Handel (37 page)

The Haymarket season concluded, after three
Sosarme
performances to nearly empty houses, with a revised version of
Il Pastor Fido
, not heard since 1712 and rather more successful, judging by its fourteen-night run. It was the end, for the time being, of any further arrangement with Heidegger, who was no doubt glad to see the contract terminated and to welcome in the smart Nobility outfit, complete with Rolli, Porpora and the immortal Farinelli. In
Le Pour et Le Contre
Prévost reported that Handel, ruined by the loss, was about to leave England. If that was true, he only got as far as Tunbridge Wells, where he began work on a new opera,
presumably enjoying the select company at the spa among its rocky outcrops and taking the cold iron-flavoured waters. He was not, in any case, a ruined man since the King, who must have realized what the enterprise had cost him and was still costing him with a company of singers to maintain, had directed that the customary royal bounty to the opera management should go, not to Heidegger, but directly to Handel himself.

Awaiting the distinguished exiles was a splendid new theatre at the top of Bow Street, Covent Garden, the first on a site now occupied by the Royal Opera House. Handsomely adorned with murals by the Venetian painter Jacopo Amigoni, it had opened in December 1732 with a performance of Congreve's
The Way of the World
by John Rich's company, who had moved from Lincoln's Inn Fields fresh, as it were, from their triumph in
The Beggar's Opera
. Rich combined his career as an impresario with that of a starring role in pantomime as Harlequin. A canny entrepreneur, eager to stay ahead of the game in entertaining London audiences, he offered an additional draw in the shape of the Parisian dancer Marie Sallé.

Sallé is often referred to as ‘notorious', though in fact she was a good deal less so than her celebrated rival La Camargo and possibly no more than any other ballerina before or since. More important than her notoriety was the degree of her artistry, which had already been appreciated by Pope and Gay, who paraphrased Virgil in her honour:

During her previous London season she had had to combat the coarseness of the footmen's gallery and the malice of her female audience,
who found her conceited and affecting ‘
la milady
', but by sheer tenacity she had established herself as a creative dancer of the first rank, laying on for Rich the sort of spectacle the rigidly conservative Paris Opéra had hitherto scorned. If there was any notoriety, it came not from her conduct (she refused, according to Prévost, to part with her virtue for 2,000 guineas) but from the daring muslin draperies she wore ‘
sur le modèle d'une statue grecque
' in her ballet
Pigmalion.
Her 1733 benefit, to a packed house, remained fresh in the memory of the seventeen-year-old David Garrick, who told the great dancer Noverre years afterwards of latecomers hammering on the theatre doors: if it went on like this, thought Prévost, she would need a lot more than 2,000 guineas.

As a prelude to the revised
Pastor Fido
with which Handel's company opened at Covent Garden on 9 November 1734, he prepared a divertissement for Sallé based on one of her previous successes, Colin de Blamont's
Caractères d'amour
and entitled
Terpsichore
. The piece was also designed to mark the arrival of the new company. Apollo, sung by Carestini, arrives from Parnassus to discover whether his new ‘Academy' (Covent Garden) is worthy of him, and asks Erato (Strada) what has become of Terpsichore. On she bounces, to perform various dances illustrative of passions described by the singers. So that the audience could have their fill of
la ravissante Sallé
Handel interpolated ballet numbers into
Il Pastor Fido
itself and into all that season's subsequent operas, as part of his contract with Rich. The Opera of the Nobility had done its best to lure the dancer to the King's Theatre by doubling Covent Garden's offer, but Sallé could afford to be honourable. ‘What about my word? Does that count for nothing?' was her response to Heidegger, and she stayed loyal to Rich and Handel for the coming season.

With a star ballerina and a spanking new theatre, this might have been enough to draw the crowds. Covent Garden nevertheless needed to take its competitors seriously, especially when they could afford a star like Farinelli. ‘Till I had heard him,' wrote Paolo Rolli to Giuseppe Riva, ‘I had heard only a small part of what human song can achieve, whereas I now conceive that I have heard all there is to hear.' The vogue for the stellar eunuch gripped fashionable London no less powerfully than the Cuzzoni–Faustina rivalry some years previously. Handel and Rich were undaunted, with two new operas ready for the coming season, beginning on 9 November 1734. The first of these,
Ariodante
, was held over until 8 January, by which time Sallé had made her mark on the audience. The new company of singers had established itself in an
Arianna
revival, followed by
Oreste
, a pasticcio from earlier Handel stage works.

When finally presented,
Ariodante
enjoyed a modest run of eleven performances, with the customary revival the following year. As with several Handelian masterpieces, recognition has arrived two centuries too late for the composer to enjoy it, and the work is nowadays justly ranked beside
Rodelinda
,
Tamerlano
and
Orlando
among the great creations of early eighteenth-century opera. For his text Handel turned once more to Antonio Salvi, and to one of his best libretti.
Ginevra, Principessa di Scozia
had been originally prepared for production at Pratolino in 1708, Salvi having adapted it from episodes in the fourth and fifth books of Ariosto's
Orlando Furioso
. The scene is set in Scotand, though, as elsewhere in the poem, there is no attempt at local colour, since one of its essential factors is a complete geographical topsy-turvydom. Polinesso, jealous of Ariodante's love for Ginevra, uses Dalinda to engineer a situation whereby the Princess will be dishonoured and condemned to death (Shakespeare used this episode as a source for the plot of
Much Ado About Nothing
). Salvi, as he admits, made some alterations to both Polinesso and Dalinda. ‘I have emphasized Polinesso's criminal character, making him operate more through interest and ambition than through love, so that the audience feels less horror at his death and to make the virtue of the other characters stand out the more.' As for Dalinda, who in Ariosto goes to Greece and becomes a nun, Salvi says that he has made her somewhat more decent in manner, ‘since in our century she would not have appeared without blame upon the stage'.

This sort of blackening and whitening makes little real difference to the nature of Handel's music, designed to create an ideal balance in the story between love, treachery and the thoughtlessness that allows Dalinda to be tempted into deceiving Ariodante. Balance, indeed, is of paramount importance here and the opera is one which does not cut at all easily. The first act, with its emphasis on the festivities surrounding the engagement of Ariodante and Ginevra, has the kind of jubilant atmosphere that is so often a prelude to disaster. Ariodante's Pergolesian ‘Con l'ali di costanza', Ginevra's ‘Volate, amori' and the song and dance finale to the act, taking place in a
‘valle deliziosa'
are simply the elements of doomed celebration, an interrupted
festa teatrale
. We should in any case guess that all will go wrong by the appearance of Polinesso like Carabosse at the christening: his music throughout the work has a compelling awkwardness about it, as if Handel were deliberately trying not to engage our sympathy while at the same time making us appreciate his motives.

The little ten-bar sinfonia introducing the moonlit second act over a falling ground bass throws the first real shadows, leading to the doughty Lurcanio, a figure of true old-fangled probity, accusing Ginevra of causing Ariodante's death. Only when she is vindicated, after the false championship of Polinesso has led to Lurcanio killing him and Ariodante returns to defend her honour in the field, can the raptures and rejoicings resume. Thus, when Ginevra and Ariodante are given their second duet, ‘Bramo aver mille vite', it is not, like their first, allowed to be broken off. Ginevra's father, the king, is the original intruder, cutting benevolently into the middle section with the words ‘Do not be alarmed, fair loved ones'. His prevailing paternal gentleness and anxiety give him a dignified pathos transcending anything among Handel's earlier bass roles and deepen the drama's credibility. Every response is naturally evoked, there are no preposterous displays of heroism or fustian conflicts of love and duty, and Ariodante himself, youthful, ardent and vulnerable, is so believable a figure that he seems to earn his final aria di bravura, the unforgettable ‘Dopo notte' (Carestini must have revelled in its lavish virtuoso divisions) simply through having endured.

If
Ariodante
aroused only modified rapture, the second new opera of the season,
Alcina
, was a runaway success. Mrs Pendarves, hearing it for the first time at Handel's domestic rehearsal in Brook Street, thought it ‘the best he ever made . . .'tis so fine I have not words to describe it . . . While Mr Handel was playing his part, I could not help thinking him a necromancer in the midst of his own enchantments.' The composer, thus happily transmogrified, became the sorceress Alcina, the Circe of a magic island. Based on another episode from Ariosto, the anonymous libretto had originally been written for Farinelli's brother, the composer Riccardo Broschi, and was probably picked up by Handel during his 1729 Italian journey. The theatre poet who adapted it for London is unknown, but the new version, reassigning several arias and introducing an extra character in the shape of the boy Oberto, is exceptionally effective. The magic element, the choral items and dances did nothing to obscure what, for one anonymous writer to the
Universal Spectator
, was the moral point of it all, finding ‘a beautiful and instructive Allegory' designed to prove that ‘neither the Council of Friends, nor the Example of others . . . can stop the giddy head-strong Youth from the Chase of imaginary or fleeting Pleasures'.

Such an interpretation is wholly acceptable in the context of a work which so genuinely absorbs that quality of shape-changing magic that forms its theme. The opera's enduring strength is that
Alcina
becomes what we choose to make it, a delightful confection of wizardry and dalliance, a Baroque entertainment, or something a little more profound, a story in which the artist Alcina, confronting the strength of her own passions, is finally crushed by them. The emotional pitch of the final act is established in the hectic strokes of the orchestral introduction and carried on through the airs of the soubrette Morgana, incapable of taking love seriously, and Oronte, desperately searching for his lost father, to reach a peak in Alcina's threats of revenge in ‘Ma quando tornerai' and the defiant resolve of Bradamante and Ruggiero, fused in the magnificently vigorous ensemble, ‘Non è amor ne gelosia'. Ruggiero breaks the magic urn, and in so doing destroys Alcina and Morgana to liberate those they have transformed.

Yet, as Handel understands, the loss of Alcina means an end to the opera. Like Agrippina or Rodelinda, she makes her eponymous drama. Her varying moods, whether expressed in the quaver sighs punctuating ‘Ah mio cor' (her heart is of the essence here) or in the nervous string counterpoint of ‘Ombre pallide', all focus on the dedication to love that undermines her power. Each of the other figures, the vacillating Ruggiero, the fearless Bradamante, even Morgana, who is only extinguished because of her complicity with the sorceress, is of slightly lessened substance in comparison. She, however, stands alone, almost a tragic figure in her musical voyage towards the nemesis of a single bar of simple recitative.

The opera's triumph was partially alloyed by the reception given to the unfortunate Marie Sallé, who appeared in the ballets as Cupid and was whistled at for her pains. The Abbé Prévost thought it was all owing to an anti-Handel claque among the audience: whatever the cause she hastened back to Paris, where her art would be appreciated as something higher than mere ‘notoriety'. Carestini, too, left England shortly afterwards. As Ruggiero he had been awarded a string of airs devised to flatter his virtuosity to its uttermost, yet the simplest and most striking of them all, ‘Verdi prati', had offended him by its sheer artlessness. Giving it back to Handel he was met with the magisterial rebuke:
‘You dog! don't I know better as yourself what is best for you to sing? If you will not sing all the song what I give you, I will not pay you one stiver!' Carestini sang, was admired, was paid and took ship for the Continent when the season finished. When he returned some years later, it was to join a different company from Handel's.

Alcina
's greatness lies in its power to work on several different levels simultaneously. Even to those for whom Handel opera is nothing better than a costumed concert, the kind of confection sent packing by Gluck's reforms later in the eighteenth century, the piece proves irresistible in the expressive impact and structural beauty of its individual arias. Those, on the other hand, for whom Italian Baroque melodramma holds no terrors as a perfectly valid dramatic medium can enjoy
Alcina
as something more than a delightful fiction full of wizardry and dalliance. They can admire the imaginative consistency with which Handel registers the central character's own transformation from a creature of fantasy, armed with the power to call infernal spirits to her aid, to a vulnerable human being, incapable of resisting the all too credible emotion that enslaves and ultimately destroys her.