January 3, 1738, saw the premiere of Faramondo at the Haymarket Theatre. The cast contained the latest find in castratos, Caffarelli, Porpora’s prize pupil. The great singer, a difficult, vain, and irascible man, lasted only for one season in London, but for a time he created a sensation. Montagnana and Merighi were back at the Haymarket, but the faithful Strada was gone, although replaced by a good soprano, Elisabeth Duparc, called Signora Francesina, and there were a few other new singers. The company was recruited by Heidegger prior to Handel’s joining him. The original libretto of this opera, written by Zeno for Pollarolo, was undoubtedly good, but it was so whittled down and twisted around by Handel’s unknown adapter that it resists any reasonable analysis; the confused goings-on and the complicated intrigues prevented Handel from shaping the fine music he composed into a coherent whole. Faramondo, which eked out a few performances, is usually dismissed as a deserved failure, but we cannot so simply disregard this music, which, beginning with the exceptionally fine overture, is very attractive, if not always outstanding. The texture is light and elegant, both vocal and instrumental writing spirited, and as Leichtentritt neatly puts it, “every leap fits, every accent suits.” Surely, the sophisticated, varied, and sprightly rhythm that infuses this score with remarkable liveliness does not reflect the working of a mind inflicted with illness. There is much engaging love music in Faramondo, though little characterization; on the other hand we notice the tendency towards architecturally built scenes in which the chorus is included. However, all the musical refinements could not save Faramondo, because it completely lacked theatrical values.
The pasticcio Alessandro Severo, which followed on February 25, also disappeared after six performances. Even if we record as many as six or eight performances of these works, they were poorly attended, and Handel was in real financial straits. Finally he had to yield to the entreaties of his friends, consenting to a benefit, which was given on the twenty-eighth of March, offering a mélange of anthems, songs, duets, and an organ concerto. The theatre was so filled that tiers of “Benches upon the Stage” had to be fitted to accommodate the overflow. The success was complete, yielding & 1,000 and effectively relieving Handel’s plight, at least for the moment.
If the reader wonders why such a crowd would assemble for a nondescript concert, while on opera nights the theatre would be half empty or worse, the explanation lies in Handel’s personal popularity, which was never really threatened. The London newspapers, reporting the first performance of Faramondo, which was also Handel’s first public appearance after his illness, say that “he was honour’d with extraordinary and repeated Signs of Approbation.” Indeed, Handel was famous and well liked even when his fortunes were at a low ebb, and when he was used as a tool for political ends. Perhaps the best proof of the respect in which he was held is the attitude of his creditors, almost all of whom waited patiently, confident that in one way or another Handel would be on top again and would honor his commitments. On many occasions his music was played to attract a public for a charitable cause. Thus at the annual benefit service for the “Sons of the Clergy” at St. Paul’s, the Utrecht Te Deum and some of the anthems were always a drawing card.
We might mention here the erection in 1738 of Handel’s marble statue in a public park—an unusual honor, then as now, for a living composer. The public gardens in Vauxhall on the south bank of the Thames had been for years a favorite resort of the great city when in 1732 Jonathan Tyers, who had acquired a lease, developed it into a fashionable place of entertainment. He built a covered orchestra shell, open at the front to the Gardens, and in addition there was an entirely covered rotunda also suitable for concerts. In 1737 an organ was built and a permanent organist engaged; organ concertos were a popular item on the programs. The place had of course “loose morals” and “open immoralities” (Flower), but the food was good and the music was good and much of that music was by Handel. The “loose morals” did not seem to have deterred either the nobility or the artistic gentry from frequenting the place; Hogarth, among them, helped with the decorations and designed the handsome silver season ticket of which Handel was an honorary recipient Tyers, about whose musical or other propensities we know little, was a great admirer of Handel (he purchased fifty tickets for the March benefit), and he commissioned the sculptor Roubillac (spelled Roubiliac in England) to carve a marble statue of the composer “in Consideration of the real Merit of that inimitable Master.” The statue was “placed in a grand Nich, erected on Purpose in the great Grove” of the Gardens in April 1738. Louis François Roubillac (1695-1762) was a French sculptor who settled in England in the early thirties. A protégé of Walpole, he soon became the most fashionable portrait sculptor in England. His sepulchral monuments (including Handel’s) are to be found in Westminster Abbey, and his statues of kings and notables populate many a public square. Roubillac was a skilful craftsman but an artist of modest taste. His statue of Handel is unimaginative, though contemporaries considered it a good likeness. It remained in the Gardens until 1818, after which it was removed to the premises of Messrs. Novello, where it keeps good company to that firm’s unimaginative editions of Handel’s scores.
On April 15, Serse, finished barely a month before, was presented at the Haymarket Theatre with the full cast headed by Caffarelli. It was even less successful than Faramondo, and Handel had to be satisfied with five performances. This opera puzzled its contemporaries no less than its modern critics, whose opinions range from Sir Newman Flower’s indignant “a musical farce ... an absurdity that has no raison d’être,” to “rein komische Oper,” or a genuine opera buffa. Burney, puzzled by this highly sophisticated and actually modern score, considered it the work “of a mind disturbed, if not diseased.” Obviously, Serse was a comic opera, but historians are flogging sundry dead horses when they find the mixture of the serious and the comical objectionable, as they have done from Burney to Leichtentritt. Serse is not an opera buffa, nor was it “a desperate attempt to keep up with the taste of the day,” as Dent judged it to be. It is the spirit of the old Venetian opera-comedy that returns here, as indeed the libretto was an old Venetian book by Minato, once set by Cavalli, and in Stampiglia’s version by Bononcini. Serse’s comedy is more subtle than that of the opera buffa and rests on the incongruity of showing great and solemn historical personalities in their unsolemn and unhistorical moments, notably in the throes of love intrigue, where they do not show to advantage. The comicality is in this incongruity and is exploited by almost purely musical means; the hilarious situations and contretemps of the buffa are largely missing, the only bit of time-honored situation comedy being the delivery of a love letter by a slow-witted servant to the wrong person. Handel was aware of the latest operatic developments in Italy; during his most recent visit there Leonardo Leo, Leonardo Vinci, Pergolesi, and others were already well known and the early buffa was rapidly gaining in popularity. Our notion that the opera buffa began with Pergolesi’s La Serva padrona is an old historical error: far from opening a new era, this engaging work only crowned a movement that was at least a generation old. But while Handel’s style became lighter (we have noticed this when he tried to cope with Bononcini’s light music) and the texture more elegant, and while he was willing to banter, whatever he took over from more recent Italian opera did not essentially change his life-long adherence to the older Venetian-Neapolitan type of opera which he carried to its apogee.
The dramatis personae in Serse are two brothers opposed to a pair of sisters, the usual subplot to complete the intrigue being supplied by a princess enamored of Xerxes, and, for the first time in Handel’s operas, the old, old comic servant, the buffo character. The whole plot can be summarized in one sentence: the King of the Persians is interested in one of the sisters, whose lover is of course none other than Xerxes’s brother, and since the other sister has designs on the same man, they must find ways to overcome the king’s rather commanding position in the affair.
Now this comic opera begins not with an amusing sit
uation that can be exploited but with magnificent love lyricism: the famous “Ombra mai fù,” better known as “The Largo,” appears in the very first scene. Nor is there anything comic about the ravishingly sensuous music of muted strings and recorders that follows, which so affects the middle-aged amorist, Xerxes, that he wants to know who the person is who sings “O voi che penate.” Romilda continues her song as her lover, Arsamene, begins to worry about the king’s interest in the sweet singer. He and the king sing a duet which, as to situation, is anything but sehr komisch, as some would have it. As a matter of fact, most of Arsamene’s arias are very moving. The king makes no headway with Romilda, yet he is more and more taken with her, and sings more and more in the grand pathetic manner of the seria—which is what makes things comical. In the meantime the Princess Amastre’s “Sapra delle miei offere” is again comical because it is a light travesty of the traditional rage aria. The two sisters spar, very attractively passing from the lovelorn to the waspish.
In the second act, Elviro, the servant, is charged with the delivery of a love letter. Disguised as a flower vender, he punctuates his song with the street vender’s calls, no doubt authentic cries which Handel is known to have noted down. The letter is cunningly used as the imbroglio deepens, but Romilda is steadfast, causing an outbreak of royal fury in the Neapolitan comic style of Scarlatti. Now it is Arsamene’s turn to pine. His aria “Anima infida” is a jewel of sophisticated operatic writing. And so the action goes—or what passes for action—but its quality is immaterial because there are live persons on the stage; they are interesting, and they sing interesting music. In the end, of course, everything is straightened out: the king, an irritable monarch, works up to another rage aria, but takes back his pursuing princess while the others are properly sorted out. The characterizations are excellent. The two sisters show quite different personalities, and all the others in this delightful if unusual opera are well handled. Xerxes’s role, designed for Caffarelli, is of course less positively drawn, but in this particular situation his character is quite credible. Serse is rich in the most sophisticatedly charming needle-point music which was far over the heads of Handel’s audiences, as it is over those of today.
On May 23, 1738, Heidegger invited subscriptions to his forthcoming season of Italian opera, but by July he had to abandon the project for lack of interest. After the season closed on June 6, therefore, Handelian opera was not to be heard until the fall of 1740. The rest of 1738 was seemingly an idle period, and Handel was not heard from, not even being mentioned in the periodical notices in the newspapers. But he was not idle: on July 25 he began the composition of a new oratorio, Saul.
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CHARLES JENNENS WAS A wealthy man who converted his ample leisure into activities in harmony with his literary ambitions. Somewhat pompous and, like rich amateurs in general, feeling superior to most other literati, he was nevertheless a cultivated man, a fervid Shakespearean, and not unacquainted with the classics. Jennens lived in such splendor that the nickname “Suliman the Magnificent” was bestowed on the Squire of Gopsall in Leicestershire. He maintained a round table and, as in the Burlington and Chandos residences, Handel could there meet very able litterateurs. Among these, Richard Bentley, nephew of the great Cambridge classical scholar of the same name, must have been an intellectually invigorating person. A lesser edition of that storehouse of knowledge that was his uncle, he also united classical erudition with Christian theology and archaeology, a combination that had an impact on Jennens’s mental processes and hence also on Handel. The “Gopsall Circle” and its influence on Handel has not yet been sufficiently explored.
The Handelian literature, taking its cue from Dr. Johnson, tends to deprecate Jennens, but this is manifestly unjust. He was intelligent; he had a good eye for dramatic possibilities and for continuity, and he not only knew what lends itself to musical treatment and choral commentary but correctly estimated Handel’s own particular capabilities. Although he neatly paraphrased the Bible, the delineation of characters was his own. Jennens’s libretto made a genuinely dramatic piece out of the biblical story of Saul, with characters and motivations. Though not much of a poet, he was quite knowledgeable as a dramatist, and he must have been interested in music and possessed of some knowledge of it. Apparently Jennens fancied Handel’s music and had followed his career for some time, because we find his name (as we do Newburgh Hamilton’s) in Handel’s first subscription list, for the opera Rodelinda in 1725, and he had a number of Handel’s scores copied for his own use. The two men somehow became acquainted, undoubtedly on Jennens’s initiative. We know of a letter Jennens addressed to Handel in 1735, with an offer of a libretto, which for the moment was politely evaded. Whether the composer remembered Jennens’s offer or was again approached cannot be ascertained; we do not even know whether the libretto offered in 1735 was Saul. But at the later date Handel gladly accepted Jennens’s text, starting to set it at the end of July.
The work did not progress with his accustomed speed and ease; something was disturbing Handel deeply, and one gets the impression that for the first time real doubts about his future course were undermining his security and optimism. After a few weeks he laid aside Saul and on September 9 turned to the composition of a new opera, Imeneo. But, and this shows his inner turmoil, the opera too was laid aside. A few days later Saul was taken out of the drawer and Handel continued to work on it. A visit from Jennens about this time must have contributed to the settling of his mind, and a measure of emotional security must have returned, because when Saul was finished by the end of September, Handel immediately embarked upon the composition of Israel in Egypt, which was completed within a month. If he did suffer a mental derangement in the previous year, there was assuredly no trace of it left; the man who composed such colossal masterpieces in a few weeks was in command of creative faculties as fresh and luxuriant as ever.
The story of David and Saul having always been popular with poets and musicians, oratorios on the subject were composed by a number of masters, among them Carissimi. Only three of these, however, need concern us here. Keiser’s Der siegende David (1728) is not a significant work, but it may have been known to Handel; it does employ a carillon, an instrument that makes its first appearance in a Handelian score in Saul, a rather unusual coincidence otherwise. Porpora’s Davide e Bersabea (1734) we have already mentioned (p. 248); it went unnoticed by Handel. The third of these precursors, David’s Lamentations over Saul and Jonathan, by John Christopher Smith, Jr., came practically from Handel’s household. This oratorio was also composed in 1738, though earlier in the year than Handel’s Saul, and was not performed until February 1740. There may be something more than coincidence in the timing of the two settings, although nothing is actually known about their relationship, and Smith, though a good musician, was certainly not in Handel’s class. At any rate, Handel owes nothing to these earlier settings, though Jennens studied them for his purposes.
The story of Saul in the Book of Samuel is complicated and diffuse. That Jennens succeeded in working it into a good dramatic libretto is attested by the very high level of the music—Handel always responded to true dramatic stimuli. Saul is pure tragedy, without a trace of religious philosophy; its entire conception is visual and theatrical; it is a music drama. Considering the spectacular aspects of this score, the festivities, the ghost scene, the funeral cortege, the two attempted murders, and so forth, one might say that there is a good deal of “grand opera” in it. The original division of the work was into “acts,” not “parts,” and the score contained stage directions even though it was called “An Oratorio or Sacred Drama.” Only staging would bring out the true grandeur of this tremendous work, for Saul is full of action, far more so than any opera of the period, or, in fact, than any for some time to come; compared to it most of Gluck is statuesque.74 Saul is Greek tragedy; Jennens and Handel only removed mask and cothurnus to give us the men behind them. This is no longer the mythus of the Bible but the mystery of life, as in the Attic
tragedy, where not the sinner is punished for his sins but man for being man. Librettist and composer realized that the tragic is always the futile struggle of human will with Ananke; this Ananke, however, no longer resides on the snow-covered peaks of Zeus’s domain but in men’s own souls. We carry our destiny in ourselves, and we fall when we rise against it, when we want to be something other than what we are.
Handel must have found the pairing of the figures of Jennens’s drama familiar from opera. Michal, Saul’s gentle younger daughter, loves David; the older daughter, Merab, a haughty princess, resents being offered as a prize to the slayer of Goliath; while Jonathan, the king’s son, a noble youth, offers his friendship to David. At first everything seems to be resolved satisfactorily: Merab finds someone socially more acceptable than the shepherd’s son, and David and Michal are happily married. This was not an unskilled dramatic move; the coming tragedy is hinted at, then delayed, temporarily easing the situation. The king’s jealousy grows—his general wins too many battles—and he resolves to destroy David. Now the conflicts mature between father and son and between the king and David. Saul bids Jonathan kill David, which the youth refuses out of loyalty to his friend, thereby coming into conflict with his filial duty. Saul, who had previously attempted to slay David, now turns on his son, but the javelin again misses. He is clearly bereft of his senses, though later he composes himself and realizes that he is preparing his own ruin. He therefore goes to Endor to consult the Witch, who calls upon the Ghost of Samuel the prophet, whom Saul implores for help. What he hears is the announcement of Moira, his inevitable doom, which duly follows. Jonathan is also killed, as is the messenger who brought the fallen king’s crown to David, and then the dead king and his son Jonathan are carried away to the strains of the famous Dead March.75 The ending is a little pat: Le roi est mort, vive le roil Merab’s change of heart, as she finally approves of David, if not as husband at least as brother-in-law, is perhaps an unnecessary touch of family solidarity, but on the whole the libretto was put together capably, if occasionally with rather platitudinous words.
George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music Page 41
