The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  deliver down to posterity a faithful account of the Italian opera.… Our great-grandchildren will be very curious to know the reason why their forefathers used to sit together like an audience of foreigners in their own country, to hear whole plays acted before them in a tongue which they did not understand.

  He concluded from the plots that in opera “nothing is capable of being well set to music, that is not nonsense.” He laughed at scenes where the hero made love in Italian and the heroine answered him in English—as if language mattered in such crises. He objected to lavish scenery—to actual sparrows flying about the stage, and Nicolini shivering in an open boat on a pasteboard sea.

  Addison had a grudge: he had written the libretto for Thomas Clayton’s English opera Rosamond, which had failed.38 His blast (March 21, 1711) was probably set off by the première, on February 24, of an Italian opera, Rinaldo, at the Haymarket opera house. To complicate the insult, while the words were Italian the music was by a German recently arrived in England. To Addison’s dismay the new opera was a great triumph: within three months it was produced fifteen times, always to packed houses; London danced to excerpts from its music, and sang its simpler arias.39 So began the English phase of the most spectacular career in the history of music.

  IV. HANDEL: 1685–175940

  1. Growth

  The most famous composer of Johann Sebastian Bach’s time was Georg Friedrich Handel.I He triumphed in Germany, he brought musical Italy to his feet, he was the life and history of music in England for the first half of the eighteenth century. He took his supremacy for granted, and no one questioned him. He bestrode the world of music like a commanding colossus, weighing 250 pounds.

  He was born in Halle, Upper Saxony, February 23, 1685, just twenty-six days before Johann Sebastian Bach, and eight months before Domenico Scarlatti. But whereas Bach and Scarlatti were baptized in music, fathered by famous composers, and reared to an obbligato of scales, Handel was born to parents indifferent to tones. His father was official surgeon at the court of Duke Johann Adolf of Saxe-Weissenfels; his mother was the daughter of a Lutheran minister. They frowned upon the boy’s addiction to the organ and the harpsichord; but when the Duke, hearing him play, insisted that he should receive musical training, they allowed him to study with Friedrich Zachau, organist of the Liebfrauenkirche in Halle. Zachau was a devoted and painstaking teacher. By the age of eleven Georg was composing sonatas (six of these survive), and was so skilled an organist that Zachau and the resigned parents sent him to Berlin to perform before Sophia Charlotte, the cultured Electress of Brandenburg, soon to be queen of Prussia. When Georg returned to Halle (1697), he found that his father had just died. His mother survived till 1729.

  In 1702 he entered the University of Halle, ostensibly to prepare for the practice of law. A month later the authorities at the Calvinist cathedral in Halle engaged him to replace their hard-drinking organist. After a year there the restless young genius, craving a wider sphere, pulled up all his Halle roots except his abiding love for his mother, and set out for Hamburg, where music was almost as popular as money. Hamburg had had an opera house since 1678. There Handel, aged eighteen, found a place as second violinist. He became friends with the twenty-two-year-old Johann Mattheson, the leading tenor at the opera and later the most famous musical critic of the eighteenth century. Together they made an expedition to Lübeck (August, 1703) to hear the aging Buxtehude play, and to explore the possibility of succeeding him as organist in the Marienkirche. They found that the successor must marry Buxtehude’s daughter. They looked and came away.

  Their friendship collapsed in a duel as absurd as in any play. On October 20, 1704, Mattheson produced and starred in his own opera, Cleopatra. It was a decided success, and was often repeated. In these performances Handel conducted orchestra and singers from the harpsichord. On some occasions Mattheson, drunk with glory, came down from the stage after dying as Antony, displaced his friend as conductor and harpsichordist, and shared happily in the final applause. On December 5 Handel refused to be so replaced. The friends expanded the opera with a warm dispute, and after the stage performance was over they proceeded to the public square, drew their swords, and fought to the plaudits of opera patrons and passers-by. Mattheson’s weapon struck a metal button on Handel’s coat, buckled, and broke. The tragedy became a comedy to all but the principals; they nursed their grievances until the director of the company accepted Handel’s opera Almira, which required Mattheson in the tenor role. The success of the opera (January 8, 1705) made the enemies friends again.

  Having forty-one arias in German and fifteen in Italian, Almira was so popular that it was repeated twenty times in seven weeks. Reinhard Keiser, who controlled the company and had composed most of its operas, turned jealous. The Hamburg opera declined in popularity, and for two years Handel lived at a reduced rate. Meanwhile Prince Giovan Gastone de’ Medici, passing through Hamburg, had advised him to go to Italy, where everyone was mad about music, and waiters warbled bel canto. With two hundred ducats in his wallet, and a letter from Gastone to his brother Ferdinand, patron of opera in Florence, Handel dared the snows of the Alps in December, and reached Florence toward the end of 1706. Finding Ferdinand’s pockets buttoned, he passed down to Rome. There, however, the opera house had been closed by Pope Innocent XII as a center of immorality. Handel played the organ in the Church of San Giovanni Laterano, and was acclaimed as a virtuoso; but as no one would produce his new opera, he returned to Florence. Gastone was now there, and pleaded for him; Ferdinand opened his purse, Rodrigo was staged; everyone was pleased; Ferdinand gave the young composer a hundred sequins ($300?) and a dinner service of porcelain. But Florence had no public opera house; Venice had sixteen. Handel went on to Venice.

  It was the fall of 1707. The Queen of the Adriatic was under the spell of Alessandro Scarlatti, and was applauding his greatest opera, Mitridate Eupatore; there was no opening for a young German just beginning to learn the secrets of Italian melody. Handel studied Scarlatti’s operas, and found a good friend in Alessandro’s son. Story has it that when Handel, masked, played the harpsichord at a Venetian masquerade, Domenico Scarlatti exclaimed, “That is either the marvelous Saxon or the Devil.”42 The lasting friendship between the two greatest harpsichordists of the age is a moment of harmony amid the discords of history. Together they left Venice to older masters, and went off to Rome (January, 1708?).

  This time Handel was better received. The news of Rodrigo had reached the capital; princes and cardinals opened their doors to him, more disturbed by his German accent than by his Lutheran faith. The Marchese di Ruspoli built a private theater in his palace to produce Handel’s first oratorio, La Risurrezione; the music was a revelation in its power, complexity, and depth; soon all cultural Rome was talking about “il gran Sassone” the tall and mighty Saxon. But his scores were more difficult than Italian performers liked. When Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni produced Handel’s Serenata the music troubled Arcangelo Corelli, who played first violin and conducted the orchestra; he murmured politely, “Caro Sassone, this music is in the French style, which I do not understand.”43 Handel took the violin from Corelli’s hands and played with his usual dash. Corelli forgave him.

  Naples remained to be conquered. An unreliable tradition describes Handel, Corelli, and both the Scarlattis as traveling to that city together (June, 1708). Another dubious story ascribes a love affair to Handel there; but cautious history regrettably admits that it has no sound evidence of any love affair anywhere in Handel’s life, except for his mother and music. It seems incredible that the man who could write such ardent arias had no flame of his own; perhaps expression dispersed its heat on the wings of song. So far as we know, the major event in this Neapolitan sojourn was Handel’s meeting with Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani, Viceroy of Naples and scion of a rich Venetian family. He offered the composer the libretto of an opera on the old theme of Nero’s mother. In three weeks Handel completed the work. Grimani arranged for its performance in the theater
of his family at Venice; Handel hurried thither with the score.

  The première of Agrippina (December 26, 1709) was the most exhilarating triumph that Handel had yet experienced. The generous Italians were not jealous that a German had beaten them at their own game, showing them splendors of harmony, audacities of modulation, devices of technique seldom achieved even by their favorite, Alessandro Scarlatti; they cried out, “Viva il caro Sassone!”44 Part of the ovation went to the remarkable basso, Giuseppe Boschi, whose voice ranged smoothly over a gamut of twenty-nine notes.

  Handel was now courted. Charles Montagu, Earl of Manchester, British ambassador at Venice, advised him to go to London; Prince Ernest Augustus, younger brother of Elector George Louis, offered him the post of Kapellmeister at Hanover. Venice was lovely, it breathed music, but how long could one eat out of one opera, and how long could you depend upon those temperamental Italians? At Hanover there would be fog and clouds and gutturals, but also a fine opera house, a steady salary, substantial German food; and he could ride off now and then to visit his mother at Halle. On June 15, 1710, age twenty-five, Handel was appointed Kapellmeister at Hanover, with an annual salary of fifteen hundred crowns, and permission for occasional absences. In the autumn of that year he asked and obtained permission to visit England, promising to return soon.

  2. The Conquest of England

  London opera was in trouble. An Italian company was singing there, with basso Boschi, his contralto wife, and male soprano Nicolini, whom Charles Burney, zealous historian of music, judged to be “the first truly great singer who has ever sung in our theater.”45 But both the Haymarket opera house (then called Her Majesty’s Theatre) and the Drury Lane Theatre were in a rough section of the city, where pockets were picked and heads were broken; “society” hesitated to risk its wigs and purses there.

  Hearing that Handel was in London, Aaron Hill, impresario, offered him a libretto drawn from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Handel set to work with his massive energy, borrowed freely from his own compositions, and in a fortnight completed Rinaldo. Produced on February 24, 1711, it was repeated fourteen times to full houses before the end of the season on June 22. Addison and Steele attacked it, but London took to it, and sang its arias in the streets; two especially, “Lascia ch’io pianga” and “Cara sposa,” touched sentimental chords, and can move us even today. John Walsh made fourteen hundred guineas by publishing the songs from Rinaldo; Handel wryly suggested that for the next opera Walsh should write the music and let him publish the score.46 Soon this best of Handel’s operas was produced in Dublin, Hamburg, and Naples. In London it held the stage for twenty years.

  Sipping his success, Handel stretched his leave of absence to a year; then, reluctantly, he returned to Hanover (June, 1711). There he was not a lion in drawing rooms but a servant in the Elector’s palace; the opera house was closed for the season; he composed concerti grossi and cantatas while his imagination soared in operas. In October, 1712, he asked leave for another “short” visit to England. The Elector indulged him, perhaps feeling that England was soon to be a Hanoverian appanage in any case. Handel reached London in November, and stayed forty-six years.

  He brought with him a new opera, Il Pastor Fido (The Faithful Shepherd), whose pleasant overture still charms our air. It was produced on November 22, and failed. Stimulated rather than disheartened, he began at once on another theme, Teseo (Theseus). The première (January 10, 1713) was a triumph, but after the second night the manager absconded with the box office receipts. Another manager, John Heidegger, took over, carried Teseo to thirteen performances, and rewarded the unpaid composer by arranging a benefit for “Mr. Hendel,” with the composer starring at the harpsichord. The Earl of Burlington, an enthusiastic auditor, invited Handel to make Burlington House his home; Handel accepted, was well lodged and too well fed, and met Pope, Gay, Kent, and other leaders in literature and art.

  Good fortune crowded upon him. Queen Anne had longed for an end to the War of the Spanish Succession; it came with the Treaty of Utrecht; Handel pleased Anne with his “Utrecht Te Deum,” and with a “Birthday Ode” for her anniversary; in these he showed that he had studied Purcell’s choruses. The kindly Queen rewarded him with a pension of two hundred pounds. Comfortable and prosperous, he rested on his oars for a truant year.

  On August 1, 1714, Anne died, and Elector George Louis of Hanover became George I of England. Handel looked with some apprehension upon this turn of events; he had in effect deserted Hanover, and might expect the royal shoulder to be cold. It was, but George held his peace. The Hay-market house was now renamed His Majesty’s Theatre; the King felt obliged to patronize it; but it was playing the truant’s Rinaldo. He went in disguise except for his accent, and enjoyed the performance. Meanwhile Handel had written another opera, Amadigi di Gaula; Heidegger produced it on May 25, 1715; George liked it. Soon thereafter the Italian violinist and composer Francesco Geminiani, being invited to perform at court, asked for Handel as the only harpsichordist in England who could fitly accompany him. He had his way; Handel outdid himself; the King forgave him, and raised his pension to four hundred pounds a year. Princess Caroline engaged him to teach her daughters, and added a pension of two hundred pounds. He was now the best-paid composer in Europe.

  When George I left London (July 9, 1716) for a visit to Hanover he took Handel with him. The musician visited his mother at Halle, and began his periodic gifts of money to the impoverished widow of his old teacher Zachau. King and composer returned to London early in 1717. James Brydges, Earl of Carnarvon—later, Duke of Chandos—invited Handel to live at his sumptuous palace, Canons, in Middlesex, and to replace as its music master Dr. Johann Pepusch, who took delayed revenge by writing the music for The Beggar’s Opera. There Handel composed Suites de Pièces pour le Clavecin— harpsichord fantasies in the style of Domenico Scarlatti and Couperin—some concerti grossi, twelve “Chandos Anthems,” music for Gay’s masque Acis and Galatea, and an opera, Radamisto.

  But who would produce the opera? Attendance at His Majesty’s Theatre had fallen off; Heidegger was nearing bankruptcy. To rescue him and opera a group of nobles and rich commoners formed (February, 1719) the Royal Academy of Music, financing it with fifty shares offered to the public at two hundred pounds each; George I took five shares. On February 21 a London weekly announced that “Mr. Hendel, a famous Master of Music, is gone beyond the sea, by order of His Majesty, to collect a company of the choicest singers in Europe for the Opera in the Haymarket.”47 Handel raided various companies in Germany, and visited his mother again. A few hours after he left Halle for England, Johann Sebastian Bach appeared in the town, having walked some twenty-five miles from Cöthen, and asked if he might see the great German who had conquered England. It was too late; the two masters never met.

  On April 27, 1720, Radamisto was performed before the King, his mistress, and a house brilliant with titles and jewelry; pedigreed persons fought for admission; “several gentlemen,” Mainwaring reported, “were turned back who had offered forty shillings for a seat in the gallery.”48 The English audience rivaled in its applause the Venetians who had acclaimed Agrippina eleven years before. Handel was again the hero of London.

  Not quite. A rival group of music lovers, led by Handel’s former patron the Earl of Burlington, preferred Giovanni Battista Bononcini. They persuaded the Royal Academy of Music to open its second season with Bononcini’s opera Astarto (November 19, 1720); they secured for its leading role a male soprano now more adored than Nicolini; this “Senesino” (Francesco Bernardi), offensive in manners, captivating in voice, carried Astarto to triumph and a run of ten performances; Bononcini’s admirers hailed him as superior to Handel. Neither composer was responsible for the war that now divided London’s operatic public into hostile groups, but London, in this year of the bursting South Sea Bubble, was as excitable as Paris. The King and the Whigs favored Handel, the Prince of Wales and the Tories played up Bononcini, and the wits and pamphleteers crowded to the fray. Bononci
ni seemed to certify his supremacy with a new opera, Crispo (January, 1722), which was so successful that the Academy followed it with another Bononcini triumph, Griselda. When the great Marlborough died (June), Bononcini, not Handel, was chosen to compose the funeral anthem; and the Duke’s daughter settled upon the Italian an annuity of five hundred pounds a year. It was Bononcini’s year.

  Handel fought back with Ottone, and a new soprano whom he lured from Italy by an unprecedented guarantee of two thousand pounds. Francesca Cuzzoni, as Horace Walpole saw her, “was short and squat, with a doughy cross face but fine complexion; was not a good actress; dressed ill; and was silly and fantastical”;49 but she warbled ravishingly. A contest of wills and tempers enlivened her rehearsals. “Madame,” Handel told her, “I well know that you are a veritable female devil; but I myself, I will have you know, am Beelzebub, chief of the devils.” When she insisted on singing an aria contrary to his instructions, he took hold of her and threatened to throw her out the window.50 As the two thousand pounds would have followed her, she yielded. In the première (January 12, 1723) she sang so well that one enthusiast cried out from the gallery in mediis rebus, “Damme, she has a nest of nightingales in her belly.”51 Senesino rivaled her, and Boschi’s basso helped. On the second night seats sold for five pounds more. About this time John Gay wrote to Jonathan Swift:

  As for the reigning amusement of the town, it is entirely music; real fiddles, bass viols, and hautboys; not poetical harps, lyres, and reeds. There’s nobody allowed to say I sing but an eunuch, or an Italian woman. Everybody now is grown as great a judge of music as they were, in your time, of poetry; and folks that could not distinguish one tone from another now daily dispute about the different styles of Handel, Bononcini, and Attilio [Ariosti].… In London and Westminster, in all polite conversation, Senesino is daily voted the greatest man that ever lived.52