But for the moment Handel’s interest could not be diverted for any length of time from opera, as the ninth season of the Royal Academy of Music opened on September 30, 1727, with a revival of Admeto. The new contribution to the repertory was Handel’s Riccardo I, Re d‘Inghilterra, presented on November 11, 1727. Rolli’s libretto owed its existence to the recent dynastic events. The English subject, craftily selected by the Italian librettist and dedicated with a flourish to the new sovereign, is rather transparently opportunistic. The heroic tone is fortified with a good deal of warlike music, and the nobility of England is proclaimed in dithyrambs. A few good numbers were buried with this pièce d’occasion.
After a revival of Alessandro, Siroe was produced on February 17, 1728, again with the top cast—the employment of two prime donne having become a standard practice. Eighteen performances indicate a favored work, but Siroe is not a great opera. This was Handel’s first Meta-stasian libretto, and though Siroe is early Metastasio—the great Italian poet’s second lyric drama—superior literary qualities are already in evidence. The language is clear, poetic, and easy to set. Nor is the dramatic construction so poor as Dent would have it, though Haym did mangle the original by excessive condensation. After all, practically every representative composer of the earlier part of the 18th century set Siroe to music, and it was this libretto that started Metastasio on his spectacular career. The clear and forceful lines prompted Handel to write many recitatives that are dramatic and imaginative; in fact, the dramatic tone, as opposed to the lyric, dominates in this opera. But on the whole it contains much conventional music. The entire royal family attended the first night.
The last new Handelian opera of the season—and of the sinking Academy—was also Haym’s last libretto; he died in the following year. Tolomeo is a strange opera, coming as it does after Siroe: it is altogether undramatic, episodic, lacking recitatives, an almost pure aria opera of the old Scarlatti cast. Many of these arias are very beautiful, and since Haym made the contending lovers fall into slumber to get them out of the way, there are many fine elegiac and pastoral scenes; nevertheless, as a whole the opera is only a collection of grateful concert numbers.
The season ended prematurely on June 1, 1728, ostensibly because of Senesino’s indisposition. Actually, sensing the demise of the Academy, the singers began to melt away as they had from Dresden when Handel was there on his first recruiting trip. The signs were plain enough for anyone to notice. Mrs. Pendarves (Mary Granville), better known after her second marriage as Mrs. Patrick Delany, who was a devoted Handelian and a keen observer, had written to her sister on November 25, 1727: “I doubt operas will not survive longer than this winter, they are now at their last gasp; the subscription is expired and nobody will renew it.” The staff itself saw the handwriting on the wall. In his dedication of the libretto of Tolomeo to the Earl of Albemarle, Haym speaks of opera “now fast declining.” But the most ominous warning came from the directors of the Academy, who by that time had exacted their twentieth five per cent assessment from the subscribers. A notice in the Daily Courant for May 31, 1728, summons the General Court of the Royal Academy of Musick “in order to consider of proper Measures for recovering the Debts due to the Academy, and discharging what is due to Performers, Tradesmen, and others; and also to determine how the Scenes, Cloaths, etc. are to be disposed of, if the Operas cannot be continued.” They could not be continued, at least not by this association.
The collapse was due partly to extravagant expenditures in an extravagant age but largely to opera itself, and not least to the Handelian operas. Chrysander, with his infinite zeal and patience, made a careful audit of the nine years of the Academy’s existence; his figures should be pretty close to the actual facts. There were 487 performances of opera: 245 by Handel, 108 by Bononcini, 55 by Ariosti, and 79 by all others—thus Handel’s operas constituted half the total. In general his operas were far above the level of the Academy audiences; they were weightier, more elaborate, worked with more sophistication than the usual run of Venetian-Neapolitan opera. The dimensions were large, the orchestra used with a skill and imagination no one in those days could match, and the stereotyped and obvious instrumental obbligatos turned into delicate counterpoint set against the voice.
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ONE WOULD THINK THAT A country with ancient musical traditions—“the English are a singing people”—would naturally take to the mellifluous art of the Italians. Was it not in England that the Italian madrigal had its greatest flowering in the north? There were songs in Shakespeare’s plays, in Stuart drama, and the first quarter century following the Restoration was brimming with theatrical productions that made copious use of music. Nor was the spirit of the Baroque that created opera missing in England; the stage was elaborate, the machines rivalling those of the best French and Italian theatres, the productions sumptuous, and there were many good instrumentalists available for the pit orchestras. Music at the court of the first two Stuart kings was lavish, the productions with their music and dancing resembling the French ballet de cour, the stage and décors designed by such great architects as Inigo Jones. The ravages suffered by theatrical life under the Commonwealth were rapidly forgotten, and by the end of the century, when Samuel Chappuzeau, a French traveller-critic, visited London he found that not only was the court “no less polished nor less elegant than the French court, but the people of London liked their pleasures no less than the people of Paris.” He mentions three theatres in commission, with “superb decorations and change of scenery, the music is excellent and the ballet magnificent.”43 It has been proved that the English theatre orchestras were well developed in the latter 17th century44 (though Pepys did not think that the orchestra’s disposition in the Drury Lane Theatre was well conceived). But the failure of Italian opera had causes other than musical; they were deeply imbedded in English character and thought.
The tradition and living force of the theatre in England did not permit the development of an alien form of the stage; the only concession English taste made was to music as an incidental ornament. The playwrights of this highly developed and experienced theatre held views concerning the drama that created an unbridgeable cleft between the spoken theatre and opera. They saw life from close proximity, in its specifically modern, contemporary aspects, which they considered completely lost and ignored in opera. In sum, they perceived in opera an abandonment of all the values they cherished, without adequate compensation by the music. Fond as they were of music, nevertheless they saw in opera not only an irrational play, but a perversion of the nature of music, or, as the Beggar says in the introduction of the ballad opera by Gay and Pepusch: “I hope that I have not made my Opera throughout unnatural, like those in vogue.” All that Handel’s audiences expected was to see the singer get set for his aria, step in front of the footlights, sing an enjoyable but unintelligible song in a foreign tongue, reap the applause, and depart. Thomas Shadwell, the industrious playwright and connoisseur of Restoration mores, who was a pioneer in “English opera,” had already perceived this attitude of the public and had no illusions about the musical sensibilities of the audiences that flocked to the public theatres. In his preface to the libretto of Psyche he gives unstinted praise to the composer, Matthew Locke, but remarks ruefully that “the unskilful in Musick will not like the more solemn [i.e. elaborate] part of it,” which he recommends “to the judgment of able Musicians.” For those who are unable to comprehend the finer points of music “there are light and airy things to please them.”
In the last decades of the 17th century interest in Italian art reached a considerable pitch of intensity in England. Hundreds of agents scoured Italy (and to a lesser extent the Low Countries) buying up everything they could. It was then that the foundations were laid for England’s great galleries, as the mansions of the rich were filled with these imported treasures. Interest in importing and acclimatizing Italian and French music was also very real, even antedating the preoccupation with art. Thomas Killegrew, playwright, a
dventurer, wit, builder of the original Drury Lane Theatre, and theatrical producer, observed operatic productions on his frequent trips to France and Italy. After the Restoration he planned to import companies with the purpose of establishing regular seasons of opera—but nothing came of the plan. Charles II, familiar with French music and an admirer of Lully, sent Pelham Humphrey abroad to study music, and since he there learned about opera at first hand one would have expected him to return eager to transplant this new and glamorous genre to England. Humphrey was an able, literate, and highly talented musician with a decided gift for the lyric-theatrical; the results of his studies abroad are in evidence everywhere in his music, yet he did not attempt the composition of a genuine opera. Nor did his great pupil, Henry Purcell, even though a staunch admirer of French and Italian music, make any effort to establish English opera. Dido and Aeneas, his one true opera, was significantly not written for the public theatre but for a young ladies’ school in Chelsea. If we add to this that English playwrights definitely knew and appreciated the fact that lyricism in song affords a direct communication between author and audience and that there was a keen understanding of the practical psychology of music both by theatrical people and the public, our puzzlement at their failure to create opera increases.
As was remarked above, the plays were generously dotted with songs, and while incidental, these were not used at random but had a structural function in the play that the audience understood and relished. Preparation was always carefully made for their appearance so that they should seem natural. The songs identified character, created and depicted moods, offered genre scenes such as slumber songs, processionals, and so forth, but they were sung to the characters, in the form of serenades or other entertainment or commentary; self-expression in music by the protagonists was consistently avoided. Edward Dent, in his Foundations of English Opera, makes the important and perceptive qualification that “Shakespeare and his contemporaries never show us speech intensified into song under stress of emotion, but only the emotional effect produced by music on the characters represented.” This is the attitude that governs the role of music in the English theatre throughout the 17th century and the Handelian era, and it is the crux of the problem of opera. The increased use of music in plays does not signify a changed esthetic doctrine; the public demanded song and dance for entertainment, but everyone was agreed that this musical entertainment must not intrude upon the drama itself. “To an English audience,” says Hawkins, “music joined to poetry was not an entertainment for an evening, something that had the appearance of a plot or fable was necessary to keep their attention awake.” They wanted the spoken dialogue—that is, the self-expression of the principals of the play—left intact; not made in music but at most with music, thus excluding the possibility of the rise of a true native opera.
As we examine these songs we discover that they were used with skill and deliberation. The brilliant exchange of wit and epigrams in the comedy of the Restoration theatre could not be set to music, while in the tragedies music was assigned to the illusory figures, supernatural spirits, or to solemn announcements such as prophecies. While in the comedies the use of songs, and of music in general, was not so carefully regulated as in the tragedies, the conventions and the patterns are similiar. Whereas in the tragedy it is the supernatural beings who sing, in the comedy the songs are given to eccentric characters, to fools or drunkards who, unlike normal men, are permitted to express themselves in such an “unrealistic” manner directly in song rather than in speech. In both types of play the most natural spot for music was where an entertainment takes place, at which point popular tunes universally known were parodied or even a whole brief masque inserted.
This dramaturgical concept is similar to that held by contemporary French critics, and since in both countries the esthetics of the musical stage were dictated by the men of letters, one wonders whether there were not some close ties between the two literary camps. Molière was the first to advance the theory that in a play songs are particularly suitable to the personnages accessoires or de fantaisie—that is, to supernatural figures that are only accessory to the drama. Dryden, in the preface to Albion and Albanius, faithfully echoes this concept (even though he does not follow it strictly in the work itself). Wherever we look in 17th-century English plays, we see that it is indeed the personnages accessoires who sing. The literary men rejected the principles of the stile rappresentativo, and Dryden took care to point out that his Albion and Albanius is not an opera because the music is incidental, at the same time averring that it is not a genuine play either, because the entire story is supernatural; whichever way they viewed it, “opera” was a troublesome proposition.
Attention has already been called to Saint-Évremond, the father of hostile French operatic criticism, who as a long-time resident in England could not have failed to influence his English colleagues and whose influence in fact extended even to Italy. His definition of opera is a classic example of French logic which, inadmissible as it is in this particular case, was generally shared by most English men of letters. “An opera is an odd combination of poetry and music in which the poet and musician, equally hindered by each other, take great pains to produce a wretched work.”45 Any English writer could have been the author of Saint-Évremond’s statement that “opera is so contrary to nature that my imagination is shocked by it; that is, to sing the whole piece from beginning to end.” Again, “There are some things which ought to be sung, and some which may be sung without offending decency and reason.” Similarly, and even before Saint-Évremond, the Abbé François Hedelin d’Aubignac in his Pratique du théâtre (1657) says that “the theatre can undoubtedly tolerate some music, but it must be to awaken the appetite, not to satiate it.” The question cannot be avoided: given this startling similarity of views, why was it that opera triumphed in France though Lully was its solitary musical champion of note, whereas in England two far superior musicians of genius, Purcell and Handel, were unable to breach the opposition?46
The answer is in the attitude of the grand siècle towards the libretto, for if the latter had merit the intrusion of music was grudgingly forgiven. Philippe Quinault, Lully’s principal collaborator, was a mediocre playwright but stood head and shoulders above the average librettist. His librettos were read as literature, and even a century later, La Harpe, the keenest and most merciless critic of 17th-century drama, still regarded Quinault as far superior to Lully: “The one is no longer sung, but the other is always read.” The very fact that Lully’s works were never referred to as operas but as “lyric tragedies” shows that the French considered their opera “une espèce de tragédie avec musique.”
In contradistinction, the term “opera” was frequently used in England in the 17th century, but we must beware of regarding these works as examples of the musical drama as we understand it. To the English of the Restoration, “opera” simply meant an elaborate spectacle enhanced by music and dancing. Matthew Locke called his setting of Psyche an opera but felt constrained to defend the validity of the title because “all the tragedy be not in music.” He correctly reflects the prevailing literary opinion when, continuing, he ventures that “though Italy was and is the greatest academy of the world for that science [opera], England is not; and there fore [we] mix [the music] with interlocutions, as more proper to our genius.” Nothing positive can be said about Sir William Davenant’s Siege of Rhodes, usually considered “the first English opera”; the music is lost but it is significant that Pepys called it more a piece of literature than an opera. Purcell himself (Preface to Dioclesian) makes a distinction between opera and “English opera,” defining the latter as “a play of which music forms a frequent, necessary, and integrated part, but of which the dialogue is spoken.”
Among the popular features of the Restoration theatre were the revivals of Shakespeare’s plays, which, as a rule roughly handled by the producers and arrangers, often fall within the category of “English opera.” The Tempest, rewritten by John Dryden w
ith the collaboration of Sir William Davenant, was one of the most admired of these. Produced in 1670 with added characters, it had become almost a new creation. But when The Tempest is mentioned as the cornerstone of English dramatic music, it is usually Shadwell’s version that is meant. John Downes, the Théophile Gautier of the 17th-century English theatre, expressly says in his Roscius Anglicanus (1702) that The Tempest was “made into an opera by Mr. Shadwell.” His description shows that “opera” was used in the sense that this was a spectacular comédie à machines with music and was not a true opera even though the historians always point out that the production boasted an unusually large orchestra. This is no criterion, however; Purcell’s Dioclesian employed an orchestra larger than the Haymarket Theatre’s—yet Dioclesian is not an opera.
The score of The Tempest contains very good instrumental music by Matthew Locke. The vocal numbers, composed by John Banister, Pelham Humphrey, and James Hart, are songs, many of them very fine, with well-contrasted and flowing lines, but they too were “insertions” and once more assigned to supernatural beings. Indeed, The Tempest was particularly suited for treatment as an “English opera”; its arrangers could observe the cardinal tenet of English dramaturgy: the music may be concerned with the principal characters, but is not sung by them as an act of lyric self-revelation. Shadwell himself was an ardent amateur musician, and it seems that he consciously strove towards the establishment of some sort of English counterpart to Italian opera, a view supported by the many satires, similar to those later aimed at Handel and the Haymarket Theatre, that were directed against him. In his preface to Psyche he made a statement such as could have been made—and indeed was made a century later—by Goldoni. “In all the words which are sung, I did not so much take care of the Wit or Fancy of ‘em, as the making of ’em proper for Musick.” This is the attitude of the true librettist.47
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