appearance for four or five Days this Publick Act' and wishing that ‘I had been helping build the new town in
Georgia
, rather than in this cursed Place'.

In the end the students and their ‘toasts' take precisely this way out to escape their creditors. No such expedient lay open to Handel. Instead, a London bristling with professional challenges awaited him. His new company, chosen with typical regard for specific musical qualities, brought back Margherita Durastanti, a seasoned Handelian now well into her forties but still apparently in good voice, and introduced two outstanding castrato singers, part of that distinguished series Handel invited to London between 1719 and 1741. The Lombard soprano Carlo Scalzi, much admired by Metastasio, had enjoyed considerable success in Venice and Naples, but was destined to stay only a year in England, where nobody but Handel seems greatly to have esteemed him. A more interesting acquisition, in view of his reputation and subsequent career, was Giovanni Carestini, a
marchigiano
from the Ancona district, that rich breeding ground of fine voices.
He made his first stage appearance at the age of sixteen (Farinelli, his exact contemporary, began a year earlier) and was later to star in the historic performances of Johann Josef Fux's coronation opera
Costanza e Fortezza
at Prague in 1723. Burney describes him as ‘tall, beautiful and majestic. He was a very animated and intelligent actor; and having a considerable portion of enthusiasm in his composition, with a lively and inventive imagination, he rendered everything he sung interesting by good taste, energy and judicious embellishments. He manifested great agility in the execution of difficult divisions from the chest in a most articulate and admirable manner.' An imaginative artist with a good stage presence and a considerable vocal range, he was just the sort of performer calculated to interest Handel, though the details of his subsequent career, with its flourishes of boastfulness and ‘insolence', suggest that he was as temperamentally difficult as Senesino.

‘It's not just a story,' wrote Rolli in one of his epigrams, ‘that those two champions Scalzi and Carestini have come over for Handel, for that great man never sits down to table without a dish of two fat capons. But to send away this capon Senesino is a mistake liable to ruin Handel, for my Senesino is reckoned the cock of all the British hens.' Part of the castrato's continuing allure was indeed a certain dubious sexual attraction, but whatever Carestini's ability to match Senesino's success with
le britanniche galline
, the disingenuous Lady Bristol's judgement of the new Haymarket company was probably shared by a good many aristocratic opera-goers that season. ‘I am just come home', she told her husband, ‘from a dull empty opera, tho' the second time; the first was full to hear the new man, who I can find out to be an extream good singer; the rest are all scrubbs except old Durastanti, that sings as well as ever she did.'

Armed with most of Handel's former line-up, the Opera of the Nobility opened its first season in splendid style with a new piece by the prestigious Porpora,
Arianna in Nasso
, on 29 December 1733. Its popularity, registered in a run of thirteen performances, established Porpora as a rival on the scale of Bononcini. The London Italians once again had a respectable focus for their cultural chauvinism and the arrival, a few months later, of Francesca Cuzzoni to join the outfit gave the ultimate state-of-the-art touch to the enterprise. Handel nevertheless had his own new work ready in time for the head-to-head battle of the opera companies.
It was a simple enough matter for him to prepare his own
Arianna in Creta
, based on a libretto by Pietro Pariati originally set by Leonardo Leo for the Rome carnival five years previously, with interpolated aria texts from an earlier Leo piece on the same subject.