At the opening of the 18th century censorship had been abolished in England, and there were a dozen or more political newspapers, the Daily Courant being the first daily to appear in Europe. By the time of Handel’s arrival these publications served not merely for the dissemination of news; they printed serious writings on law, economics, social and political questions, and literary problems. One could read contributions by William Temple, North, Davenant, Locke, Steele, Addison, Defoe, Swift, and many others. The Spectator was just coming into its own in 1711, and though it did not last long, it established a tone that was to remain a characteristic aspect of intellectual life in Britain. Since the creation of the Habeas Corpus Act and the Bill of Rights the middle classes had gained constantly, their position improving with the skills acquired in parliamentary battles. They were conscious of their power and guarded it jealously. The aristocracy still played a leading role, but the bourgeoisie was rapidly gaining under the new mass psyche, which gave birth to the ideas and principles of rational business and the amassing of wealth, resulting in the gradual secularization of the middle classes. It was this spirit that made England a parliamentary state with free institutions alongside a Europe ruled by absolutism, and it was this spirit of political freedom that brought with it the triumph of individualism. Germany still largely followed the world of the Middle Ages, a world divided into little units, the distinctions being made on the basis of occupation; the individual was only a molecule in his occupation’s entity. In England these units gradually became more comprehensive, the principal unit, to which the individual owed direct allegiance, becoming the national state.
Any newly arrived stranger would be in danger of foundering in the “omnivorous ocean” of London life, especially if he came, as did Handel, from an environment and society having quite different traditions. Unable to speak the language, Handel could not immediately feel the distinctive atmosphere of this great city. At first he failed to make contact with the middle-class urban intelligentsia, thereby missing what was undoubtedly the most novel aspect of English life to a German: the position of the artist. The artist’s situation was ambiguous in this new society, and in reality the middle-class artist led a double life. While he was still a purveyor of music to the aristocracy, he had become a factor in the furthering of the intellectual aspirations of the bourgeoisie. This role the English artist, especially the musician, had to fulfill under difficult conditions, for he was subjected to crushing competition imposed upon him by the very freedom that a modern capitalist society assured.
England achieved a political and commercial hegemony that was as world-wide as was Italy’s artistic conquest. Her national forces were occupied to such a degree with the building of an empire, a modern state, and the ruling of the seas, that her artistic life declined. Her tremendous musical heritage was still strong enough to supply the needs of society, but it no longer had the power to uphold a high .level of productivity. England gradually became a market place for foreign talent, and her developing business and industry provided a living—often lucrative—for visiting foreign celebrities, some of whom, like Handel, settled down to become British subjects. No other nation until the advent of the modern United States could offer such opportunities to foreign artists. Though Handel must have watched this scene unfolding before him, his customary systematic study had to wait until he had the necessary leisure; his immediate aim was to strike a blow with opera.
Basic differences will arise in a composer’s creative style according to whether he is really part of his social surroundings, taking part in its battles, or merely observes what is taking place around him. These differences play a part in selecting creative processes, and the very experience that calls forth the work may require a particular structure. Whether a creative artist is active in his society or is an observer is not always dependent on his psychological make-up; it is often determined by circumstances. More than one contemplatively inclined composer has been carried away by the intensity of contemporary events, becoming involved in them. Verdi is a good example, and so would Handel become within a short time. But for the moment he was exclusively interested in obtaining a foothold in England with his opera, and this he did at his very first attempt. The triumph of Rinaldo, his first opera composed for London, rivalled his success in Venice. How he managed to find his way to the right persons and to obtain their backing is still largely a matter of conjecture, but in the light of his known character these conjectures appear quite plausible.
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WHEN HANDEL burst upon the London scene there was already a respectable repertory of Italian opera, even though the genre had been introduced in England only in the previous half decade. “At this time Operas were a sort of new acquaintance, but began to be established in the affections of the Nobility,” says Mainwaring. Opposition was not wanting, yet Steele’s and Addison’s murderous satire notwithstanding, by the time Handel arrived opera was not only accepted, at least by the higher strata of society; it had already assumed its future pre-eminence as an instrument of state entertainment and diplomacy.21 A trio of rather interesting if dissimilar musical entrepreneurs was responsible for the first attempts at transplanting Italian opera onto English soil.
The first of these, Nicola Haym (1679-1729), was born of German parents in Italy, where he must have received a sound musical and humanistic education. He was a composer, cellist, adapter and arranger, librettist, man of letters, and archaeologist, an expert on numismatics and on rare books. On all these subjects he wrote and published elaborate monographs. Settling in England in 1702, Haym eventually joined forces with Charles Dieupart and Thomas Clayton, the other members of the trio, and had a hand in all productions at the Drury Lane Theatre until Handel’s arrival. The great success of Rinaldo at the Haymarket hurt their undertaking, and at first Haym joined the detractors who protested the “new style” of Handel’s opera; but shrewdly evaluating the Saxon’s talents and probable future, instead of sulking and opposing him like Pepusch and others, he soon formed an association with him that lasted, on and off, for some fifteen years. Haym was responsible for the librettos of some of Handel’s greatest operas, among them Radamisto, Giulio Cesare, Tamerlano, and Rodelinda. He also wrote librettos for Ariosti and Bononcini. Hawkins considered him a great composer, though one wonders why the composer, whom the bemused historian ranked above Alessandro Scarlatti, should remain so obstinately obscured by the librettist. Incidentally, Haym himself planned the writing of a large history of music.
Charles Dieupart (d. c. 1740), a French composer-harpsichordist-violinist, was known from about 1700 in London as an excellent and most versatile performer, among the first great interpreters of Corelli. When Handel practically annihilated the Drury Lane corporation with his initial try at opera in England, Dieupart, a very able musician but no entrepreneur at heart, soon gave up opera and returned to his safe teaching and concertizing activity. He was a composer of international repute, one of the best clavecin masters next to the great Couperin. His works must have been well known because Sebastian Bach himself liked them sufficiently to copy and study them closely, even borrowing here and there.22
Thomas Clayton, the third partner (of uncertain dates), was an Englishman and member of the King’s band from 1692 to 1702, after which he went to Italy to perfect himself in composition. Having been impressed, like all the others, by Italian opera, he joined forces with Haym and Dieupart to see whether they could not profitably acclimatize this exciting form of the lyric theatre in England.
Their first production, in 1705, was Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus, which they called “an opera after the Italian manner: All sung,” Clayton supplying the bulk of the music. The critics derided Arsinoe, but the public liked the novelty well enough to support thirty-six performances in less than two years. There is a long-standing mystification about Clayton’s true role in the venture: everyone says that he merely used airs collected in Italy, but no one has as yet been able to disprove his authorship by positive identification
of the allegedly borrowed airs. It does not make any difference, because the music does not amount to much.
After this promising start, Clayton associated himself with a “Person of Quality,” Joseph Addison, whose libretto served as vehicle for the second opera, Rosamond, performed March 15, 1707.23 This time the reward was a resounding failure which finished Clayton as an opera composer and Addison as a librettist, turning the eminent man of letters into a bitter enemy of opera. The Drury Lane enterprise had reaped its greatest success with Antonio Maria Bononcini’s Camilla on April 10, 1706; the work was done in an English version, the music arranged, but apparently not substantially altered, by Haym. It was the most successful Italian opera presented in England in the 18th century—but of course it was sung in English, though later some arias were presented in the original Italian. One notices at this stage of opera in London a similarity to the Hamburg opera at the time of Handel’s stay in that city: the public preferred performances in their native tongue and it was only gradually that Italian supplanted the vernacular.
Pepusch’s Thomyris, Queen of Scythia (April 12, 1707) can hardly be said to be a composition by that veteran German. It was a pasticcio consisting of airs by half a dozen famous Italian composers; Pepusch only arranged and fitted them together and wrote the perfunctory recitatives. With some songs in English and others in Italian, it was also very successful. After another such medley, the Drury Lane company proceeded to a far more ambitious work on December 25, 1708. Pyrrhus and Demetrius, an English version of Alessandro Scarlatti’s Pirro e Demetrio (Naples, 1694), again sung partly in English, partly in Italian, was arranged by Haym. How faithful Haym remained to the original—this is one of Scarlatti’s fine earlier operas—is an open question; the presence of some numbers from Scarlatti’s Rosaura indicates at least some “arranging,” but the opera was highly successful, and it served for the début of the great Italian castrato, Nicolo Grimaldi, better known as Nicolini.
In the meantime the Haymarket Theatre also caught the operatic fervor. The management, under Aaron Hill, assisted by still another continental musical speculator, Johann Jakob Heidegger, meant to capture the business from Drury Lane. Aaron Hill (1685-1750) was of the same age as Handel, and like him was precocious, much-travelled, good-natured, ready to help, and enamored of the theatre. The difference was in their talents, for Hill was a minor literary figure and a hapless businessman. Pope’s harsh picture of Hill in The Dunciad does injustice to the man, who may have had some foolish business escapades but was not without merit. Hill, first at Drury Lane and from 1710 at the Haymarket, had many literary friends and undoubtedly was of great help to Handel, especially at the beginning of his career in England.
Heidegger was a German whose family hailed from Bavaria, eventually settling in Switzerland, whence Johann Jakob came to London in 1707. The purpose of the trip was a nebulous business affair that did not materialize, for we find him enlisting in the Queen’s Life Guards as an ordinary private. In the life of an adventurer this seemingly desperate measure simply indicates a lack of funds, providing a needed pause to reconnoiter the possibilities. Evidently Heidegger did his scouting so well that soon after shedding his uniform the one-time private was moving in high society circles, where he was well liked, for he was a man of good manners and a certain charm which compensated for features famous for their ugliness all over London. They called him the “Swiss Count.” Presently, Heidegger entered the world of the theatre, partly because it offered good business opportunities, partly because he was a man with excellent theatrical instincts and, as his subsequent acts proved, of considerable knowledge of the theatre. Where he acquired this knowledge remains a mystery. Like Hill and Haym, Heidegger was instantly to realize Handel’s true stature and to lose no time in associating himself with the coming monarch of opera in London.
After producing a pasticcio or two, on January 21, 1710 the Haymarket Theatre proceeded to bona fide opera: Almahide. Burney positively states that this work by (presumably) Giovanni Bononcini “was the first opera performed in England wholly in Italian and by Italian singers.” Nevertheless, Almahide still had intermezzi in English.24 Mancini’s Hydaspes (L’Idaspe fedele) and Giovanni Bononcini’s Etearco followed —it can be seen that Handel would be pitting his talents not against a Clayton but against some world-famous masters of Italian opera. Now the Haymarket Theatre became the principal opera house in London, and for some time the only one.
How did the newcomer, unable to speak English, find his way into this milieu and almost instantly persuade the Haymarket administration to mount his opera? First he must have made contact with the resident German musicians. Among these there was John Ernest (Johann Ernst) Galliard, a few years Handel’s senior, originally from Celle, who received his early education in the excellent French court orchestra there. He was a good oboe player, and also a well-trained composer, who had studied with Steffani in Hanover. Galliard (evidently a distortion of Gaillard) settled in London in the first decade of the century. One of the founders of the Academy of Ancient Music, he was a versatile musician and apparently a cultivated one, for he translated Tosi’s celebrated Opinioni de’ cantori into excellent English. In 1712 his Calypso and Telemachus, the last all-English opera for decades, closed the season of opera. Later at the performances of Handel’s Teseo he played the oboe in the orchestra. Handel and Galliard stayed on friendly terms, as can be seen from their mutual subscriptions to their respective works.
Then there was Andrew (Andreas) Roner, well regarded in London and very friendly to Handel. We know next to nothing about him, but he was at home in both musical and literary circles and acted as an intermediary between Handel and the poet Hughes. Both Roner and Galliard had direct connections with the theatre. There were also some professional acquaintances from Italy and Hanover, singers who preceded Handel to London. Boschi, the prodigious basso, and his wife Francesca, both of whom sang in Agrippina in Venice, surely delighted Handel, whose Italian was fluent; they furthered his career at the opera house, where they were employed and had a considerable reputation. It is a matter of record that Francesca introduced Handel to an unaware English public scarcely a month after his arrival, by inserting an aria from Agrippina into Scarlatti’s Pyrrhus on December 6, 1710. Valeriano Pellegrini, an old acquaintance from the original cast of Agrippina, sang in Handel’s Pastor fido in 1712, but it is not known whether he was already in London in 1710. Still another professional friend about whom we have information was Elisabetta Pilotti, a court singer from Hanover who, since she was billed as being in the service of the Elector of Hanover, was also presumably on a leave of absence. She sang in Rinaldo, and one surmises that the two Hanoverians vacationing in London must have exchanged ideas about the art of staying away from their employer.
These intermediaries undoubtedly were of substantial assistance to Handel, but it is the manager who decides whether or not to mount a new opera. Aaron Hill was a shrewd man, and biographers credit him with helping Handel to orient himself in the strange country, but then Handel always found his way to a good organ and to a likely theatre wherever he was, and the Haymarket Theatre was a likely place. It had a manager whose adventurous spirit and willingness to gamble were akin to Handel’s, and they found each other congenial right from the beginning. And of course Handel was no risk; he was known in professional circles and among the high-born amateurs; a record-breaking success in Venice such as Agrippina achieved becomes known wherever opera is cultivated. When, in the preface to Rinaldo, Hill referred to “Mr. Hendel” as a composer “whom the world justly celebrates,” he was not merely writing the customary encomium. It seems likely that it was Handel who sought out the manager rather than vice versa, and the latter, seeing that the German was champing at the bit, scented an excellent opportunity for himself and his theatre. A librettist was quickly produced, and about three months after his arrival Handel affixed his name to the annals of English music, from which it was never to be erased.
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p; THE LIBRETTIST, Giacomo Rossi, is universally condemned as a miserable poetaster, but perhaps he deserves some grace—at least for Rinaldo, his first libretto for Handel. In his preface the poor man, who had never faced anything like the imperious Saxon, defends himself for the unseemly haste forced upon him in the preparation of the libretto. “Mr. Hendel, the Orpheus of our century, while composing the music, scarcely gave me the time to write, and to my great wonder I saw an entire opera put to music by that surprising genius, with the greatest degree of perfection, in only two weeks.” Indeed, Handel could outpace any librettist, but of course in addition he also had a fistful of numbers culled from earlier works ready for transplantation, about which Rossi was ignorant. The impatient Handel could not even wait for the verses; on at least one occasion when he was ahead of the librettist, as in Almirena’s aria, “Bel piacere,” he simply used words from Agrippina.
Rinaldo was first performed on February 24, 1711. The cast consisted of the Boschi couple, Isabella Girardeau, Nicolini, Valentini, Elisabetta Pilotti, and Giuseppe Cassani—a star assembly. The success was tremendous, and rightfully so, because in spite of the hasty composition and the many borrowings, Rinaldo is one of Handel’s great operas; from the overture, a spacious piece, the music flows beguilingly. Such airs as “Lascia ch’io pianga” and “Cara sposa” belong among his finest melodies, and, while this level is not maintained throughout, the emotional and descriptive passages are managed with a fine evocative economy. The orchestra is also treated with a skill never before heard in London; notably the imaginative use of the brass was an innovation. The staging was lavish, though perhaps a little too realistic, for in Almirena’s “Bird Song,” “Augel-letti che canto,” a flock of live sparrows was let loose, creating a sensation and providing the satirists with a theme they utilized with relish. In his very first opera in England Handel set a precedent that he was to follow throughout his career in opera and oratorio: he assigned himself virtuoso tasks on the conductor’s harpsichord (in the oratorios he was to play organ concertos between the acts). These improvisations were highly appreciated by the public, constituting a drawing card that almost equalled the works themselves. In the score of Rinaldo these passages are only indicated, not written out, Handel obviously improvising as only he could, but Walsh, the publisher, aware of the admiration for Handel’s virtuoso improvisations, found someone who remembered them—after a fashion —and in his 1711 edition of the keyboard score of the airs from Rinaldo had them reconstructed by William Babell. Chrysander printed two of Babell’s more ambitious Handel fantasias in Vols. 48 and 58 of the Händelgesellschaft edition. Babell, who died young in 1723, was a pupil of Pepusch, a good organist and violinist, but especially skilful at the harpsichord. He must have been the Liszt of the age, for he was celebrated for his opera transcriptions and fantasies not only in England but all over the Continent.
George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music Page 16
