Alcina is another “scenic” opera that depends on imaginative staging, good ballet, and a good chorus. As in Ariodante, besides the neo-Neapolitan influences, there is a French hue, and not only because of the delectable dances. Handel was obviously familiar with French opera, but just how he had acquired this familiarity it is hard to tell. Even the arias in this work often have a French tinge, and rich use is made of the chorus, a practice that is a mark of the tragédie lyrigue. The numerous dances were inspired (as were those in Ariodante) by the presence at Covent Garden of Marie Sallé and her French dance company (see p. 636). Alcina ran till the end of the season on July 2; the Haymarket Theatre closed a month earlier. Both companies ended the season with staggering deficits.
More trouble was brewing for Handel. The Opera of the Nobility had its superb company of singers, and now its maestros were augmented by still another good composer. Francesco Maria Veracini (1690-1750), whom Burney and others considered the greatest violinist in the world, was back in London, this time in the capacity of composer. His opera, Adriano, was performed at the Haymarket Theatre and ran for seventeen nights. Walsh published the “favourite songs.” While the opposition was growing stronger, Handel’s forces diminished. Carestini, whose resentment Handel had once roused with a merciless tongue-lashing, left immediately upon the close of the season. At this time the loss of a leading castrato was considered an irreparable calamity, but even more alarming was Handel’s failing health, which had to be repaired before the next artistic-political move could be risked. After another cure at Tunbridge Wells, Handel felt well enough to return to London and prepare the next season. The first and most urgent task was the rebuilding of his troupe. In Ariodante and Alcina he had already employed the excellent soprano, Cecilia Young, who was good enough to incite Strada’s jealousy. The youthful tenor, John Beard, also made a favorable impression on the public. Another English singer, the bass Erard, was added to the cast, but little is known about this man, who soon disappeared from the Handelian annals. The English works Handel had produced at Oxford met with favor, and now that he had some good English singers (there was much sarcastic merriment caused by the Italian singers’ English pronunciation) he decided, or was prevailed upon, to set aside opera for the moment and exploit the possibilities of oratorio and pastoral.
Alexander’s Feast, composed in an incredibly short time, opened Covent Garden on February 19, 1736, a date that will remain a memorable one in English musical history. The theatre was filled and Handel’s triumph was complete. The public liked the music and was especially pleased by the fine singing of native artists in their native tongue; Strada’s was the only voice with a foreign accent. Acis and Galatea followed on March 24, and Esther on April 7. Thus Handel once more had a real oratorio season, something that later became an institution but in 1736 was still a novelty. Nevertheless, the omens were so clear that Handel should not have hesitated for a moment to make Covent Garden into a citadel of English music, but the oratorio season was once more a mere interlude. While the oratorios were running to general applause, Handel was getting ready for an opera season, brief though it necessarily had to be. Having acquired a replacement for Carestini in the person of a soprano castrato by the name of Gioacchino Conti, he proceeded on May 5 to revive Ariodante. Perhaps the return to opera was prompted by the forthcoming nuptials of the Prince of Wales which, according to the custom imported from the Continent, had to be celebrated by a festive opera. This was duly composed by Handel, while the Haymarket company celebrated the event with a festa by its director, Porpora.
Atalanta, by an unknown librettist, was first performed on May 12. It is more of a festa or large serenata, i.e. a pastoral, than an opera. The quality of its music does not falter anywhere, and those who think that Handel always hurls boulders from Mount Sinai should listen to the delectably light and aromatic pieces which, by omitting the final licenza, could be performed today without changing one note. The licenza, much used by court composers, especially in Vienna, though rather exceptional with Handel, was a transparent eulogy of the person or persons commemorated. In Atalanta it occurs at the end when Mercury appears to bring Jupiter’s greetings to the newlyweds. Atalanta is an accomplished pièce d’occasion, not pretending to be either more or less, but it has charms adequate to compel attention.
The festa was well received, and the balance began to turn in Handel’s favor. Even the Prince of Wales began to vacillate, and Porpora, a realist who was used to skulduggery, seeing that the titular head of the anti-Handelian cabal applauded his adversary, made some deductions of his own. He did not wait to be defeated like Bononcini, but departed forthwith, nolo contendere. The wedding anthem Handel wrote for the Prince (see p. 226) also pleased the heir to the throne, and Frederick not only abandoned the feud, inviting Handel to a tête-à-tête, but withdrew from the Opera of the Nobility. Soon we see him ostentatiously frequenting Covent Garden. Unfortunately, along with its benefits, this had its side effects: the King, displeased by these signs of amity between Handel and the despised Prince, turned his back on his favorite composer. However, since it was time to shed the affairs of state for the provincial pleasures of Hanover, for the moment the King’s displeasure did little harm. George departed for Hanover a few days after the brief season of opera ended on June 9.
Handel kept on composing furiously, for he believed that, as in Bononcini’s time, the opportunity for administering the coup de grâce to the Opera of the Nobility was nearing. A pleasant interlude in this relentless girding of loins came with the news that his favorite niece, Johanna Friderike, now twenty-five, was married to a professor of law at Halle University; the family continued to climb the social ladder. Handel, always a good family man, sent the bride and groom appropriate wedding presents. He also was appointed, or, to put it more precisely, confirmed, by the Queen as music master to the Princesses Amelia and Caroline at an annual fee of £200. As the opening day for Covent Garden drew near, the singers began to arrive, among them Domenico Annibali, the new castrato. Handel had two new operas ready, but the season opened on November 6, 1736, with Alcina, the Prince of Wales in attendance, followed by Atalanta on November 20 and Poro on December 8. Handel was waiting for the Opera of the Nobility to get under way (they opened with Hasse’s Siroe late in November), and in the meantime he started work on still another new opera.
As the new year dawned, Handel judged the time ripe to throw the two new operas into the fray: Arminio was presented on January 12 and Giustino on February 16. Both were failures. Arminio is the work of a distraught and ailing man, one of his weakest scores. Giustino has somewhat better music, but the libretto was manhandled to the point where it makes little sense. Handel’s fatigue is shown by his relapse into the old operatic style; the dragon and other props provided the parodists with a field day.61 Neither of these operas yields the one or two fine arias or other numbers that one often finds in otherwise poor compositions, though the workmanship in both of them is thoroughly Handelian. What is un-Handelian in them is the absence of human characters; there are only silhouettes in these operas, and there are no deeds and conflicts, only happenings that follow in one another’s wake with a degree of implausibility. Only pictures are they, and as such some of them are fine enough, but their mood is lyric, not theatrical.
With the third new opera, Berenice, another farrago arranged by Salvi and introduced in May, Handel returned to the Caesar and Cleopatra theme that had once covered him with glory. This time the characters are Berenice, Queen of Egypt, and Alessandro, her husband-designate by the Roman Senate, and the subplot consists of the usual contretemps between the heroine’s sister who is in love with Demetrio, and the latter, the real object of the Queen’s affections (who in turn has another admirer). There are some scenes in this work, as well as an exceptionally fine overture, that rise far above Arminio and Giustino in quality of invention. In particular, Berenice’s very feminine confession of love, a minuet-aria, is extremely attractive, and Demetrio’s outbursts of
rage have power. But the crisis at the end of the second act, with magnanimity serving as the deus ex machina, is inept, and Handel did not quite know what to do with it, though the tone remains passionate. The denouement once more sees everyone ready to forgive and forget, which leaves the heroine, otherwise well characterized, rather high and dry. Thus, while well composed and containing some fine music, Berenice is again one of those operas that must be excluded from the important works.
For whatever reason, another oratorio “season” relieved the operas. While, as remarked above, an oratorio season was a novelty, the performance of a serenata, festa, pastoral, or oratorio on the stage of the opera house was in Handel’s time not a radical departure that would have startled the audience, in spite of the Baroque love for machines, fountains, and other spectacular staging effects. The dividing line between the genres was slight, Baroque opera was static, and its principal components, recitative and aria, were the same whether in opera, oratorio, or Passion. Nor were the costumes markedly different from the elaborate clothing worn by the rich, for even though the subjects might be taken from classical antiquity, the costumes were contemporary. One would think that the main reason for the immediate acceptance of such works as Acis and Galatea or Esther was the singing. The “oratorio singer” of grave mien and pronounced Christian humility was as yet unknown. Senesino or Strada would sing in an oratorio as they would in an opera, freely, with imagination and expression, nor would they stay riveted to one spot; there was a modicum of movement in their delivery. The English singers modelled their platform manner on the Italians’, and their clear enunciation of their native tongue was much appreciated by the public.
Alexander’s Feast and Esther were revived, and, in addition, from his vast repository of usable materials, Handel exhumed Il Trionfo del Tempo e della Verità of 1707, a new version of which, written in a couple of weeks, was offered on March 23, 1737. The Prince of Wales, attending the performance of Alexander’s Feast, was so taken by Handel’s playing of the organ concerto that he commanded a repetition on the spot.
Still, nothing seemed to attract full houses and clearly both operatic establishments were bankrupt. The Haymarket Theatre closed on June 11, 1737, and Senesino immediately left, never to return. Covent Garden closed a fortnight later. Recent estimates prove that though hard hit, Handel was not bankrupt financially either this time or any other, but he was bankrupt in mind and health. At the end of April he was taken ill. At first the newspapers spoke of indisposition caused by rheumatism, but by the middle of May they conceded a “Paraletick Disorder,” for indeed the attack was a stroke which paralyzed Handel’s right arm. With superhuman effort he forced himself to continue, but the ensuing reaction, after a momentary improvement, was severe, and for the first time in his variegated career Handel was forced to yield the conductor’s seat at the harpsichord; he watched the premiere of Berenice from the auditorium. Presently his condition worsened, for apparently the stroke affected his mind: “his senses were disordered at intervals,” says Mainwaring. While “it was with the utmost difficulty that he was prevailed on to do what was proper,” continues Mainwaring, Handel finally decided to go to the famous spa of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle). In September 1737 the curtain seemed about to descend upon a rich and courageous artistic life.
XI
Cannons—Masque and pastoral—Handel’s pantheism—Culture and nature as concentric forces—Pictorialism in music—Acis and Galated—Use of the chorus—Mozart’s edition—Modern fallacies in performance —Esther—Libretto and music poorly organized—Much borrowed material—Historical importance—Bernard Gates performs Esther (1732) —Subsequent piratical production arouses Handel—First appearance of religious issue—Bishop of London and his edict—Second unauthorized production: Acis—Handel destroys wcompetition—Deborah—New role of chorus—Racine and the return of Greek drama—Athalia successful, but Handel returns to opera—Alexander’s Feast
WE MUST LEAVE THE STRICKEN COMPOSER FOR THE moment and retrace our steps to the days at Cannons, when the Handel of the English oratorios made his first appearance.
Both the past and the future were here, and the decisive spark went out to the future, though this was unnoticed by Handel. There can be no question that the Handelian oratorio, the pastoral drama, and the classic-mythological music drama all had elements and influences that came from German, Italian, and French sources; nevertheless, what Handel produced in this line at Cannons was a direct result of his literary environment, the Burlington-Chandos circle. From our vantage point, the significance of the environment and the Cannons works is clear, but to Handel Cannons was an episode, the works occasioned by the circumstances; for years to come he attached no importance to them. He did his best as a composer, as he always tried to do, with the first version of works, and he probably would have composed an a cappella Mass or a ballet as readily as an ode or a Te Deum if the circumstances had warranted, for he was a true Baroque opportunist and a professional who reacted creatively to every stimulus.
Acis and Galatea (c. 1718), the first of the Cannons dramatic pieces, is a perfect expression of Handel’s poetic vision at a moment of complete equilibrium, every musical phrase a jewel and every turn a miracle. It is rich in thought and perception and follows its purpose steadily from start to finish, as without psychological frills of any kind he gets at the living truth of his handful of characters. Yet Handel seemed ready to abandon Acis and Galatea forever. When after a lapse of a dozen years he returned to the English works of the Cannons period, it was once again by force of circumstance. On a superficial level, we might say that the Handelian oratorio was born of anger and the fierce competitive spirit of this artistic speculator and promoter. We might go farther and say that even the continuation of the 1732 “revivals,” which produced the first master oratorio, Athalia—in which the true English oratorio, a new genre, is before us in full bloom—was the result of a chance opportunity that seemed auspicious to Handel. Because Deborah, a rather hasty pasticcio, was successful, Handel sat down and wrote a piece along the same lines, except that now the music was original, expressly composed for the occasion. But nothing followed, and Handel did not have the faintest intention of abandoning opera. Indeed, he unceremoniously put aside the English works until, finding himself in extremis, he had no choice but to return to them, having neither the physical nor the financial power to continue as composer-entrepreneur of opera. This tug of war did not end until after 1741.
Acis and Galatea and Esther, the two theatrical works that owe their existence to Cannons and to the men who frequented the Duke of Chandos’s residence, are variously called masque, oratorio, pastoral, sacred drama, and so on. The confusion was not then so dense as it appears to us, even though all these terms, as well as “English opera,” were often interchangeable. Handel’s contemporaries agreed on one important point: that all this was theatre. Even Esther was considered a masque and was staged; it was certainly a theatrical piece, intended so and performed so. The religious connotations and the belief that Holy Writ is profaned when presented on the stage are later developments. At Cannons Esther was regarded as a play with a story from the Bible.
Modern literary and musical scholars, especially the former, have created the confusion. Literary critics, seeing influences converging on the English theatre from the Italian mascherata and trionfo, the French ballet de cour, the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, lyric poetry and music, even the medieval mystery play, were puzzled by the music, which they took for something extraneous and irrelevant from the dramatic point of view, a mere acquiescence to the public demand for song and dance entertainment. Even the most eminent of them, such as Edward K. Chambers and Allardyce Nicoll, were looking for literary values and constructions where the emphasis was, instead, on spectacle, dance, and music. Of course, in many instances the songs were extraneous, but in general their use was structural and dramatic; the distinction between “masque,” “concert Musick,” “English opera” on the one hand, and “play,
” with or without music, on the other was fairly real. The bulk of all plays from the Stuart period contained songs and, as we have seen (p. 190 ff.), this lyricism was considered an integral and essential part of the show. The masque was different from the dramatic theatre; its appeal was spectacular rather than dramatic, it did not aim to create an illusion of life. But it had a canon of its own, highly formal and well respected, and this canon was altogether based on a well-defined program of dances, “revels,” speeches, dialogues, and songs. Otto Combosi summarized this succinctly: “The masque as a literary form is amorphous; as a form of choreographic entertainment it is highly organized.”62
The musical scholars in their turn, with a few laudable exceptions, failed to realize that in this vacillation between music and drama there was a concept, perhaps vague but nevertheless perceptible enough, of an English opera, a concept that failed because of the insufficiency of the composers. The one towering genius, Purcell, who like Lully could have turned aspiration into reality, who with one stroke carried the masque to its pinnacle, died tragically young, and there were no native successors of even faintly comparable talent. The intentions were clear in the frequent rubric “compos’d after the Italian Manner,” nor was there lack of interest in the new means of expression taken over from the Italians. Recitative was tried rather early, developing, in the works of Nicholas Lanier and Henry Lawes, into a sort of arioso, which eventually reached its finest expression in Purcell. But this too was abandoned, for while the “manner” was there, the spirit was not; the ingrained English aversion to “all sung” theatre was too strong. The concept was not unlike that of the early forms of the German Singspiel with spoken dialogue: at the moment of lyric effusion the song took over. Thus the songs did not merely supply a decorative element, even though the play was suspended the moment they appeared. The situation was palpably an operatic one, but the product was only half-loaf opera; the old Elizabethan tradition of “joining words and notes lovingly together” was alive, but the English theatre was not prepared to go beyond that.
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