To most of us the term “cantata” usually means a piece of sacred music and we have a very firm idea when we mention it, but to the historian it is one of the vaguest and most troublesome of genres. From the early 17th century the Baroque produced the cantata in profusion, yet neither its form, nor its text, nor its medium is sufficiently well defined to permit us to present a categorical opposition to the “cantata” as we know it—which is to say, from Bach. At any rate, the cantata Handel encountered in Italy was a form of vocal chamber music, more inclined towards lyricism than towards drama, usually being a voce sola with thoroughbass accompaniment. However, the more elaborate varieties such as the serenata used an orchestral accompaniment and obbligato concerted instruments, as well as a choral number or two. The dividing line between this and the Italian oratorio is only faintly, if at all, visible. The secular variety of cantata we know fairly well, and while the manuscript sources are close to inexhaustible, the few printed anthologies, among them Riemann’s Kantaten Frühling and Jeppesen’s La Flora, nevertheless give us a very good idea of this engaging species, and Eugen Schmitz’s monograph devoted to it is a reliable guide. Unfortunately no such work exists in the realm of the Italian sacred cantata, and here our information is very sketchy indeed. Yet from what little is available,11 it is clear that neither in style nor in form do the two species differ materially, the recitative-aria scheme being followed by both, though in the sacred cantata the order is often unaccountably reversed: aria-recitative.
The secular cantata, the result of a merger of madrigal and aria, actually developed from the magnificently flourishing monodic “concert” songs as a natural result of the introduction of narrative-dramatic elements. The earliest known example of this type is a set by Alessandro Grandi, Cantate e arie a voce sola (1620), while Sigismondo d’India published a remarkable collection of chamber duets as early as 1615. Monteverdi’s Scherzi Musicali (1632) and his solo madrigals also belong in this category. These songs are expressive, at times powerfully dramatic, at others so dainty and diminutive that only the most intimate surroundings would be appropriate for them; “a dulcet and luscious form of verbosity,” as Swinburne said of his own poetry. Many were undoubtedly sung in the evening, out in a meadow or on a riverbank, with a lute or chitarrone. There are many paintings from the period that preserve the memory of these outdoor concerts. At first often called scena di camera, the monodic song had a bucolic, idyllic nature that was very popular, and the poets were the old poets of the madrigalian era. In Italy the poets stay alive forever. Dante’s language is still a living language, not like medieval English, French, or German, which must be deciphered for the modern reader. Handel, like Montaigne and Goethe, could have heard even simple people recite Tasso and Ariosto. This language, which Handel obviously studied closely, judging from his steadily improving musical prosody, is music itself. But while the language was a new experience—after the miserable concoctions he set to music in Hamburg this polished poetry was a revelation—the melody must have been of even greater fascination. It is no exaggeration to state that it was the Italian cantata that enabled Handel to deploy his latent melodic gifts, and it was the cantata that gave him the sense for the carrying power of a theme or melody and the knowledge of when to break off lest it lose its strength by being overdrawn.
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IT WILL BE remembered that while Mattheson had praised Handel’s skill in harmony and counterpoint, he had found the young man’s melody mediocre. Though not exactly mediocre, it was the German cantor’s somewhat abstract and instrumentally inspired melody. Italian melody, which Handel now observed at first hand, does not concern itself with mysticism, it is very much of this world, in the foreground, an experience that takes place once and will never again happen in exactly the same way. This experience is sentiment, feeling, the purest form of lyricism. In the final analysis this is the root of all music, and music could never altogether cut itself off from this root, that is, not until it became willing to entrust its creation to the machine. But that does not concern us here.
Melody evokes mood, and mood is the expression of a fusion of emotions and images, an inward state of soul. We feel each mood to be individual and unique. Since it forms a bridge between conscious beings, its every emanation has its own individuality.
It is unfortunate that the German word Stimmung is untranslatable. Neither the Italian tonalità or sfumatura, nor the French état d’âme, nor the English mood expresses quite the same thing, for the German word virtually suggests the striking of a tuning fork or the plucking of a chord and thus indicates the relationship that is established among men’s souls by mood. Mood spreads like sound. (Regrettably, in English the word has also acquired the secondary meaning of an unstable, even morbid, temper —“a man of moods”—for which the Germans again have a special word: Laune.)
In the mood created by a composer there is often concentrated an immense culture, the distillation of a style, for creation of mood has a great tradition. If there is considerable distance in time between the originator of a mood and the listener, the latter may be unable to identify himself with the mood, unless by study he acquires an understanding of the style. This is why most operagoers have difficulty in adjusting to Baroque opera and why they are often unable to penetrate into the infinitely complicated moods of, say, Mozart’s Così fan tutte. Nevertheless, at the bottom of every artistically created mood there is hidden secret and miracle. This is true even when a very conscious artist such as Handel deliber-erately and with consummate skill mixes the perfumes of mood. He is successful because he is working with the instinctive arcanum that characterizes the master. A great composer may create a mood instinctively, projecting an idea beyond his conscious grasp. It is perhaps somewhat disconcerting to realize that an artist often “feels” how to create a religious mood and thus without faith achieves a state only faith illuminates. Many a worldly Renaissance artist painted famous courtesans, transforming them into Madonnas of unearthly tenderness, and many a composer transmuted a salacious chanson into a Mass or motet of true spirituality.
It was through the Italian cantata that Handel acquired his incomparable art of creating mood without the help of scenic representation. The flood of his poetic imagination, imprisoned in the cantor’s tradition, was released. What drew him to Italy—what drew all foreign composers to Italy—was to learn how a mood can be created by melody. In the cantata it is accomplished with the illumination of a dream, without marching a crowd on the stage or presenting heartbreaking scenes; moreover, cantata composers knew that the night can harbor far more mood than a sun-drenched day. A tragedy is not necessarily more intense than a quiet, ballad-like cantata.
At first there was perhaps danger that Italian melodic euphony would beguile Handel as it did many another northern pilgrim, only to submerge him in the Italian-colored international style. Among other transalpine composers only Christian Bach and Mozart were able to escape unscathed. It is very easy to say that these two simply became Italianized. Perhaps this was the case with the type represented by Hasse, but with Handel, Christian Bach, and Mozart innate affinity with the radiant Italian melody enriched and enhanced their art without doing violence to its essential nature. To us they may seem altogether Italianized, but the Italians detected the difference. The mature Mozart never became really popular in Italy, even though his operas were pure Italian operas composed on Italian librettos, and the “English” Handel was a closed book to the great musical cities that once had resounded with admiration for il caro Sassone. Though Handel held fast to old Italian forms and procedures, more so than did Christian Bach and Mozart, he arrived at a more condensed simplicity of music than Venice and Naples offered. What was at first expansive and suave became later weighty, its tensile strength tremendous. Italian cantata and opera did not have that strength; they had to yield to euphony, the supreme Latin ideal. Handel retained this ideal learned in Italy all his life, never permitting construction or symbolism to interfere with euphony, but he
always insisted that euphony should conform to the idea, must clearly mirror the mood and the feeling of the characters and not shine in abstract beauty. The rapidity with which Handel managed to acquire his own tone in this old art, in which countless fine composers had preceded him, is amazing, for the form of the language of art is governed by solid conventions and the composer’s personality normally can impinge on the style of the period only gradually. In his cantata La Lucretia and in his very first original and full-fledged Italian opera, Agrippina, Handel has already hit his stride.
Several cantatas can be traced to Handel’s first Florentine visit, among them O numi eterni; Sarai contenta un dì; Clori, degl‘ occhi miei (Händelgesellschaft, Vol. 50). O numi, better known as La Lucretia (or Lucrezia), is a masterpiece difficult to account for. Mattheson, in his Grosse Generalbass-Schule, discusses it in 1731 in enthusiastic terms, praising in particular Handel’s bold modulations. While some of his biographers are very much pleased that no love affair can be ascribed to Handel with absolute certainty—a pious man does not trifle with women—one notices that from Hamburg to London there are entr’actes in Handel’s busy and studious life where many signs point to the comforting fact that he was an ordinary healthy mortal. Among the cantatas of this period La Lucretia is by far the most accomplished—and ardent—which lends some credence to the rumored love affair with Lucrezia d‘André, a diva at the court, for whom it was composed. One wonders why this admirable piece is not heard, for it is surely one of the most impressive scene, and it is available in a good modern edition by Schering. Interestingly, in spite of its ardor, the cantata is full of elaborate contrapuntal devices. There is another early cantata that seems to echo personal experience—Parti l’idolo mio, about a forsaken maiden. (Partenza, too, sounds like a romantic farewell.)
In Rome, Handel advanced to more elaborate cantatas of the serenata variety, which we shall discuss presently, not, however, before claiming the reader’s indulgence for dealing somewhat cavalierly with chronology. While we know the main dates and stations of Handel’s peregrinations in Italy, the details are fuzzy. There is, for instance, the mention of a first, fleeting visit to Venice somewhere in 1708, during Handel’s stay in Rome. It cannot be proved and is very unlikely. Then there is the uncertainty of the dates of some of the compositions; accordingly, we shall observe chronology as well as possible, but deal with the various genres in groups. Handel’s Roman sojourn was extremely fruitful for his future development, and it is far more useful to deal with cantata, oratorio, and Latin sacred music in one place than to try to pin down each work according to Handel’s temporary presence in or absence from Rome.
The larger cantatas, such as the serenatas, are really small operas; moreover, they can hardly be distinguished from the secular oratorios. By the middle of the 17th century when Carissimi turned to the orchestrally accompanied cantata, it was a rich and flexible genre, often highly dramatic in tone, studded with hardy chromaticism and altered harmonies, with coloratura as elaborate as in opera, and with a differentiated orchestral accompaniment that is often independent and thematically significant. Recitative, both secco and stromentato, arioso, ostinato basses, miniature concertos, sinfonias and ritornels—the whole arsenal of dramatic music was present. Nor were these cantatas restricted to languorous unrequited love or noble allegorical philosophizing about the merits of beauty and valor; Carissimi himself wrote alongside his grandly elevated biblical works comical cantatas of a buffo character, even mixing the two, as was done in the 17th-century Roman opera. This did not escape Handel, ordinarily little interested in the buffo element in spite of his well-known sense of humor: his Dalla guerra amorosa is a perfect opera buffa scena. In other works, such as Venne voglia ad Amore, the comic is light and airy; it could grace any fine opera buffa; and Nel dolce dell’ oblio, with its gentle humor, is already close to Pergolesi’s style. Also, many of the works, whether cantata, festa, or oratorio, clearly demand staged performance; there is documentary proof that the oratorio La Resurrezione was staged in the Ruspoli palace. While some of the larger cantatas are satisfied with a single obbligato instrument and thoroughbass, there are others that are very elaborate, with impressive ensembles. Some of the orchestral cantatas are for two voices, and there are even instances of trios.
By this time Handel was very highly regarded in Rome, not only as a performer but as a composer. Cardinal Ottoboni, issue of an old Venetian patrician family that gave the Church a pope and himself a nephew of the reigning pope, was an uncommonly cultivated patron of the arts and a poet of no mean ability who wrote librettos for Scarlatti. His reputation was international—even Dryden praised him—and contemporaries found him a very charming person. (There were some detractors, however. Montesquieu and de Brosses called him a lecher and a man without morals, though grand musicien.) The cardinal, a sound judge of men and music, who counted Corelli among his closest friends, now took an interest in the young German, shepherding him in the Academy where he met some of the outstanding personalities of the Roman aristocracy, such as the Marquess Ruspoli and Cardinals Colonna and Panfili, the latter another poet-humanist of distinction. That Handel was fully appreciated is demonstrated by the libretto Cardinal Panfili wrote in his honor—to be set to music by Handel himself for performance in the Academy. Hendel, non può mia musa, discovered some years ago by Dent, compares the young musician with Orpheus—to the latter’s detriment. However, to judge by the music, Handel did not find his own person a particularly rousing subject.
Cardinal Panfili was also the author of the libretto of Handel’s next venture: Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, completed in May 1707, an allegorical poem in which Beauty, Pleasure, Time, and Truth are engaged in rivalry. This is a fresh and poetic work in which the Italian style and manner are assimilated, and to which Handel was to return repeatedly many years later. Schering demonstrated that Handel here had already put his Italian studies to good use, basing some of the tone and construction of Il Trionfo on Perti’s Nerone (1693). Il Trionfo is classified as an oratorio, but it is clearly a serenata which, though eminently vocal in conception, nevertheless allots a considerable share in the proceedings to the orchestra. For Handel had also absorbed the lessons learned from Corelli, and the extraordinary experience of repeatedly hearing the orchestra under Corelli’s direction could not but affect his own orchestral technique. Indeed, Handel had never before indulged in such an elaborate accompaniment; in the arias the instruments do not simply merge with the voices into one unit but “concertize” with them. The overture itself is a fine concerto grosso in Corelli’s style but more advanced and venturesome, using oboes and trumpets. Several of the instruments, such as the organ (presumably played by Handel), are. given tiny concertos, while “Come nembo che fugge,” an elaborate vocal number, is accompanied by a full-fledged concerto grosso. The arias are lovely, in Handel’s “gentle” manner that we know so little, and the ensembles, though not in the dramatic vein, are enchanting.
Several other large cantatas were composed about this time; one of them, Lungi dal mio bel Nume, is dated March 1708. Apollo e Dafne is another very fine serenata, and the two trios, Se tu non lasci amore, and Quel fior che all’ alba ride, also from 1708, are on the same high level. Apollo e Dafne is a neglected gem, charmingly characterized by Anthony Lewis as Handel’s Entführung. The finely spun arias are accompanied by an imaginative orchestra full of delectable surprises, the whole breathing a ravishing bucolic air. This work fairly demands staging. Udite il mio consiglio is also an elaborate composition, but the most ambitious of the large cantatas is Aci, Galatea, e Polifemo, which must have been composed somewhat later in the same year in Naples or brought there from Rome to be finished. Once more, this work is catalogued as an “oratorio,” but it is palpably a large cantata or serenata, for action and plot are rudimentary; yet at the same time Aci, Galatea, e Polifemo goes far beyond the previous cantatas, trespassing into the genuinely operatic: Handel draws characters in music. Polifemo is a flesh-and-blood
figure, and the giant comes to life almost graphically in the outrageously wide intervals he sings. The other two protagonists are not so vividly drawn, though Galatea’s grief is very moving, but their music is of a consistently fine quality. The orchestral part is brilliant and carefully worked, and Handel took particular pains with the ensembles, in which the three characters stand out as individuals—we are in the presence of the modern and truly dramatic ensemble, such as we shall hear much later in Solomon. Handel himself was fond of this piece.
The emotional range in the cantatas, even in the basso continuo cantatas, is very wide. They are pensive, elegiac, delicate, at times slightly ironical, often tinged with gentle eroticism. Handel can be gay and he can be tempestuous and ardent. Several of the cantatas are flower pieces, elegant and dainty, but Nell’ Africane selve, in which the composer depicts the terrors of the jungle, is at the opposite extreme—almost bizarre in its pictorialism. The solo cantata with basso continuo is the source of his lifelong love of intimate lyricism; the serenata laid the foundations for his larger-scale dramatic music.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of these cantatas and serenatas is Handel’s ability to vary the routine. The simple solo cantata, especially, was pretty well standardized, but he found ways to impress his individuality on the old pattern: here changing the sequence of recitative-arioso or aria, there modifying the da capo, interrupting the vocal line with a ritomel—or vice versa—but above all by internal manipulation of the melodic line, playing out symmetry against asymmetry. The basso continuo should not be taken for a perfunctory harmonic support. Anthony Lewis characterizes the colorfully worked bass lines aptly, for indeed the bass is a full partner in these cantatas and not merely “the good listener in a one-sided conversation.” That Handel rapidly learned the finer points of Italian diction is shown in the alternate versions of some of the cantatas. At times he had to transpose or otherwise rearrange a cantata for a different singer; usually on such occasions he tightened the declamation to accord with the natural rhythm and inflection of the text. We notice that in many instances Handel painstakingly wrote out the embellishments, as if to exercise himself in the art of the professional Italian singer whose skill was new to him.
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