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Title: Handel
Author: Edward J. Dent
Release Date: October, 2005 [EBook #9089]
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HANDEL
By Edward J. Dent
{Illustration: G. F. HANDEL from a woodcut by Eric King (not
available)}
CONTENTS
DETAILED CONTENTS
CHRONOLOGY
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
BIBLIOGRAPHY
HANDEL'S WORKS
DETAILED CONTENTS
ChapterI
Birth and parentage—studies under Zachow at
Halle—Hamburg—friendship and
duel with Mattheson—Almira—departure
for Italy.
ChapterII
Arrival in Italy—Rodrigo—Rome:
Cardinal Ottoboni and the
Scarlattis—Naples: Venice: Agrippina—appointment
at Hanover—London:
Rinaldo.
Chapter III
Second visit to London—Italian opera—George I and the Water
Music—visit to Germany—Canons and the Duke of
Chandos—establishment of
the Royal Academy of Music.
ChapterIV
Buononcini—Cuzzoni, Faustina, and Senesino—death of
George I—The
Beggar's Opera—collapse of the
Academy.
ChapterV
Handel naturalized—partnership
with Heidegger—Esther—the Opera of
the Nobility—visit
to Oxford—opera season at Covent Garden—Charles
Jennens—collapse
of both opera-houses.
ChapterVI
Bankruptcy and
paralysis—visit to Aix-la-Chapelle—the last
operas—Vauxhall
Gardens—Handel's "borrowings"—visit to
Ireland—Messiah
and other oratorios.
Chapter VII
Judas Maccabaeus—Gluck—Thomas
Morell—incipient blindness—Telemann and
his garden—last
oratorios—death—character and personality.
Bibliography
and List of Works
CHRONOLOGY
1685.... Birth at Halle.
1702.... Entered University; organist of the Cathedral.
1703.... Went to Hamburg.
1705.... First opera: Almira (Hamburg).
1707.... Arrival in Italy.
1710.... Appointment at Hanover; first visit to London.
1711.... First London opera: Rinaldo.
1712.... Second visit to London.
1717.... Appointment to the Duke of Chandos.
1720.... Opening of Royal Academy of Music (Opera).
1726.... Naturalized as a British subject.
1728.... The Beggar's Opera. Collapse of the Academy.
1732.... First public oratorio: Esther.
1733.... Festival at Oxford.
1737.... Collapse of Opera; Handel bankrupt and paralysed.
1741.... Last opera: Deidamia.
1742.... Messiah at Dublin.
1751.... First signs of blindness. Last oratorio Jeptha.
1759.... Death in London.
CHAPTER I
Birth and parentage—studies under Zachow at Halle—Hamburg—friendship
and duel with Mattheson—Almira—departure for Italy.
The name of Handel suggests to most people the sound of music unsurpassed
in massiveness and dignity, and the familiar portraits of the composer
present us with a man whose external appearance was no less massive and
dignified than his music. Countless anecdotes point him out to us as a
well-known figure in the life of London during the reigns of Queen Anne
and the first two Georges. He lies buried in Westminster Abbey. One would
expect every detail of his life to be known and recorded, his every
private thought to be revealed with the pellucid clarity of his immortal
strains. It is not so; to assemble the bare facts of Handel's life is a
problem which has baffled the most laborious of his biographers, and his
inward personality is more mysterious than that of any other great
musician of the last two centuries.
The Memoirs of the Life of the late George Frederic Handel, written
by the Rev. John Mainwaring in 1760, a year after his death, is the first
example of a whole book devoted to the biography of a musician. The author
had never known Handel himself; he obtained his material chiefly from
Handel's secretary, John Christopher Smith the younger. Mainwaring is our
only authority for the story of Handel's early life. Many of his
statements have been proved to be untrue, but there is undoubtedly a
foundation of truth beneath most of them, however misleading either
Smith's memory or Mainwaring's imagination may have been. The rest of our
knowledge has to be built up from scattered documents of various kinds,
helped out by the reminiscences of Dr. Burney and Sir John Hawkins. For
the inner life of Mozart and Beethoven we can turn to copious letters and
other personal writings; Handel's extant letters do not amount to more
than about twenty in all, and it is only rarely that they throw much light
on the workings of his mind.
The family of Handel belonged originally to Breslau. The name is found in
various forms; it seems originally to have been Händeler signifying
trader, but by the time the composer was born the spelling Händel
had been adopted. This is the correct German form of his name; in Italy he
wrote his name Hendel, in order to ensure its proper pronunciation,
and in England he was known, for the same reason, as Handel. The Handels
of Breslau had for several generations been coppersmiths. Valentine
Handel, the composer's grandfather, born in 1582, migrated to Halle, where
two of his sons followed the same trade. His third son, George, born 1622,
became a barber-surgeon. At the age of twenty he married the widow of the
barber to whom he had been apprenticed; she was twelve years older than he
was. In 1682 she died, and George Handel, although sixty years of age,
married a second wife within half a year. Her name was Dorothea Taust; her
father, like most of his ancestors, was a clergyman. Her age was
thirty-two. Her first child, born in 1684, died at birth; her second, born
February 23, 1685, was baptised the following day with the name of George
Frederic.
The town of Halle had originally belonged to the Dukes of Saxony, but
after the Thirty Years' War it was assigned to the Elector of Brandenburg.
George Frederic Handel was therefore born a Prussian. But Duke Augustus of
Saxony was allowed to keep his court at the Moritzburg in Halle, and it
was this prince who made George Handel his personal surgeon. After Duke
Augustus's death in 1680, Halle was definitely transferred to Brandenburg,
and the new Duke, Johann Adolf, took up his residence at Weissenfels,
twenty-five miles to the south-west of Halle. At the time of George
Frederic's birth, Halle had relapsed into being a quiet provincial town.
The musical life of Germany in those days was chiefly centred in the
numerous small courts, each of which did its best to imitate the
magnificence of Louis XIV at Paris and Versailles. But the seventeenth
century, although it produced very few musicians of outstanding greatness,
was a century of restless musical activity throughout Europe, especially
in the more private and domestic branches of the art. The Reformation had
made music the vehicle of personal devotion, and the enormous output of a
peculiarly intimate type of sacred music, both in Germany and in England,
shows that there must have been a keen demand for it in Protestant home
life.
George Handel, the surgeon, seems to have hated music. There is no
evidence that either his wife or her sister, who shared their home after
her father's death in 1685, was musically gifted, but the mere fact of
their being the daughters of a Lutheran pastor makes it probable that they
had had some education in the art. We may safely guess that the composer
inherited his musical talents from the Taust family. He showed his
inclination for music at a very early age, with such insistence indeed
that his father forbade him to touch any musical instrument. There is a
well-known story of his contriving to smuggle a clavichord into a garret
without his father's knowledge in order to practise on it while the rest
of the family were asleep, but for this tale Mainwaring is our only
authority. It is very probable that old Handel was irritated by the sound
of his son's early efforts and regarded music as a waste of time; his wife
may perhaps have encouraged the child's obvious abilities, taking care
that he made music only in some part of the house where he would not
disturb his father.
At the age of seven he was sent to the Lutheran Grammar School, and he may
very likely have had some instruction in singing while there. In any case
there can be no doubt that he was taught more than the mere rudiments of
music in childhood, however severe his father's opposition may have been.
He was between seven and nine when his father took him to Weissenfels,
where he was required to attend on the Duke. It is quite probable that the
child may have been taken there several times, especially as a relative of
his was in regular service in the Duke's establishment. One day he was
allowed to play on the organ in the palace chapel; the Duke happened to
hear him, made enquiries as to who the player was, and at once urged on
the father the duty of having him properly trained for a musical career.
Old Handel remained obstinate; he was determined that his son should have
a liberal education and become a lawyer. By his own efforts he had raised
himself to a position of some distinction and affluence; it was only
natural that he should wish his son to enter on life with better
advantages than he himself had enjoyed. He at any rate followed the advice
of the Duke so far as to place the boy under the musical tuition of
Friedrich Zachow, the organist of the Lutheran church at Halle.
The next episode in George Frederic's career has considerably puzzled his
biographers. Mainwaring asserts that in 1698 he went to Berlin, where he
was presented to the Electress Sophia Charlotte and made the acquaintance
of Ariosti and Giovanni Battista Buononcini, two famous Italian opera
composers whom he was to encounter again, in London, many years later. But
it is known that Ariosti did not arrive in Berlin until the spring of
1697, and Buononcini not until 1702. And as old Handel died in February
1697, his son cannot have been in Berlin later than about the end of 1696,
if it is true (as Mainwaring says) that the Elector offered to send him to
Italy, an offer which the father firmly refused to accept for him. If, on
the other hand, Mainwaring is right in saying that young Handel went to
Berlin with a view to obtaining a musical post there, it is hardly likely
that he should have made the journey at ten years of age, and while his
father was still living. It seems much more probable that if he ever did
visit Berlin it was when he was of an age to form his own judgments as to
his future career.
Three days before his seventeenth birthday he matriculated as a law
student of the University of Halle, but music must have been the chief
occupation of his time. The composer Telemann, four years his senior,
spoke of him as being already a musician of importance at Halle when he
first met him there, probably in 1700. In March 1702 he was appointed
organist at the Cathedral, although he belonged to the Lutheran Church,
whereas the Cathedral was Calvinist; considerable scandal had been caused
by the intemperance of the Cathedral organist, one Leporin, who was
finally dismissed. That Handel should have been given the post at so early
an age points to his ability and trustworthiness of character; it also
suggests that efficient organists were rare among the Calvinist musicians.
Mainwaring unjustly credited Zachow with Leporin's love of a cheerful
glass, and other biographers have perhaps for this reason greatly
underrated Zachow's musicianship. Zachow cannot indeed be classed as a
great composer, but he was considerably more than merely a sound average
teacher. For one thing, he possessed a large library of music. Handel was
not only made to master the arts of counterpoint and fugue, but he was
also set to study the works of other composers, and to train his sense of
style by writing music in direct imitation of them. In those days there
was no possibility of buying all sorts of music ready printed. Printing
was expensive, and generally clumsy in execution as well; most music was
copied by hand, and a musician who wished to acquire a library of music
generally did so by borrowing it and copying it. Zachow employed Handel to
copy music for him, and no doubt he copied a great deal for himself.
Although the opportunities for hearing music would not be very liberal in
a town like Halle, Handel, under Zachow, became a well-read musician as
well as an accomplished one.
During the seventeenth century the chief contribution of Germany to the
art of music was religious, just as the German hymns were her chief
contribution to poetry. In Italy, on the other hand, sacred music was of
minor importance as compared with the development of opera. But in all
music Italy led the way, and German sacred music was constantly influenced
by the Italians, with the result that Italian dramatic methods were often
used by German composers of sacred music, not with any loss of seriousness
and dignity to its character, but rather to the intenser expression of
that deep personal religious feeling which characterised both the poetry
and the music of the Protestant nations.
Zachow was well acquainted with the Italian masters, and his own Church
music shows a vivid dramatic sense; it is easy to see how much Handel
learned from him. But although Church cantatas and organ music may have
sufficed for the majority of the innumerable worthy German musicians of
those days, the form of music which excited the curiosity and interest of
the livelier spirits was certainly opera. By 1700, opera had established
itself all over Italy, supported mainly by the great princes, but at
Venice maintained on a commercial basis by the citizens themselves since
1637. The first attempt at a German opera was made by Heinrich Schütz, at
Torgau, ten years earlier. Vienna introduced Italian opera in 1631, and,
generally speaking, the Catholic princes of Germany, who one after another
followed the example of Vienna, preferred opera in Italian. Protestant
Germany inclined more to opera in its own language, though towards the end
of the century Italian gradually gained the upper hand at the more
important courts. Native German opera owed its origin partly to the visit
of the English comedians early in the century, and partly to the musical
plays acted by school-boys; from the English "jigs" came the use of short
popular songs, and from the school plays the tendency of the early German
operas to be of a more or less sacred or edifying character.
Handel's friend, the composer Telemann, tells us that it was not unusual
for students from the University of Leipzig to go to Berlin to hear the
Italian opera, which had been established by the Electress Sophia
Charlotte in 1700, and this suggests that Handel's visit to Berlin may
have taken place in 1703 rather than in his childhood. But he certainly
had opportunities for seeing operas nearer home. There had been many
German operas performed at Halle itself during the twenty years before
Handel's birth, and Duke Johann Adolf opened an opera-house at Weissenfels
in 1685, in which Philipp Krieger produced German operas regularly for the
next thirty years. There was thus every reason for young Handel's growing
ambitious to become a composer for the stage, although we have no evidence
of his having ever attempted dramatic composition until he left Halle in
1703.
The most important of all the north German opera-houses was that of
Hamburg, where the opera did not depend on the patronage of a court, but
was organised, as at Venice, as a public entertainment. Hamburg had
attempted German opera as early as 1648, and it is interesting to note
that the English composer William Brade was one of those who provided the
music; but the real history of the Hamburg opera may be said to begin with
the performance of Theile's Adam and Eve in the newly built theatre
in the Goose-Market in 1678. When Handel arrived in Hamburg in the summer
of 1703 the biblical operas had long come to an end, and the theatre was
under the management of Reinhold Keiser.
Keiser was a musician of remarkable genius. His father was a disreputable
organist, and his mother a young lady of noble family who had been hastily
married at the age of sixteen. Born near Weissenfels in 1674, he had begun
his operatic career at Brunswick at the age of eighteen; three years later
he took over the direction of the opera at Hamburg, where he produced a
large number of operas composed by himself. As a composer, Keiser had a
singular fluency of melody in a style that hovers between those of Germany
and Italy; had he been a man of more solid character he might have
accomplished greater things. But he had inherited from his parents a love
of pleasure and debauchery; extravagant in his private life, he was no
less extravagant in his theatrical management, and was ready to provide
his audiences with anything in the way of startling sensation. One of his
most famous operas was on the subject of Störtebeker, a notorious
highwayman (1704), in which murders were represented with the most
disgusting realism.
Hamburg was the Venice of the north and, like Venice, a city of pleasure;
but its pleasures were often of a coarse and licentious description. Life
in Hamburg was probably not much unlike that of Restoration London; but
though Keiser may well be set beside Purcell, Hamburg had no dramatists to
compare with Congreve, hardly even with Shadwell. Jeremy Collier, however,
was far outdone in vituperation by the puritan clergy who, not altogether
without reason, castigated the immorality of the Hamburg stage.
Handel seems to have arrived in Hamburg in early summer of 1703, for we
first hear of him there on July 2, when he met Johann Mattheson in the
church of St. Mary Magdalen. It seems to have been a chance acquaintance,
to judge from Mattheson's account; it stuck in Mattheson's memory for many
years and he remembered especially the pastry-cook's boy who blew the
organ for Handel and himself. Mattheson was four years older than Handel;
he was one of those precociously gifted, versatile, attractive, and rather
vain young men who are endowed with so many talents that they never
achieve distinction in any branch of art. He is remembered now only by the
literary work of his later life, in which he shows himself as a voluminous
pedant and an embittered critic. He made friends with Handel on the spot,
and took him under his own protection, providing him with almost daily
free meals at his father's house. He evidently regarded him as a very
simple and provincial young musician, a notable organist indeed, and a
master of such learned devices as counterpoint and fugue, but a dull
composer, turning out endless arias and cantatas with no sense of the
fashionable Italian taste.
It was Mattheson, by his own account, who introduced Handel to the musical
life of Hamburg. The opera was closed for the summer, and Keiser's
celebrated winter concerts, at which the wealthy society of Hamburg
listened to the most famous singers and regaled themselves with tokay, had
not yet begun; but there was no lack of social distractions, in which
music no doubt played its part. In August the two friends made a journey
to Lubeck, to compete for the post of organist at the Marienkirche in
succession to Dietrich Buxtehude, who was nearly seventy and ready to
retire. But both Buxtehude and the town council insisted that the new
organist should marry his predecessor's daughter, in order to save the
town the necessity of providing for her; she was considerably older than
the two youthful candidates, and they both withdrew in haste. Late in life
Mattheson married the daughter of an English clergyman; Handel remained a
bachelor to the end of his days.
It was no doubt through Mattheson that Handel, in the autumn, entered the
opera band as a humble second violinist. He seems to have been of a very
retiring and quiet disposition, although of a dry humour. Opera management
at Hamburg was no less precarious than it was in London; Keiser could not
afford the Italian singers patronised by the German princes, and his
performances had often to be helped out by amateurs of all classes. On one
occasion the harpsichord-player failed him; Handel took his place at short
notice, and his musicianship was at once recognised. Unfortunately
Mattheson, whose chronology is always rather uncertain, does not tell us
when this occurred. In addition to his duties in the orchestra, Handel
earned a living by teaching private pupils, and through Mattheson he was
engaged by Mr. John Wyche, the English Envoy, as music-master to his small
son Cyril.
Early in 1704 Mattheson went to Holland, where he had some success in
organising concerts at Amsterdam, and was offered the post of organist at
Haarlem. He seems to have had some idea of seeking his fortune in England;
he spoke English well, and may have had useful connexions in England
through Mr. John Wyche. But in March Handel wrote to him that the Hamburg
opera could not get on without him, and to Hamburg he returned. It soon
must have become clear to him that Handel was rapidly outgrowing any need
of his condescending patronage. A Passion according to St. John,
the words of which had been written by Postel, an opera-poet turned
pietist, had been set to music by Handel, and performed on Good Friday
with marked success. Mattheson arrived too late to hear it, but it is
significant that twenty years later he published a scathing criticism of
it, although it is a work of little importance in relation to Handel's
complete career, and can seldom have been performed. A Passion oratorio by
Keiser was produced at the same time, it may well have been that Handel's
work, youthful and conventional as it is, was enough to arouse the
jealousy of both Keiser and Mattheson.
Shortly after Easter, Keiser began the composition of a new opera, Almira,
on a libretto by the local poet Feustking, but for some reason or other he
found it necessary to call in Handel's assistance, and eventually left the
whole work to Handel to compose. It was to be produced in the autumn.
Handel seems to have consulted Mattheson over every detail of the opera;
there exists a complete score in Mattheson's handwriting, with corrections
and additions by Handel. Mattheson spent the summer enjoying a country
holiday in Mecklenburg; Handel probably went on with his opera, at
Hamburg. In October, just as the opera season was reopening, Mattheson
contrived to get himself engaged by Sir Cyril Wych as tutor to his son; he
also took over the boy's musical education, hinting that Handel was
dismissed for neglect of his duties. In view of Handel's strictly
honourable character it is difficult to believe that he was guilty of
neglect, and we may naturally suppose him to have resented the loss of a
lucrative appointment.
The first opera of the autumn was not Handel's Almira, but an opera
by Mattheson, called Cleopatra. Mattheson, always eager to exhibit
his versatility, sang the part of Antony himself, and, not content with
that, came into the orchestra as soon as Antony had died on the stage and
kept himself in view of the audience by conducting at the harpsichord. For
several performances Handel made no objection and gave up his seat to
Mattheson when the moment came, but on December 5, for some reason or
other, he refused, to the surprise and indignation of the composer. German
musicians in those days were a quarrelsome crew; at the court of Stuttgart
the musicians were so much given to knocking each other on the head with
their instruments, even in the august presence of His Serene Highness,
that there was hardly one left undamaged. It was only to be expected that
the friends of Handel and Mattheson should egg them on to fight a duel in
the street; luckily Mattheson's sword broke on a button of Handel's coat,
and the duel ended. On December 30 a town councillor effected a
reconciliation; the rivals dined together at Mattheson's house and went on
to the rehearsal of Almira, which was brought out on January 8,
1705, with Mattheson as the principal tenor.
Almira, the libretto of which was partly in German and partly in
Italian, ran continuously for about twenty performances until February 25,
when it was succeeded by Nero, another opera which Handel had
hastily composed for the occasion. Nero, in which Mattheson sang
the title part, was a failure. The music is lost, but the libretto
survives, and that is enough to account for the collapse. The opera had
three performances only. In the very same season Keiser re-set Nero
to music himself, and brought it out under the title of Octavia;
shortly afterwards he did the same with Almira, which was performed
in August of the same year. Although Keiser's operas were no more
successful than Handel's, and his extravagance and mismanagement forced
him to leave Hamburg for three years in order to avoid imprisonment, it is
evident that he had made Handel's position in the theatre impossible.
Handel withdrew into private life and devoted himself to earning a living
by teaching. Mattheson says that Handel remained in Hamburg until 1709,
and that he still worked in the theatre, but the first of these statements
is certainly untrue, and the second probably so. Mattheson himself left
the theatre after the failure of Handel's Nero, and his friendship
with Handel seems to have come to an end. About Handel's subsequent life
in Hamburg we know nothing, until the theatre was taken over by one
Saurbrey in the autumn of 1706. Saurbrey commissioned an opera from
Handel, but, owing to the confusion in which Keiser had left the affairs
of the theatre, it could not be brought out until January 1708, when it
was found to be so long that it had to be divided into two operas, Florindo
and Daphne, both of which were put on the stage successively. By
that time Handel had left Hamburg for Italy; he evidently took little
interest in the production of these works, neither of which has survived.
It was during the run of Almira, says Mainwaring, that Handel made
the acquaintance of Prince Gian Gastone de' Medici, son of the Grand Duke
Cosmo III of Tuscany. Mainwaring's date is wrong, for it is known that
Gian Gastone at that time was in Bohemia with his wife, a German princess,
to whom he had been married against his will. But it is also known that he
was in Hamburg for a few months during the winter of 1703-04, and, if he
met Handel at that time, the rest of Mainwaring's story becomes much more
credible than subsequent biographers have been willing to admit. According
to Mainwaring, Handel became almost an intimate friend of the Prince; they
often discussed music together, and the Prince lamented that Handel was
unacquainted with the music and musical life of Italy.﹃Handel confessed
that he could see nothing in Italian music which answered the high
character His Highness had given it. On the contrary, he thought it so
very indifferent, that the singers, he said, must be angels to recommend
it.﹄Gian Gastone urged him to come to Italy and hear for himself,
intimating﹃that if he chose to return with him, no conveniences should be
wanting.﹄Handel declined the invitation, but resolved to go to Italy as
soon as he could do so "on his own bottom."
Gian Gastone was a spendthrift and a profligate; his moral reputation was
of the worst, and he was chronically in debt. That, however, would not
make it unthinkable that after a glass of wine he should invite Handel to
come to Italy with him, but Handel may well have known enough about the
Prince even then to reply to the proposal with tactful evasiveness. From
what Mattheson says of Handel on his first arrival in Hamburg, it is quite
likely that he was contemptuous of Italian opera music, and it is equally
likely that after the success of Almira his views on Italian opera
underwent a change. It is obvious that Hamburg had no further chances to
offer him, and the attraction of Italy was at that time so vivid to all
young German musicians that not one of them would have refused an
opportunity of making the journey.
The date of Handel's departure from Hamburg is unknown, nor have we the
slightest information as to his whereabouts until we hear of him at Rome
in January 1707. Chrysander's statement that he spent Christmas 1706 with
his mother at Halle is manifestly untrue. Mattheson says that he travelled
to Rome with a Herr von Binitz, but nothing is known of this gentleman.
His most natural route into Italy would be by the Brenner, the historic
road of all German pilgrims.
Handel may well have been glad to leave Hamburg, but Hamburg did not
forget him. He is mentioned in a theatrical manifesto of 1708 as being
already "beloved and celebrated in Italy"; Barthold Feind, one of the
Hamburg librettists, who in 1715 translated Handel's Rinaldo,
called him "the incomparable Handel, the Orpheus of our time"; and from
1715 to 1734 almost all of Handel's London operas were represented on the
Hamburg stage.
CHAPTER II
Arrival in Italy—Rodrigo—Rome: Cardinal Ottoboni and
the Scarlattis—Naples: Venice: Agrippina—appointment at
Hanover—London: Rinaldo.
Handel spent three years in Italy. The known facts about his life there
are singularly few, and his biographers have often had to draw copiously
on their imagination. They may perhaps be forgiven for doing so, since
they rightly sought to emphasise the fact that these three years were the
most formative period of Handel's personality as a composer. Handel came
to Italy as a German; he left Italy an Italian, as far as his music was
concerned, and, despite all other influences, Italian was the foundation
of his musical language until the end of his life.
On January 14, 1707, a Roman chronicler noted the arrival of﹃a Saxon, an
excellent player on the harpsichord and a composer of music, who has
to-day displayed his ability in playing the organ in the church of St.
John [Lateran] to the amazement of everyone.﹄This can hardly refer to
anyone else than Handel, who throughout his sojourn in Italy was always
known as "the Saxon" (il Sassone). We owe the discovery of this
important document to Mr. Newman Flower. The next date known to us is that
of April 11—on the manuscript of Handel's Dixit Dominus,
composed in Rome.
Most biographers have, however, assumed that Handel's first halt in Italy
would have been made at Florence, in view of the fact that Gian Gastone
de' Medici is known to have been at Florence from June 1705 to November
1706. The eldest son of the Grand Duke, Prince Ferdinand, was an
enthusiastic patron of music, who employed the best musicians of the day
to perform operas in his magnificent country palace at Pratolino, some
twelve miles north of Florence. It has been suggested that Handel's first
Italian opera, Rodrigo, was composed for Ferdinand and performed
early in 1707, but, in view of Mr. Flower's discovery, this seems
unlikely. Mr. Flower suggests, indeed, that Ferdinand did not take much
interest in Handel, otherwise he would not have allowed him to go to Rome
so soon. This is not impossible, for we know that Ferdinand found the
operas of Alessandro Scarlatti too serious for his taste, and he may well
have thought even less of Handel's music, which (as we can see from the
score of Rodrigo) was still very German in style.
Rome could offer Handel no opportunities either for composing operas or
even for hearing them. Pope Clement X had permitted the opening of a
public opera-house (the Teatro Tordinona) in 1671, but it was closed five
years later by Innocent XI, who made every effort he could to suppress
opera both in public and in private. Innocent XII, who became Pope in
1691, seems to have been, at first, less intolerant, for the theatre was
rebuilt, and a few performances were given; but in 1697 he ordered its
destruction on grounds of public morality. Except for a few performances
of opera in private in 1701 and 1702 no operas were produced in Rome until
1709.
Deprived of opera, the Romans devoted themselves to oratorio—which
in musical style was much the same thing—and to chamber music. The
most generous patron of music in Rome was the young Cardinal Ottoboni, who
had been raised to the purple in his early twenties, in 1690. He had
indeed composed an opera himself, which was performed in 1692, but he was
more competent as a poet than as a musician; in 1690 Alessandro Scarlatti
had set a libretto of his, La Statira.
Handel was no doubt recommended to him by Ferdinand de' Medici, and at the
Cardinal's weekly musical parties he soon came into contact with Domenico
Scarlatti, as well as with Corelli and Pasquini. Alessandro Scarlatti had
left Naples, probably for political reasons, in 1702, and at the end of
1703 Ottoboni had secured him a subordinate post at the church of Santa
Maria Maggiore, at the same time appointing him his private director of
music. Domenico was a young man of Handel's own age—"a young eagle"
as his father called him—brilliantly gifted, and (to judge from
Thomas Roseingrave's impression of him) possessed of a singular personal
fascination. "Handel," says Mainwaring,﹃used often to speak of this
person with great satisfaction; and indeed there was reason for it; for
besides his great talents as an artist, he had the sweetest temper, and
the genteelest behaviour.﹄We may indeed regard his friendship with Handel
as safely authenticated. It is just possible that Handel may have met
Alessandro Scarlatti at Pratolino in the previous autumn, as his opera Il
Gran Tamerlano was produced there in September; he may well have met
him between January and April of 1707. From April to September Alessandro
Scarlatti was in Urbino.
Handel's movements now become very difficult to follow. It seems probable
that his opera Rodrigo was performed at Florence in the autumn of
1707; Mainwaring says that it was composed for Ferdinand de' Medici, but
there is no record of any performance at Pratolino. As Handel is said to
have been presented to Prince Ernest Augustus of Hanover at Venice, he
must have been there in October or November, as the Prince is known to
have spent only those two months in that city. Whether Handel remained at
Venice over Christmas, or whether he returned to Rome, is uncertain.
Domenico Scarlatti is said to have identified him at Venice at a
masquerade by his playing of the harpsichord. It would be most natural to
suppose then that Handel and the two Scarlattis were in Venice together
for the production of Alessandro's two operas, Mitridate Eupatore
and Il Trionfo della Libertà, both of which were brought out at
Venice in 1707, but, as it is not known whether this took place at the
beginning or at the end of the year, there is not sufficient evidence to
support such a conjecture.
During March and April 1708, Handel was the guest of Prince Ruspoli in
Rome; this has been definitely ascertained by Mr. Flower. Prince Ruspoli
was another great Roman patron of music, and Scarlatti frequently composed
works for him; his Annunciation Oratorio was performed under his
auspices on March 25. On Easter Sunday, April 8, Handel made a triumphal
appearance with La Resurrezione, which was given on a sumptuous
scale, at Ruspoli's expense, in the Palazzo Bonelli, which he was
occupying at the time. Corelli led the orchestra.
After La Resurrezione, Handel seems to have returned to the
patronage of Cardinal Ottoboni, in whose palace he produced a serenata
(i.e. an allegorical cantata) called Il Trionfa del Tempo e del
Disinganno, which he remodelled fifty years afterwards as The
Triumph of Time and Truth. The libretto was by Cardinal Pamphilij. It
was the overture to this work which caused so much difficulty to Corelli.
Handel, irritated at his lack of understanding, snatched the violin from
his hand and played the passage himself, to show how it should be
executed; Corelli, gentlest of souls, took no offence, although thirty-two
years his senior and the greatest violinist living, but merely observed,
"My dear Saxon, this music is in the French style, of which I have no
knowledge."
It has been assumed by many biographers that Handel attended the meetings
of the Arcadian Academy, and since Prince Ruspoli was a great, benefactor
to the Academy, this is extremely probable, although there is no evidence
for it. Handel was not a member of the Academy, and various reasons for
this have been suggested, such as that he was a foreigner and also too
young to be admitted. It is more probable that his admission to that
exclusive society was never even contemplated; musicians were generally
engaged professionally for the concerts of the Italian academies, but very
seldom admitted to the honour of membership. Corelli, Pasquini and
Alessandro Scarlatti were all admitted together in 1705; they were the
three senior and most distinguished composers of the time, and as no other
musicians were then members, it may be assumed that these elections
constituted an exceptional honour.
Mainwaring relates that Cardinal Pamphili; on one occasion wrote a poem in
honour of Handel and desired him to set it to music himself; in this poem
"he was compared to Orpheus, and exalted above the rank of mortals." Later
biographers, being unable to trace any music of Handel to this poem,
assumed that Handel was too modest to sing his own praises; but he was
not, for the original manuscript of the cantata was found by the present
writer in the University Library at Münster in Westphalia. As Mainwaring
informs us, Handel is compared by the poet (whose name is not given) to
Orpheus and indeed exalted above him. "Orpheus," says the Cardinal,﹃could
move rocks and trees, but he could not make them sing; therefore thou art
greater than Orpheus, for thou compellest my aged Muse to song.﹄The style
of both words and music suggests that the whole cantata was thrown off, as
Mainwaring suggests, on the spur of the moment, and this improvisation may
well have taken place at one of the Arcadians' garden parties, for there
is a well-known account of a similar improvisation by the poet Zappi and
the composer Alessandro Scarlatti.
Handel was by this time fully accepted as one of the leading musicians in
Italy, for in June he composed a pastoral, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo,
for the marriage of the Duke of Alvito at Naples on July 19. It was in
July 1708 that the Austrian Viceroy of Naples, Count Daun, was succeeded
by Cardinal Grimani, who, towards the end of the year, persuaded
Alessandro Scarlatti to return to the service of the royal chapel. As a
good friend to Scarlatti, the Cardinal was sure to interest himself in
Handel, and it was probably through him that Handel was commissioned to
write an opera for Venice, as the Grimani were a great Venetian family and
owned the principal opera-house there. How long Handel stayed at Naples we
do not know; all that Mainwaring tells us is that he was taken up by a
Spanish princess, but, as Naples had belonged to Spain for a hundred and
fifty years, Spanish princesses can have been no rarities there, and it is
impossible to identify this lady.
From July 1708 until December 1709 we lose sight of Handel entirely. On
December 26, the first night of the carnival season, his opera Agrippina
was produced at Venice. The libretto was by Cardinal Grimani, who had
already written other dramas for music, all produced, like Handel's, at
the Teatro San Giovanni Crisostomo in Venice. Venice was the first city
which had undertaken opera on a commercial basis, open to the public on
payment, whereas in other places it depended for many years on the
munificence of princes and nobles. At Venice there existed not one
theatre, but several, devoted to opera, each called after the name of the
parish in which it was situated, and, of these, the theatre of St. John
Chrysostom, built by the Grimani family and still standing (though much
remodelled) under the name of Teatro Malibran, was the largest and most
important. The Inquisition took a more tolerant view of opera than the
Pope; a Venetian preacher admonished actors and singers to remember that
they "were abominated of God, but tolerated by the Government by desire of
those who took delight in their iniquities."
Agrippina aroused an extraordinary enthusiasm.﹃The theatre, at
almost every pause, resounded with shouts and acclamations of viva il
taro Sassone! and other expressions of approbation too extravagant to
be mentioned﹄(Mainwaring). The title part was sung by Margherita
Durastanti, and another singer who appeared in the opera was Boschi, the
famous bass; both of them were to sing for Handel in London later on. It
is fairly certain that Boschi must have sung the part of Polyphemus in
Handel's Italian Aci e Galatea at Naples, for it bears a striking
resemblance to other songs written for Boschi, whose voice was of
exceptional range. The opera ran for twenty-seven nights.
After this unprecedented triumph it seems surprising that Handel did not
remain in Italy, where he had so many friends who could ensure his
success. It is probable that by the time Agrippina was performed,
if not indeed long before, he had been promised the post of Kapellmeister
to the court of Hanover. The actual appointment is dated June 16, 1710.
But no sooner was Handel appointed than he at once obtained leave of
absence, and went on, first to Düsseldorf, and then to London. It was
probably the Elector's intention that he should spend some time in foreign
travel before taking up regular duty.
The three years which Handel spent in Italy at the most impressionable
period of his life fixed the characteristics of his style as a composer,
and we may well suppose that they exercised a decisive influence on his
personality and character. His youth had been spent in the respectable
middle-class environment of his home at Halle; then came the three years
at Hamburg, fantastic and exciting, yet, despite all the artistic stimulus
of Keiser's opera-house, inevitably sordid and provincial. Italy
introduced him to an entirely different atmosphere—to a life of
dignity and serenity in which a classical culture, both literary and
artistic, was the matured fruit of wealth, leisure, and good breeding.
That exquisite life found its highest musical expression in Alessandro
Scarlatti, who at that period was incontestably the greatest of living
musicians. On his style Handel formed his own, and it is interesting to
note that of all Scarlatti's operas the one which most strikingly
foreshadows the genius of Handel is Mitridate, which Handel may
possibly have seen at Venice in the winter of 1707-08. The musical library
of Handel's English friend Charles Jennens contained a large collection of
Scarlatti's manuscripts, and there can be little doubt that it was Handel
who brought them with him from Italy.
In Venice, Handel had made the acquaintance of Prince Ernest of Hanover,
younger brother of the Elector Georg Ludwig who was eventually to become
King of England as George I. With Prince Ernest was Baron Kielmansegge,
who for many years afterwards remained a firm supporter of Handel, and
another Venetian acquaintance was the Duke of Manchester, English
Ambassador to the Republic of Venice. Through Prince Ernest, and
Kielmansegge, Handel was recommended to the court of Hanover; the Duke of
Manchester gave him a pressing invitation to England. Music in Hanover was
under the direction of an Italian, Agostino Steffani, who was not only a
musician but priest and diplomatist as well. Born at Castelfranco in 1654,
he was taken as a boy to Munich, where he studied music, and, in 1680
entered the priesthood; he produced several operas there, and about 1689
became Kapellmeister to the court of Hanover. Here he was employed on
important diplomatic business; Pope Innocent XI made him titular Bishop of
Spiga in the West Indies, and in 1698 he was Ambassador at Brussels. In
1709 he became the Pope's representative for North Germany, and it was
doubtless owing to his heavy ecclesiastical duties that he resigned his
musical post in favour of Handel, although Hanover remained his chief
place of residence until his death in 1728. He was in Rome in 1708 and
1709, and it has been suggested that he made Handel's acquaintance there,
but this hardly seems consistent with Handel's own statement, recorded by
Hawkins in his History of Music: "When I first arrived at Hanover I
was a young man under twenty; I was acquainted with the merits of Steffani
and he had heard of me. I understood somewhat of music, and could play
pretty well on the organ; he received me with great kindness, and took an
early opportunity to introduce me to the Princess Sophia and the Elector's
son, giving them to understand that I was what he was pleased to call a
virtuoso in music; he obliged me with instructions for my conduct and
behaviour during my residence at Hanover; and being called from the city
to attend to matters of a public concern, he left me in possession of that
favour and patronage which himself had enjoyed for a series of years."
These statements of Handel seem, in fact, to point to his having visited
Hanover before he went to Italy, possibly before he went to Hamburg, or,
more probably, during the course of his Hamburg period, in which case one
might conclude that the Electress Sophia had defrayed the cost of Handel's
Italian journey. Even if Handel made a mistake as to his age, he clearly
implies that his first meeting with Steffani took place in Hanover.
At Düsseldorf, Handel was sure of a warm welcome, for the Elector Johann
Wilhelm was a close friend of Steffani, and his wife was a sister of
Ferdinand and Gian Gastone de' Medici; he was a man of extravagant tastes,
and his opera-house was maintained on the most magnificent scale. But
Handel did not stay there long; England was a greater attraction, and he
arrived in London for the first time in the autumn of 1710.
Nothing is known of Handel's early days in London, but it may be safely
assumed that he was provided with letters of introduction to persons of
influence. We meet him first in the company of Heidegger, a Swiss
adventurer who achieved notoriety through his incredible ugliness, and
from 1709 onwards was concerned in the management of the opera at the
Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket. Through Heidegger, Handel was introduced
to Mary Granville, then a little girl of ten, whom he delighted by his
performance on her own spinet. Her uncle, Sir John Stanley, asked her if
she thought she should ever play as well as Mr. Handel.﹃If I did not
think I should,﹄she cried, "I would burn my instrument!" Mary Granville,
who, seven years later, married a Mr. Pendarves, and in 1743 became the
wife of Dr. Delany, was for many years one of Handel's most faithful
friends and supporters.
In the reign of Queen Anne the musical life of London was developing in a
new fashion as compared with what it was in the last twenty years of the
previous century. The type of English opera which Purcell and Dryden had
created came to an end with Purcell's death in 1695. Italian music,
especially when sung by Italian singers, was gradually becoming more and
more popular with London concert-audiences, and in 1705 Thomas Clayton
produced at Drury Lane an opera called Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus.
Clayton had visited Italy, and had brought back with him a collection of
Italian songs; he got Peter Motteux to translate for him an old Italian
opera libretto, and adapted these songs to it. How much of Arsinoe
was Clayton's own work is not known; Burney speaks of the opera with
nothing but contempt. Yet it seems to have had some fair success, and was
even revived the following year; but Clayton's Rosamond, to a
libretto by Addison, did not survive three performances. It was followed
by a series of Italian operas composed by Buononcini, Scarlatti, and
others; at first the operas were in English, and sung by English singers,
but gradually Italian was introduced, as at Hamburg, and in 1710 an opera
called Almahide, the music of which Burney ascribes conjecturally
to Buononcini, was given in Italian with an entirely Italian company. The
victory of the Italians was due mainly to the marvellous singing and
acting of Nicola Grimaldi, known as Nicolini, who first appeared in London
in Scarlatti's Pyrrhus and Demetrius. Nicolini was not the first castrato
who had been heard in England; the famous Siface had been brought over by
Queen Mary of Modena in 1687. But Nicolini was the first who appeared on
the English stage, and it was he who paved the way for Senesino,
Farinelli, and the rest, and established that annual season of Italian
opera which is not yet extinct.
At the time when Handel arrived in London the opera company had migrated
from Drury Lane to Vanbrugh's new theatre in the Haymarket, where it was
under the management of Aaron Hill, an enterprising young man of Handel's
own age who was ready to pursue any sort of career that chance might offer
him, whether in literature, music, or business adventure. We may safely
hazard a guess that it was Boschi who persuaded Hill to invite Handel to
compose an opera for the Queen's Theatre, as Boschi had already sung, in
November 1710, in Hydaspes, an opera by Francesco Mancini, in which
Nicolini delighted his audience in a fight with a lion. Hill sketched a
plot based on Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, and an Italian libretto
was hastily provided by Giacomo Rossi, Handel composing the music at the
same time, and often overtaking the poet. The music, in fact, was
completed in a fortnight, and the opera of Rinaldo was first
produced on the stage on February 24, 1711. To judge from Burney's account
of the preceding weeks of the season, coupled with this astonishingly
rapid collaboration, it is probable that Hill was in a difficult
situation, from which only a new and strikingly successful opera could
save him. Rinaldo achieved the desired success; it did more, it
established Handel's reputation in England as a dramatic composer, and set
London a new standard in Italian opera. The previous Italian operas had
been works of little distinction, and some of them had even been pasticcio
operas, as they were called, put together from songs by various composers.
Even Scarlatti's Pyrrhus and Demetrius paled beside the new opera
of Handel, for it had been written as far back as 1694, and was in a style
which Scarlatti himself had long abandoned.
Rinaldo had fifteen performances in the course of the season. It
provoked bitter attacks from Addison in the Spectator and from
Steele in the Tatler, but everybody knew that Addison's vanity was
wounded by the grotesque failure of Rosamond, and that Steele had
interests in the playhouse. It was useless at that particular moment to
champion the cause of English opera, for England happened to possess not a
single composer who was equal to the task of writing one.
The opera season came to an end in June, and Handel left London for
Germany. He did not go straight back to Hanover, but stayed at Düsseldorf
again, where the Elector was evidently desirous of keeping him as long as
possible, for the Elector himself wrote more than once to Hanover to make
excuses for Handel's prolonged absence from his official duties. Handel
may well have felt that Hanover was a dull place as compared with London.
There was no opera, and his chief function was to compose Italian chamber
duets for the Princess Caroline of Ansbach; afterwards Queen of England.
But he may well have taken pleasure in her service, for she was an
excellent musician and no mean singer. In November 1711 Handel paid a
visit to Halle, in order to stand godfather to his niece, Johanna
Friderica Michaelsen, the daughter of his surviving sister, who eventually
inherited the bulk of his fortune. Some biographers have stated that
Handel had already revisited his birthplace in 1710 before going to
London. Mainwaring is their authority for this, but Mainwaring habitually
confused dates and more probably referred to the visit of 1711, for which
we have the certain evidence of Friderica Michaelsen's baptismal register.
It is clear that the alleged visit of 1710 was suggested merely by a
desire to make the most of Handel's affection for his mother, which
Mainwaring had already emphasised. Mainwaring, however, went beyond the
truth in saying that she had become blind; she did eventually lose her
sight, but not until some twenty years later.
Handel appears to have remained at Hanover until the autumn of 1712, when
he obtained permission to go to London again﹃on condition that he engaged
to return within a reasonable time﹄(Mainwaring). What period was to be
considered reasonable we do not know. Handel had certainly been planning
this London visit for some time, as he was corresponding with friends in
England, and was also taking some trouble to improve his knowledge of the
English language. It is not surprising that he hankered after London, for
London offered him a society which bore more resemblance to the world
which he had known at Rome. The tradition of Italian culture had for
generations been more firmly implanted in England than anywhere in
Germany, except perhaps in Vienna, and, since those three years in Italy,
Handel's musical outlook had become completely Italian, as his music
shows. The few attempts which he made at German Church music present a
curious contrast of style; one could hardly believe them to be the work of
that Handel whom we have adopted as our own. German music at that date was
provincial; Italian music was the music of the great world, because it was
the music of the theatre. It was to the theatre that Handel looked
forward, and London had what even Rome had not—an opera, and an
Italian opera. The success of Rinaldo had shown him that London was
the place where he might launch out into a triumphal career as a composer
for the stage.
CHAPTER III
Second visit to London—Italian opera—George I and the Water
Music—visit to Germany—Canons and the Duke of Chandos—establishment
of the Royal Academy of Music.
For the greater part of the nineteenth century the Handelian type of opera
was the laughingstock of musical critics; they wondered how any audiences
could have endured to sit through it, and why the fashionable society of
London should have neglected native music for what Dr. Johnson defined as
"an exotic and irrational entertainment." The modern reader's impression
of an Italian opera of Handel's days is a story about some ancient or
mediaeval hero whose very name is often to most people unknown; if he
happens to be someone as famous as Julius Caesar, the familiar episodes of
his life are sacrificed to some imaginary and complicated intrigue
presented in the form of long and elaborate songs, thinly accompanied, and
separated by stretches of dreary recitative. But in those days persons of
culture, in England as well as in Italy, were perhaps more interested in
ancient history and in the history of the later Roman Empire than they are
now; it is significant that Gibbon's Decline and Fall made its
appearance just when the fashion for operas on subjects which might have
been taken from its pages was coming to an end.
The conventional treatment of those subjects, which makes all the operas
seem exactly alike, was the result of a certain literary reform which had
tended to standardise opera libretti under the influence of Racine, and it
was really a movement towards dignity and dramatic unity after the
monstrous confusion of the earlier Venetian operas. As to the
conventionality of the music, and its forms of air and recitative, it can
only be said that all serious Italian music was written in these forms; it
was simply the normal musical style of the period, and must have been as
natural to its own audiences as the style of Puccini or Richard Strauss at
the present day. Handelian opera has often been described as a concert in
costume, and Dr. Burney, writing as late as 1789, both admits this
description and defends it.
"An opera, at the worst, is still better than a concert merely for the
ear, or a pantomime entertainment for the eye. Supposing the articulation
to be wholly unintelligible, we have an excellent union of melody and
harmony, vocal as well as instrumental, for the ear. And, according to Sir
Richard Steele's account of Nicolini's action, 'it was so significant,
that a deaf man might go along with him in the sense of the part he
acted.'
"No one will dispute but that understanding Italian would render our
entertainment at an opera more rational and more complete; but without
that advantage, let it be remembered by the lovers of Music, that an opera
is the completest concert to which they can go; with this advantage
over those in still life, that to the most perfect singing, and effects of
a powerful and well-disciplined band, are frequently added excellent
acting, splendid scenes and decorations, with such dancing as a playhouse,
from its inferior prices, is seldom able to furnish."
Orchestral concerts in those days did not exist; concerts of any kind were
rare, and the best were to be heard in that historic room over Thomas
Britton's small coal shop, in Clerkenwell, where Handel himself sometimes
played on a chamber-organ for the genuine musical enthusiasts of London
society. It was no wonder that Italian opera became fashionable. Italian
singers have always been unrivalled in popular favour, and in Handel's
days they were not only something new to England, but were the exponents
of a vocal art which admittedly has never been surpassed. The theatre was
new and sumptuous; society was wealthy and at the same time exclusive; at
the opera the great world met together as in a sort of club. People went
to talk and to be seen as well as to see and hear; they do so in certain
opera-houses still. And the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket possessed the
greatest opera-composer living, a greater even than Scarlatti himself.
It was a period when there was still a considerable tradition of
musicianship among the amateurs of English society. Old Countess
Granville, known to her younger relatives as "the Dragon," who had lived
all through the age of Locke and Purcell, wrote, at the age of eighty, to
her cousin Mrs. Pendarves—Handel's child friend Mary Granville—in
1734:﹃There is, I think, no accomplishment so great for a lady as music,
for it tunes the mind.﹄There were plenty of people in the great houses
capable of appreciating the merits of Handel, or at any rate of
constituting themselves his enemies.
Handel must have arrived in England at least as early as the beginning of
October 1712, for the manuscript of Il Pastor Fido, the first new
opera which he produced, is dated, at the end, "Londres, ce 24 Octobre."
The opera-house was now under the management of Owen MacSwiney, who seems
to have been both incompetent and unreliable. Il Pastor Fido did
not attract the public, and was withdrawn after six performances, but
Handel soon had another opera ready to take its place. Teseo was
finished on December 19, and brought out on January 10, 1713; it was a
romantic-heroic opera, closely modelled on Rinaldo, with an
abundance of scenic effects. After the second performance MacSwiney
disappeared, leaving the singers unpaid as well as the scene-painters and
costume-makers. The company carried on the season undeterred, and the
management was taken over by Heidegger. Handel's opera was performed
twelve times—on the last night for the composer's benefit; between
the acts he gave a performance himself on the harpsichord.
For the moment, however, the operatic situation was not encouraging, and
Handel turned his thoughts in other directions. He had stayed first at the
London house of a Mr. Andrews of Barn Elms in Surrey, but he soon
transferred himself to the house of Lord Burlington in Piccadilly. Lord
Burlington was only seventeen years of age, but he and his mother made
Burlington House an artistic and literary centre comparable with the
palaces of Cardinal Ottoboni and Prince Ruspoli at Rome. As the libretto
of Teseo is dedicated to him, he must have taken Handel under his
patronage soon after his arrival in England, but the precise date at which
Handel went to live with him is uncertain. According to Hawkins, he stayed
at Burlington House for three years, meeting Pope, Gay, and Dr. Arbuthnot,
as well as many other "men of the first eminence for genius." But Gay does
not seem to have met Lord Burlington until 1715, and Pope mentions him
first in 1718. It is thought that Handel's little opera, Silla, may
have been written for a private performance at Burlington House in 1714,
and the dedication of Amadigi, Handel's next opera (1715),
indicates that the music was composed within his patron's own walls.
One of Handel's favourite haunts in London was St. Paul's Cathedral, where
Brind the organist often persuaded him to play the organ after evening
service, to the great delight of the congregation. He appears to have made
Brind's acquaintance first through young Maurice Greene, then aged
seventeen, who had been a chorister of St. Paul's, and, after his voice
broke in 1710, was articled to Brind as a pupil. After service was over,
Handel, Greene, and some of the members of the choir would repair to the
Queen's Arms Tavern close by for an evening of music and musical
conversation.
This friendly association with St. Paul's was no doubt of great value to
Handel in his next musical undertakings—the Birthday Ode for
Queen Anne, and the Te Deum which celebrated the Peace of Utrecht
in 1713. The Queen's patronage may very likely have been obtained for him
by Lady Burlington, as she was one of the Ladies of the Bedchamber. These
two works are important landmarks in Handel's career, as they were his
first compositions to English words, and his first compositions for
English ceremonial occasions. They marked him out as the natural successor
to Purcell, and it is evident that in each case he took Purcell's similar
composition as his model. Up till now he had been a foreigner engaged to
provide Italian opera for the amusement of fashionable society; with the
Birthday Ode he became a court musician to the Queen of England,
and with the Te Deum his music entered St. Paul's.
The practical result of the Ode was a pension of £200 a year
conferred on him by Queen Anne. It is clear that he now regarded England
as his permanent home, regardless of the fact that he was officially the
servant of the Elector of Hanover and had undertaken to return thither
"within a reasonable time." But on August 1, 1714, the Queen died, and the
Elector was proclaimed King of England. When George I came over to his new
country, Handel did not dare to show himself at court, and all efforts on
the part of his friends to effect a reconciliation with the King were in
vain. The King went to see his new opera, Amadigi, which came out
late in the season of 1715, but refused to pardon him, until Handel's old
Venetian acquaintance, Baron Kielmansegge, now Master of the Horse,
devised an ingenious expedient for surprising the King into clemency.
One of the favourite amusements of London society was to make up a
water-party on the Thames, with a band of musicians in attendance. Mrs.
Pendarves describes a party of this kind in July 1722; they rowed up to
Richmond, where they had supper, and﹃were entertained all the time by
very good music [for wind instruments] in another barge.﹄Baron
Kielmansegge arranged that the King should go for an excursion of this
kind, and that, without his knowledge, Handel should conduct appropriate
music of his own in a barge that followed the King's. As the Baron was
often in charge of the music for such occasions, this can have been a
matter of no great difficulty; in any case it achieved the desired result.
The King was enchanted with the music, and restored Handel to favour. As
Mainwaring tells this story just before speaking of Amadigi, it has
generally been assumed that this episode took place in the summer of 1715,
but more recently it has been ascribed to 1717, on the strength of a long
account of a royal water-party, with music by Handel, given in the Daily
Courant, a newspaper of the period. This account was copied by the
Envoy of Brandenburg at the court of St. James's and despatched by him to
Berlin; the discovery of this document has led certain writers to cast
doubt on Mainwaring's story. Streatfeild is probably right in suggesting
that Mainwaring's story refers to an earlier water-party, and that Handel
contributed music frequently for such occasions. He also points out that
the celebrated Water Music was not published until 1740, and that
it may quite well have been collected from various aquatic programmes.
Hawkins relates the story of the Water Music, evidently copying
from Mainwaring; but Hawkins had known Handel personally, and had been
supplied by him with certain reminiscences, one of which was unknown to
Mainwaring. According to this anecdote, recorded by Hawkins, the
reconciliation with George I was due to the violinist Geminiani, who had
composed a set of sonatas dedicated to Baron Kielmansegge; Geminiani was a
notoriously difficult player to accompany, and insisted on Handel, and no
other, taking the harpsichord when he went to play the sonatas to the
King.
Mr. Flower, in his life of Handel, refuses all credit to Mainwaring's
well-known tale, and takes the view that the King never had any quarrel
with Handel at all. In any case it seems certain that he confirmed the
pension granted to him by Queen Anne, and added a further £200 a year of
his own. A few years later, Handel received yet another £200 a year—from
Caroline of Ansbach, now Princess of Wales, for teaching her daughters the
harpsichord, so that he enjoyed a settled income of £600 a year for the
rest of his life.
Amadigi, produced May 25, 1715, did not have many performances, as
the season ended on July 9, but it attracted considerable attention,
partly because that old favourite, Nicolini, sang in it again, and also on
account of its elaborate staging.﹃There is more enchantment and machinery
in this opera,﹄says Dr. Burney, "than I have ever found to be announced
in any other musical drama performed in England."
During the following season, which did not begin until February 1716, both
Rinaldo and Amadigi were revived, but Handel produced no new
opera. The King seems to have wished to see Nicolini in his older parts;
Pyrrhus and Demetrius was revived, as well as other operas of the
days before Handel's first arrival in England. In July, at the end of the
season, George I returned to Hanover, where he remained until the end of
the year. Handel accompanied him, but seems to have had freedom to travel,
for he visited Hamburg, where he avoided meeting his old friend Mattheson,
though he corresponded with him from a safe distance. He also went to
Halle, where his mother was still living; Zachow, however, was dead, and
had left his widow in straitened circumstances, with an idle and
intemperate son. Handel helped the widow, and continued to send her money
in later years, but he eventually came to the conclusion that it was
useless to do anything for the son. From Halle he went on to Ansbach, no
doubt on some commission from the Princess of Wales. At Ansbach he found
an old friend from the University of Halle, Johann Christoph Schmidt, who
was established in a woollen business. Although Schmidt was married and
had a family, he was persuaded by Handel to leave these behind at Ansbach
and to travel with him to London, where he spent the rest of his life as
Handel's faithful secretary and copyist. His son came over later on, and,
after Handel had provided for his education, assisted his father in
looking after Handel during his old age.
During these six months in Germany, Handel reverted for a moment to German
music; he set what is known as the Brockes Passion, a sacred
cantata in verse by the Hamburg poet Brockes, which had already been set
once by Keiser. Later on it was set to music again by two of Handel's
former friends, first by Telemann, and then by Mattheson. Little is known
about the composition of this work; Handel apparently had a copy made
after his return to England and sent this to Mattheson, and it was
performed at Hamburg in 1717. Handel does not seem to have had it
performed in England; he used up the music afterwards for other works.
Chrysander attributed to 1716 a set of nine German songs with violin obbligato
to semi-sacred words by Brockes; but there is some difficulty about
accepting this date, for, although eight of the poems had already been
printed by Brockes, there is one which is found only in the second edition
of the book, printed in 1724.
The King came back to London in January 1717, and it is supposed that
Handel came with him. The opera was on the verge of collapse. Rinaldo
and Amadigi were once more revived for Nicolini, but Handel
contributed no new work, and, after the season came to an end in July,
there was no more Italian opera in London until 1720. It was during this
period that Handel became musical director to the Duke of Chandos, for
whom he composed works of a character new both to England and to himself.
James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, had built himself an Italian palace
at Canons, near Edgware, in which he must have outdone even the
magnificent Lord Burlington in sumptuousness and ostentation. Like a
German princeling, he kept his choir and his band of musicians, though
there seems to be no evidence that he was himself genuinely musical. The
chapel of the house, a florid Italian baroque building with frescoes in
the appropriate style by Italian painters, was opened in 1720, and the
anthem for the occasion was no doubt one of Handel's. It is not known what
music of Handel's was performed at the Duke's private concerts, but for
the services of the chapel he composed the famous Chandos Te Deum
and the twelve Chandos Anthems. Here again Purcell was his model,
but the style was Handel's own, a style indeed so appropriate to the
formal stateliness of the Duke's establishment that these works have never
become part of the ordinary cathedral repertory. It was to Purcell, and to
some extent to Scarlatti too, that Handel owed the general plan of the
anthems with their orchestral accompaniments, but even Purcell's anthems
with orchestra had by that time been found too elaborate for general use.
To the Chandos period belongs also a work which is still one of Handel's
most popular compositions, the English Acis and Galatea, to words
by John Gay. It was not a revision of the serenata which he wrote
at Naples, but an entirely new work. More important as a landmark in
Handel's development is the masque of Esther, originally called Haman
and Mordecai. About the early history of these works little is known;
both were intended to be acted on the stage, and they were very probably
performed in this way at Canons. The words of Esther were adapted
from Racine's play of the same name, and it has been suggested that Pope
was the author.
Handel's residence at Canons gave rise to two legends about him which are
still so often repeated that their absurdity must be mentioned here,
although they have been known for many years to be baseless. One is
perpetuated by an inscription on the organ in the church at Whitchurch, to
the effect that Handel composed the oratorio of Esther on this
instrument. Handel was never organist at Whitchurch; the church existed in
his day, but it was an entirely separate building from the private chapel
of the Duke of Chandos which was pulled down with the house. The organ of
that chapel is now at Gosport. It need hardly be said that in any case it
was not Handel's practice to compose his works on an organ. The other, and
even more popular, legend is that of "The Harmonious Blacksmith." It was
during the Canons period that Handel published his Suites de Pièces
pour le Clavecin (1720) which had probably been composed for the
daughters of the Princess of Wales, and one of these suites contains the
air and variations known by that familiar title. But the air was never
called by this name before 1820; about that time a young music-seller at
Bath, who had previously been a blacksmith's apprentice, earned the
nickname of "the harmonious blacksmith" because he was always singing that
particular tune. Somehow the name got transferred from the singer to the
song, and in 1835 the story of Handel's having been inspired to compose
the tune after hearing a blacksmith at Edgware produce musical notes from
his anvil was first put into print in a letter to The Times. Not
long afterwards an imaginary blacksmith of Edgware was invented, and his
alleged anvil sold by auction.
Whether the air is Handel's own composition at all is a matter of
uncertainty; there would be nothing in the least unusual about any
composer taking another man's air as a theme for variations, and it has
been suggested, with some plausibility, that the tune is that of an old
French song.
On August 8, 1718, Handel's sister Dorothea Sophia died of consumption at
Halle. She was not more than thirty years of age; the other sister,
Johanna, had died in 1709. The sermon preached at Dorothea's funeral on
August 11, 1718, has been preserved, and tells us that one of her
favourite texts from the Bible, which she was often in the habit of
quoting, was, "I know that my Redeemer liveth." Chrysander suggested, and
we may well believe, that the setting of these words in Messiah,
given to a female voice, owed its inspiration to the memory of Dorothea
Sophia. Handel was evidently much attached to her. To attend her funeral
was impossible, and it was some months before Handel could visit Halle
again; but on February 20, 1719, he wrote a letter to his brother-in-law,
thanking him for all the kindness which he had shown to his sister, and
promising to come to Halle as soon as his engagements permitted.
Handel's inability to leave London before February 1719 was due to the
fact that a new scheme for the promotion of opera in London was on foot.
The first idea was probably suggested in the circle of the Duke of Chandos
towards the end of 1718. It was the moment of the South Sea Bubble, and
speculation had become the universal fashion. To revive the Italian opera
a company was formed among members of the nobility; a capital of £50,000
was raised in shares of £100 each, and the King himself contributed
£1,000. The new venture was called the Royal Academy of Music, in
imitation of the Académie Royale de Musique, under which name the
Paris opera was officially known. The French designation was obviously
suggested by the Italian "academies," or literary and musical societies of
the period; the expression accademia di musica is still
occasionally used in Italy to signify a concert. The directors engaged
Nicolo Haym and Paolo Rolli as poets to provide libretti; for the music
they naturally secured Handel, but also invited Buononcini over from Rome,
and Attilio Ariosti from Berlin. Handel was sent at once to Dresden to
select singers; on February 21 he is stated to have left London for that
purpose, but it is possible that he may actually have started later, for
in his letter to his brother-in-law, dated February 20, he says, "I beg
you will not judge of my desire to see you by the delay of my departure,
for to my great regret I find myself detained here by important business
on which I may say my fortune depends, and it has dragged on longer than I
expected.... I hope I shall be at the end of it in a month from now."
Handel's exact itinerary is difficult to establish. We know that he went
to Düsseldorf, where he engaged the singer Baldassari, but whether this
was on the outward journey or later in the year is uncertain. From the
letter to Michaelsen we should imagine that he went to Halle as soon as
possible; the only authentic document which gives us any date is a letter
from Count Flemming, a court functionary at Dresden, to Melusine von
Schulenburg, daughter of George I's mistress the Duchess of Kendal, who in
1733 married Lord Chesterfield. Melusine was a pupil of Handel in London.
The letter is dated from Dresden, October 6, 1719; the Count seems to have
been much offended by Handel's behaviour, and suggests that he was﹃a
little mad﹄(un peu fol). Count Flemming was evidently vain of his
own musicianship, and this made him feel all the more hurt at Handel's
obstinate refusal to accept his invitations. The Electoral Prince of
Saxony was married about this time to an Austrian Archduchess, and the
Elector had invited several of the most famous Italian singers, headed by
the composer Lotti, to Dresden to grace the occasion, hoping to make
contracts with them for the winter season. Handel's object in Dresden was
to tempt these celebrities to London by the offer of English guineas, so
that he was naturally obliged to be extremely discreet in his relations
with the officials of the court.
He certainly played the harpsichord at court, for in the following
February (1720) a sum of 100 ducats was paid to him; this however cannot
indicate that he was actually in Dresden at that date, and may easily have
been a delayed payment for earlier services. Handel's negotiations with
the singers were only moderately successful, for he was unable to secure
anyone except Signora Durastanti for the opening of the London opera, even
though that was delayed until April 1720. The others remained at Dresden,
but it is probable that Handel's offers had not been without their
attractions, for the Italian singers at Dresden gave so much trouble to
the management that the Elector suddenly dismissed the whole crew in
February 1720; none of them, however, appeared in London before the autumn
season.
Handel's visit to Halle this year is of peculiar interest because of the
attempt made by J. S. Bach to become acquainted with him. Forkel's
biography of Bach (1802) is the only authority for this story. Bach in
1719 was in the service of the Prince of Anhalt-Cöthen; hearing that
Handel was in the neighbourhood, he went over to Halle, a distance of
about twenty miles, but found that Handel had already departed for London.
The exact date of Handel's return is not known, but as there was a meeting
of the shareholders of the opera on November 6, 1719, he may have been in
England by that time. He was not himself one of the actual directors of
the company; the only professional member of the board was Heidegger.
Burney suggests that the affairs of the company were none too prosperous
even before the season began; and it is strange that so long a delay took
place between the first initiation of the scheme in the winter of 1718 and
the first rise of the curtain on April 2, 1720. Handel, at any rate, must
have felt his own position to be secure, for it was about this time that
he took the house at what was then 57 Lower Brook Street, Grosvenor
Square, where he resided for the rest of his life. His name appears first
in 1725 among the ratepayers of the parish of St. George's, Hanover
Square, but not long ago a lead cistern was found in the house, bearing
his initials and the date 1721. On what terms he took the house is not
known; it is not mentioned in his will.
CHAPTER IV
Buononcini—Cuzzoni, Faustina, and Senesino—death of George I—The
Beggar's Opera—collapse of the Academy.
The opening performance of the Royal Academy of Music was undistinguished;
it is hard to understand why the noble directors should have begun their
season with Numitor, an opera by Porta, a Venetian composer, who is
described in the book of words as﹃Servant to His Grace the Duke of
Wharton.﹄The Duke of Wharton was not one of the directors. The company,
moreover, was more English than Italian; it included Baldassari,
Durastanti, and a second woman called Galerati, together with Anastasia
Robinson, who afterwards became Countess of Peterborough, Mrs. Turner
Robinson, wife of the organist of Westminster Abbey, Mrs. Dennis, and Mr.
Gordon. Numitor ran for five performances; on April 27 it was
succeeded by Handel's new opera Radamisto, in which the same
singers took part, except that Mrs. Dennis did not appear, and Mr. La
Garde sang the part of Farasmane. It is interesting to note that two of
the male parts were taken by women—Radamisto (Durastanti) and
Tigrane (Galerati). This looks as if the management had found it
impossible to secure a sufficient number of Italian castrati, who
probably demanded exorbitant fees.
Radamisto fared little better than Numitor; an enormous
crowd came to the first night, and many were turned away, but the opera
was not performed more than ten times in the season. It was probably above
the heads of the audience, for it is one of Handel's finest works for the
stage and a great advance on any of his previous operas. The only other
opera performed was Narciso, by Domenico Scarlatti, which was even
less successful than the others. Chrysander seems to suggest that
Scarlatti came to London with the idea of being a rival to Handel, but it
is much more likely that Handel himself persuaded the Academy to invite
the friend of his youth.
The season ended on June 25. Radamisto was printed, and was
published by Handel himself at his own house.
A really serious rival to Handel appeared in the autumn. Lord Burlington
had made the acquaintance in Rome of Giovanni Buononcini, and had heard
his opera Astarto. Perhaps he had had enough of Handel after three
years of his close company in Burlington House; in any case he probably
thought himself a better judge of music than Handel. He secured Buononcini
for the Academy, and the season opened on November 19 with Astarto.
The dedication to the Earl of Burlington is signed by Paolo Rolli, and no
other author's name is mentioned; but the libretto was really by Apostolo
Zeno (1708). Astarto had ten performances before Christmas, and
twenty afterwards; Radamisto was revived again, but Buononcini
established himself firmly in the favour of a large party. Although Burney
speaks very disparagingly of the music, it is not in the least surprising
that the opera attracted the public. In the first place, it had the
advantage of a magnificent cast of singers—Senesino, Boschi,
Berenstadt, Berselli, Durastanti, Salvai, and Galerati, and this sudden
blaze of vocal splendour would in itself have made the success of any
opera, especially of one which opened the season. Besides, Buononcini's
music was pleasing and, after a far longer stage experience than Handel's,
he naturally wrote what singers enjoyed singing. It must further be added
that Buononcini himself was a striking personality; he had produced operas
at Berlin and Vienna, as well as in various Italian cities, and was a man
of the world, accustomed to the society of courts. Besides, Buononcini was
a stranger and a novelty; Handel was becoming an established institution—indeed,
he was well on the way to becoming an English composer.
The same singers, with the addition of Anastasia Robinson, appeared in the
season of 1721-22. A curious experiment was tried in Muzio Scevola,
of which the first act was composed by Filippo Mattei, the second by
Buononcini and the third by Handel, each act having an overture and
concluding chorus. Some biographers have supposed that this was intended
to be a trial of strength, and that the contest resulted in the
acknowledged triumph of Handel; but Burney is probably right in saying
that the collaboration was merely a device to save time in getting the
opera ready, and Burney further points out that Buononcini's position
remained as strong as ever. It was in fact due to Buononcinci's next two
operas, and not to Handel's, that the Academy was able to declare a
dividend of seven per cent.
Handel's Floridante (December 9, 1721) had a moderate success only,
and against Handel's one opera (except for a few performances of Radamisto
at the very beginning of the season) Buononcini had three works to his
credit. The following season brought Handel better fortune, and a decline
in the popularity of Buononcini. In November and December, Muzio
Sceaola and Floridante were revived; on January 12, Handel
produced a new opera, Ottone, with a new singer, Francesca Cuzzoni,
who eclipsed all the other women singers completely, until after some
years she herself was driven into eclipse by her historic rival Faustina
Bordoni.
Ottone contains one number at least which is familiar to everyone
who knows the name of Handel—the gavotte at the end of the overture.
This spirited piece of music won popularity at the outset, and even to-day
it is probably the best known melody of Handel, after the﹃Harmonious
Blacksmith.﹄But the real success of Ottone was made by Cuzzoni.
How Cuzzoni came to be engaged at the opera is not clear. Handel cannot
possibly have ever heard her sing; it has been suggested that she was
engaged by Heidegger. She was about twenty-two, and had made her first
appearance at Venice in 1719, after which she sang in various Italian
theatres. She had a voice of extraordinary range, beauty, and agility; she
was equally accomplished both in florid music and in airs of a sustained
and pathetic character, and she was never known to sing out of tune. In
appearance she was anything but attractive: she was short, squat, and
excessively plain-featured. She was uneducated and ill-mannered, impulsive
and quarrelsome. Her arrival in London was delayed for some reason, so the
management sent Sandoni, the second harpsichord-player, to meet her,
probably at Dover. On the way to London they were married; Sandoni
doubtless had an eye to the money which she was to earn.
Her first air in Ottone, "Falsa imagine," fixed her reputation as
an expressive and pathetic singer (Burney); she had at first refused to
sing it, on which Handel remarked to her,﹃Madame, je sais que vous êtes
une véritable diablesse, mais je vous ferai savoir, moi, que je suis
Béelzebub, le chef des diables,﹄seized her round and waist, and
threatened to throw her out of the window. Handel had similar trouble with
Gordon, the English singer who came in for a small part in Flavio,
which was given on May 14. Gordon found fault with Handel's method of
accompanying, and threatened to jump on the harpsichord.
"Oh," replied Handel, "let me know when you will do that, and I will
advertise it; for I am sure more people will come to see you jump than to
hear you sing."
Two more operas by Buononcini were given, but his relations with the
Academy were not very cordial. He had been taken up by the Marlborough
family, and was commissioned to compose the funeral anthem for the burial
of the great Duke in June 1722. On May 16, 1723, Mrs. Pendarves informed
her sister that the young Duchess had settled £500 a year for life on
Buononcini,﹃provided he will not compose any more for the
ungrateful Academy, who do not deserve he should entertain them, since
they don't know how to value his works as they ought.﹄The contract,
however, seems not to have been carried out by the composer. Mrs.
Pendarves evidently took the news from the day's issue of a weekly
journal, adding only the name of the Duchess, which the paper had
suppressed. What the paper tells us is that the Academy had not engaged
Buononcini for the coming season.
Senesino and Cuzzoni had made life impossible for the other singers.
Durastanti retired to the Continent; Anastasia Robinson left the stage,
and married her old admirer Lord Peterborough. Senesino and Cuzzoni,
however, were indispensable to the success of the opera, and probably the
ridiculous affectations of the one and the abominable manners of the other
were not without their attraction to a public which could enjoy all the
pleasure of gossiping about them without having to put up with them at
close quarters.
The season of 1723 began in November with Buononcini's Farnace and
Handel's Ottone; in January 1724 a new opera, Vespasiano, by
Attilio Ariosti, was given, and ran for nine successive nights. Ariosti
was never a very troublesome rival to Handel; he was a man of amiable
character, and apparently quite content to remain aloof from the party
politics of the opera-house. On February 14, Handel produced his Giulio
Cesare, one of his finest dramatic works; it has been revived with
considerable success in recent years, partly owing to the fact that modern
audiences are more familiar with the episode of Caesar and Cleopatra than
with the subjects of Handel's other operas. Giulio Cesare had the
advantage of a strong cast; Senesino sang the title part, with Berenstadt
and Boschi to support him, and the women included Cuzzoni, as well as
Durastanti and Mrs. Robinson, who had not yet quitted the opera company.
Another masterpiece of Handel's, Tamerlano, inaugurated the autumn
season of 1724 in October; in December appeared Ariosti's Artaserse,
in January Giulio Cesare held the stage till the production of
another Handel opera, Rodelinda, which came out on February 13, and
ran for thirteen nights. Two more operas, by Ariosti and Leonardo Vinci of
Naples, completed the season, but it was evidently Handel who scored the
greatest triumphs, unless the honours should more properly go to Cuzzoni,
as Rodelinda, and her brown silk gown trimmed with silver. All the old
ladies, says Burney, were scandalised with its vulgarity and indecorum,
"but the young adopted it as a fashion so universally, that it seemed a
national uniform for youth and beauty."
Cuzzoni created a further sensation in the summer by giving birth to a
daughter. Mrs. Pendarves made much fun of the event. "It is a mighty
mortification it was not a son. Sons and heirs ought to be out of fashion
when such scrubs shall pretend to be dissatisfied at having a daughter;
'tis pity, indeed, that the noble name and family of the Sandonis should
be extinct! The minute she was brought to bed she sang' La speranza,' a
song in Otho."
Revivals of Rodelinda and Ottone took place in the following
season, and, in March 1726, Handel produced Scipio, in which the
famous march was heard for the first time on the rise of the curtain.
But Cuzzoni's throne was soon to be sharply contested. Ever since 1723 the
directors of the opera had been trying to secure Faustina Bordoni, and at
last, with a promise of £2,500 for the season (Cuzzoni received £2,000),
they succeeded. Faustina was born of a patrician family at Venice in 1700;
she had been brought up under the protection of Alessandro Marcello,
brother of the well-known composer, and had made her debut at Venice at
the age of sixteen. She sang mostly at Venice for several years, and in
1718 she appeared there in Pollaroli's Ariodante, along with
Cuzzoni herself. She sang at Munich in 1723, and in the summer of 1725 she
went to Vienna, where she stayed six months, enjoying an extraordinary
success. Nearly forty years afterwards the Empress Maria Theresa recalled
with pride how she herself, at the age of seven, had sung in an opera with
Faustina. At the end of March 1726 she left Vienna for London, where she
made her first appearance, on May 5, in Handel's new opera Alessandro,
which had been designed especially to show off both Faustina and Cuzzoni
in parts of exactly equal importance and difficulty. The immediate result
was to divide London society into two parties: young Lady Burlington and
her friends supported Faustina; Cuzzoni's admirers were led by Lady
Pembroke. Lady Walpole succeeded in getting both to sing at her house;
neither would sing in the presence of the other, but the hostess tactfully
managed to draw first one and then the other out of the music-room while
her rival enchanted the guests. Mrs. Pendarves also contrived to be on
good terms with both. She heard Cuzzoni in November privately, or perhaps
at a rehearsal, and writes, "my senses were ravished with harmony." The
opera was expected to begin about the middle of December,﹃but I think
Faustina and Madame Sandoni [i.e. Cuzzoni] are not perfectly agreed about
their parts.﹄The opening, however, was delayed by the absence of
Senesino, who had gone to Italy and did not return until fairly late in
December.
It was probably owing to this fact that opera in English was offered at
the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where Marcantonio Buononcini's Camilla,
first given in London in 1706, was revived by a mainly English cast of
singers. Mrs. Pendarves went to see it, and her criticisms are significant
for the taste of the time. "I can't say I was much pleased with it, I
liked it for old acquaintance sake, but there is not many of the songs
better than ballads."
Faustina—"the most agreeable creature in the world in company"—dined
with Mrs. Pendarves for a small musical party on January 26. On the
previous day there was the first rehearsal of Handel's Admeto. It
was the moment, says Burney, of Handel's greatest prosperity and English
patronage. Admeto exhibited conspicuously what Dr. Burney called
Handel's "science "; it was evidently considered to be complicated in
style, though at the same time both pathetic and passionate. "Music," says
Burney,﹃was no longer regarded as a mere soother of affliction, or
incitement to hilarity; it could now paint the passions in all their
various attitudes; and those tones which said nothing intelligible to the
heart began to be thought as; insipid as those of 'sounding brass or
tinkling cymbals.'﹄These words of Burney make one realise that Handel's
London operas must have affected their audiences almost in the way in
which the operas of Wagner startled the audiences of the nineteenth
century. Handel himself, like Wagner, was steadily developing his own
dramatic powers, and it is important to bear in mind that it was only
those marvellous singers of Handel's day, such as Senesino, Cuzzoni,
Faustina, and Boschi, who could inspire him to the creation of such music
as they only were competent to interpret.
Admeto was received with respect, and although the partisans of the
"rival queens" were noisy in their applause, no actual disturbance took
place until Admeto was followed by Buononcini's Astyanax on May 6.
On the first night of the new opera each side did its best to drown the
opposite party's favourite with a chorus of catcalls. The behaviour of the
audience became more and more disgraceful as the opera was repeated, until
on the last night (June 6), when the Princess of Wales was present,
Cuzzoni and Faustina delighted the sporting instincts of the nobility and
gentry of England by indulging in a free fight on the stage.
Five days later George I died suddenly at Osnabruck. George II was crowned
on October 11, to the music of Handel's Coronation Anthems. The opera
season reopened a month later. Apparently the quarrel between Cuzzoni and
Faustina had been patched up; probably neither of them wanted to lose
their English contracts. They appeared together in Handel's Riccardo
Primo, and again in Siroe (February 5, 1728), as well as in Tolomeo
(April 30), but the battle seems to have been won by Cuzzoni, who obtained
the more important parts. We hear of no more disturbances; the fact was
that the audiences were too thin to be noisy.
Mrs. Pendarves, always a devoted supporter of Handel, was pessimistic from
the beginning of the season.﹃I doubt operas will not survive longer than
this winter,﹄she wrote on November 25; "they are now at their last gasp;
the subscription is expired and nobody will renew it. The directors are
always squabbling, and they have so many divisions among themselves that I
wonder they have not broke up before; Senesino goes away next winter, and
I believe Faustina, so you see harmony is almost out of fashion."Admeto
was revived on June 1, 1728; this was Faustina's last appearance, and the
last night of the Royal Academy of Music. The opera was announced for June
11, but Faustina declared herself indisposed. The opera was shut up and
the company disbanded. Faustina went with Senesino to Paris, and thence to
Venice, where Cuzzoni also made her appearance, and continued in the local
dialect the campaign of slander against Faustina's alleged immoralities.
There were many reasons for the collapse of the opera. It had been carried
on with reckless extravagance, and the noble directors were in all
probability not very expert men of business. The scandalous behaviour of
all concerned in Astyanax may well have caused a falling-off in the
subscriptions. Mrs. Pendarves, who was a lady of unimpeachable conduct,
continued to go to the opera, but she was a serious lover of music and a
personal friend of Handel. The failure of the Academy is generally
attributed to the success of The Beggar's Opera, which had been
brought out at Lincoln's Inn Fields on January 29, 1728, and at once took
London by storm. A letter of Mrs. Pendarves, dated January 19, but
evidently continued later, tells us that she went to a rehearsal of Siroe:
﹃I like it extremely, but the taste of the town is so depraved, that
nothing will be approved of but the burlesque. The Beggar's Opera
entirely triumphs over the Italian one.﹄Even Mrs. Pendarves could not
help enjoying it, once she had seen it.
It is probable that Handel himself had contributed to the downfall of the
Academy. Out of the 487 performances given between 1720 and 1728, Handel's
works obtained 245, Buononcini's 108, and Ariosti's 55. The great singers
had drawn the public to listen to Handel's operas, but it is clear from
many contemporary allusions that Handel's music was too severe to be an
attraction in itself, except to cultivated musicians like Mrs. Pendarves.
The same accusations were made against Handel that were made in later
years against Mozart and Wagner—that his operas were noisy and
overloaded with learned accompaniments. The Italian opera was killed, not
so much by the fact that The Beggar's Opera made its conventions
ridiculous (for its conventions could at that time have been ridiculous
only to quite unmusical people), as by the incontestable attraction of the
new work itself. It was witty and outspoken, with abundance of topical
satire; its music consisted of the tunes that everybody knew, and it
presented the public with the irresistible fascinations of Lavinia Fenton,
who was soon to become the Duchess of Bolton.
Handel may well have resented the success of The Beggar's Opera,
but the collapse of the Academy was in reality no great disaster for his
own interests. In the first place, he had done very well out of it from a
financial point of view; the noble directors might have lost their money,
but he had been only their paid servant, in which capacity he had
accumulated enough to invest no less than £10,000 of his own in the next
operatic venture. He obviously realised the strength of the position which
he had built up for himself both as a composer and as a man of business.
The most important result of the Academy's career had been to provide
Handel with the opportunity of consolidating his own style as a composer
of musical drama. Like all the court composers of his age he had provided
whatever his patrons required—chamber music, water music, minuets
for court balls, Church music for royal ceremonial; but the music on which
his own heart was set was that of the theatre.
CHAPTER V
Handel naturalized—partnership with Heidegger—Esther—the
Opera of the Nobility—visit to Oxford—opera season at Covent
Garden—Charles Jennens—collapse of both opera-houses.
Handel had by this time definitely decided to make England his home; on
February 13, 1726, he had been naturalised as an English subject. He had
every reason to regard England as the best place in which to live. He
enjoyed the protection of the German court; George II and Queen Caroline
gave him indeed a good deal more encouragement than George I. The
appointments of composer to the Chapel Royal and composer to the court
were purely honorary, but they strengthened his position. As to the
opera-house, he must by now have felt that he was its unquestioned
autocrat, and he could not help being aware that he was without a rival in
Europe as far as the stage was concerned, for old Scarlatti had gone to
his grave, and the younger generation had produced no composer of such
outstanding eminence. And in England music was generously rewarded from a
material point of view; high fees were paid, not only to singers, but to
teachers as well, and England was also one of the few countries where
music-printing was a flourishing business. A good proportion of Handel's
savings must have come from the sale of his published compositions; among
Handel's contemporaries no other composer in Europe had so many of his
works printed during his lifetime. English society seemed always ready to
subscribe for a new musical work, and neither in Paris nor in Amsterdam
was music so admirably engraved as in London.
Encouraged by the Princess Royal, Handel went into partnership with
Heidegger, who had also made his own profits out of the opera, as well as
out of his notorious masquerades; they leased the King's Theatre for a
period of five years. The first thing to do was to secure new singers, and
for this purpose Handel went to Italy, probably in the autumn of 1728.
Heidegger had already tried to bring back Senesino and the two﹃costly
canary-birds,﹄as Colley Cibber called them, but they had had enough of
London, and probably of Handel too. Little is known of the details of this
Italian journey; it has been said that Handel travelled with Steffani, but
this is impossible, as Steffani died at Frankfurt early in the year.
Mainwaring tells us that, at Rome, Cardinal Colonna invited him to his
palace, but that Handel, hearing that the Pretender was staying there,
prudently declined the invitation. In engaging singers he seems to have
been perhaps more prudent than was desirable, for his new company did not
contain any very distinguished names. In place of Senesino he obtained the
castrato Bernacchi; his new first woman was Signora Strada del Po',
who was a fine singer, but so unattractive in appearance that London
nicknamed her "The Pig." It is interesting to note that he also engaged a
tenor, Annibale Fabri, although in those; days tenors were considered only
fit for old men's parts of minor importance, and at Naples were generally
given the parts of comic old women. Fabri's wife and another woman were
announced as good actresses of male parts. "Fabri has a tenor voice,"
wrote Mrs. Pendarves,﹃sweet, clear and firm, but not strong enough, I
doubt, for the stage. He sings like a gentleman, without making faces, and
his manner is particularly agreeable.﹄Perhaps Handel's friendship with
Mrs. Pendarves had given him a sure insight into the taste of English
gentlewomen.
In the summer of 1729 Handel paid a visit to his mother at Halle; she was
then blind and half paralysed. Bach sent his son Friedemann over from
Leipzig to beg Handel to come and see him, as he was himself too ill to
make the journey, but Handel not unnaturally declined. Towards the end of
June he passed through Hanover, and also went to Hamburg, where he engaged
a German bass Riemschneider.
The opera season began on December 2, with Handel's Lothario, but
it had only a moderate success. After a few revivals of Giulio Cesare,
he brought out a second new opera, Partenope, on February 24.
Despite its many beauties, it was even less successful than Lothario.
Handel's audience did not go to the theatre to listen to his music; they
went to hear the singers, and Bernacchi, who was no longer a young man,
was a poor substitute for Senesino. Strada was the only member of the
company who interested the audience. For the next season something better
had to be found, and through Francis Colman, the English Envoy at
Florence, Senesino was persuaded to accept 1,400 guineas instead of the
2,000 that he had received before. He opened the season of 1730 on
November 3, with his former rôle of Scipio. For the moment Handel remained
in the background; the next opera was a pasticcio, that is, an
opera made up of favourite songs from various operas stuck into any
convenient libretto. On February 2 there came out the new opera of Handel,
Poro, which turned the tide once more in the composer's favour.
Later on, Rinaldo and Rodelinda were revived, but the season
came to an early end on May 29. For the following winter some changes were
made in the cast. Senesino and Strada were of course indispensable, and
the most important new acquisition was Montagnana, the bass, for whom
Handel was to write some of his most celebrated songs.
After revivals of Tamerlano and Admeto, Handel brought out
Ezio on January 15, 1732; it had only five performances. Sosarme
(February 19) had ten; it is remembered now by the exquisite song,﹃Rendi
'l sereno al ciglio,﹄which was sung by Strada. The remainder of the
season presented nothing of any special interest until on the last night
Handel offered his subscribers a new type of entertainment in the shape of
Acis and Galatea.
On Handel's birthday, February 23, Bernard Gates, the master of the
children of the Chapel Royal, arranged a private performance of Esther,
which had been neglected since its first performance at Canons some twelve
years before. Among the boys who sang and acted in the "masque" were
Beard, who afterwards became Handel's favourite tenor, and Randall,
eventually Professor of Music in Cambridge, who took the part of Esther.
The performance was repeated twice before a paying public at the Crown and
Anchor Tavern, where concerts were often held, and on April 20 a rival
organisation advertised a further performance of Esther at the
concert-room in Villiers Street. On this occasion it was described as﹃an
oratorio or sacred drama,﹄and was evidently sung without action. Princess
Anne wished to see it on the stage of the opera-house but the Bishop of
London forbade a dramatic performance. As the bishop's ban was ultimately
the cause of Handel's turning his attention to oratorio in preference to
opera, it has sometimes been suggested that Handel might have created a
new type of national English opera on biblical subjects if only his
lordship had not interfered. In justice to the bishop it has to be pointed
out that his objection seems to have been raised, not against the dramatic
presentation of Bible stories (for he did not discountenance Gates'
performances by the choristers at the Crown and Anchor), but against their
presentation in a regular theatre by professional opera singers. Such
prejudice may be difficult to understand at the present day, but even well
into the middle of the nineteenth century persons of severe morality
regarded the theatre and all who belonged thereto with stern disapproval,
and the notorious scandals associated with Cuzzoni and Faustina, to say
nothing of Heidegger, were not likely to have washed out the memory of
Jeremy Collier's denunciations.
"The sacred story of Esther, an oratorio in English," was
accordingly announced for May 2, with the information that﹃there will be
no acting on the stage, but the house will be fitted up in a decent manner
for the audience; the Musick [i.e. the orchestra] to be disposed after the
manner of the coronation service.﹄Within a fortnight, Thomas Arne, father
of the composer, advertised a performance of Acis and Galatea at
the Little Theatre in the Haymarket﹃with all the choruses, scenes,
machines, and other decorations, being the first time it was performed in
a theatrical way.﹄The laws of the time gave no protection to musical and
dramatic copyright. Handel could only reply by giving a performance of the
work himself; his one advantage was that as composer he could remodel the
score and make several new additions to it. But he did not have the work
acted; it was sung in costume with a background of appropriate scenery.
Even in this form it obtained four performances; Senesino and Strada took
part in it, singing in English.
Such a setting may appear strange to modern readers, but, even if it was a
new idea for England at the time, it was a fairly well established
tradition on the Continent, and Handel may very likely have seen a similar
entertainment in Italy. The subscribers to the opera would see little in
it that was incongruous. They were accustomed to see singers in all operas
wearing dresses that differed very little from their own, and scenery
which recalled their own Italianate gardens and palaces; Handelian opera,
in any case, left little scope for what most people now call acting. At
the same time we may be pretty sure that concert singers, especially
Italians, allowed themselves far more liberty of spontaneous expressive
movement than Victorian oratorio singers holding their music-books in
front of them by traditional convention.
Four more performances of Acis and Galatea were given at the
opera-house in December 1732; Handel evidently saw that it would be a sure
attraction. Alessandro and Tolomeo were revived, and on
January 23 he produced a new opera, Orlando, which had ten
performances, with six more later in the season. Orlando is one of
Handel's most original operas; he seems always to have derived a peculiar
inspiration from the poems of Tasso and Ariosto, as in the case of Rinaldo.
Orlando is a thoroughly romantic opera—Chrysander even
compares it with those of Weber—full of episodes of madness and
magic; it is so far removed from the ordinary conventions of its time that
we can well imagine it to have startled both its audiences and its
singers.
The affairs of the opera-house were going badly, and it is probable that
there were considerable dissension within its walls. It is certain that
relations between Handel and Senesino were becoming more and more
strained; Orlando was the last opera of Handel's in which he sang.
It seems fairly certain also that Heidegger was none too loyal as a
partner. Heidegger was in a strong position, for he was the actual owner
of the stock of scenery and other appurtenances taken over from the
original Academy. He seems to have lent the theatre to Buononcini for some
performances of Griselda, and, when the lease came to an end, it
was Heidegger who left Handel in the lurch and allowed a rival
organisation to secure it.
There was, too, a further reason for the general hostility against Handel.
Encouraged by the success of Acis and Galatea, he had composed a
new oratorio, Deborah, which was performed at the opera-house on
March 17, by the King's command. For this work prices were doubled;
tickets were a guinea each, and admission to the gallery half a guinea,
instead of five shillings. At the second performance the normal prices
were charged. The raising of prices for an extraordinary performance might
well seem nothing unreasonable; but the event came exactly at the moment
of the popular outcry against Walpole's Excise Bill, and the satirists of
the day seized the opportunity of comparing Handel with Walpole.
Handel was now nearly fifty years of age. In the days of Rinaldo he
had been a young man of twenty-five, making friends with those of his own
age or younger, a new attraction with all the fascination of genius and
youth. In the course of a generation he had become an established
institution. He had made a success; he had amassed a fortune; he had
secured to himself the unshaken confidence of the court; but he had
inevitably made enemies. The native musicians were very naturally jealous
of the foreigner, and the numerous foreign musicians in London jealous of
one who made more money out of the extravagant English than they did
themselves. The Italian singers found him tyrannical, and society very
probably resented his rough manners. Society had engaged him to provide
music for their entertainment, and he took up the unheard-of attitude of
expecting society to pay its guineas for whatever music he chose to write.
England, one might almost say, had spoiled him, for it was only in England
that "The Great Bear," as he was sometimes called, could go his own way—a
musician behaving with the complete disregard of public opinion which was
considered the exclusive privilege of the English nobility. In any other
country he would have been forced either to pander to the taste of a court
or to relapse into obscurity. It was not until after the French Revolution
that a Beethoven could display the independence of Handel in the
aristocratic environment of Vienna.
The English nobility, having set Handel this example, claimed their own
rights, and organised a rival opera-house at Lincoln's Inn Fields. They
had no difficulty in seducing, first Senesino, then Montagnana, and
finally Heidegger. Only Strada remained faithful to Handel. Buononcini
having lost their favour, they engaged as composer the Neapolitan Nicolo
Porpora, famous then as a great trainer of singers, and still more famous
in later years as the teacher of Haydn. If Handel had the King and Queen
on his side, the nobility could count on the support of Frederick Prince
of Wales, who was immensely popular throughout the country and was on the
worst possible terms with his royal parents. The Opera of the Nobility, as
the new syndicate was called, was making its plans in good time, directly
after the end of Handel's season.
In July 1733, Handel was invited to Oxford for a series of performances of
his works, and it was proposed to confer on him the honorary degree of
Doctor of Music. The Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Holmes, was a loyal Hanoverian,
and hoped by honouring Handel to do something to counteract the Jacobite
reputation of the University. Esther and Deborah were
performed, as well as the Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate, and
the Coronation Anthems; Handel further provided a new oratorio, Athaliah.
The degree he refused to accept, for what reason has never been explained.
Various suggestions have been offered. The Abbé Prevost, who was in
England at the time, says that he refused the degree out of modesty; later
biographers have differed in their views as to whether modesty was one of
Handel's characteristics. Others have supposed that he refused to pay the
fee of £100 that was demanded, but it is inconceivable that a fee should
have been demanded for an honorary degree, although it would naturally
have been paid by candidates who took the degree in the normal way. The
concerts were attended by large audiences, many music lovers coming over
from Eton and Cambridge, although there was considerable resentment at the
price of admission—five shillings, a small amount compared with
Handel's London charges. This "Handel Festival" at Oxford is significant,
for it shows that in the space of no more than a year oratorio had begun
to make a wide appeal, even outside London, although it was a form of
composition that was new to English audiences. Esther, considered
as a masque to be acted, might be said to continue the English traditions
of the previous century, but there was no precedent in England for
anything like Esther in concert form. The only English works which
offered anything remotely like oratorio were the odes of Purcell and Blow
for the musicians' festivals on St. Cecilia's Day, apart from the greater
services and anthems of Purcell, which were composed, not for
entertainment, but for liturgical use.
After the Oxford concerts, Handel and Schmidt went to Italy to look for
singers. They heard Farinelli, the most famous castrato of the
century, but did not engage him; perhaps his demands were too high. The castrato
whom they did engage was Carestini, who, though less celebrated, was at
any rate a singularly artistic singer. Durastanti came back, and, in place
of Montagnana, Handel contented himself with Waltz, a German, who is often
described as having been Handel's cook. Burney, at any rate, recorded that
he was said to have filled this office, but Burney remembered him chiefly
as a popular comic singer. He had sung Polyphemus in Arne's pirated
performance of Acis and Galatea, and owing to the defection of
Montagnana, took his place in Athaliah at Oxford. He had﹃a coarse
figure and a still coarser voice﹄(Burney).
Handel opened his season on October 30, 1733. He had already finished the
composition of a new opera, Ariadne, but it was not brought out
until January 26, 1734. The reason, no doubt, was that an opera on the
same subject by Porpora was produced by the Opera of the Nobility on
December 29. Handel would no doubt have heard that it was in rehearsal,
and have postponed his own production until he could see how Porpora's was
succeeding. The two operas obtained the same number of performances, but
Handel's theatre was seldom full, and many opera-goers were dissatisfied
at his giving them oratorios, such as Deborah and Acis, on
opera nights; these, however, seem to have been commanded by the King, and
that in itself would make them all the more unpopular.
In March the Princess Royal was married to the Prince of Orange, and
Handel was commissioned to write a wedding anthem. He also provided a
secular entertainment in the shape of Parnaso in festa, described
as a serenata. It was not unlike a masque; Apollo and the Muses
appeared in costume on Mount Parnassus, but apparently there was no
acting. The music was adapted from Athaliah, which, so far, had
only been heard at Oxford. Oratorio was also attempted by Handel's rival;
Mrs. Pendarves heard a work of his at Lincoln's Inn Fields in March.﹃It
is a fine solemn piece of music,﹄she wrote,﹃but I confess I think the
subject too solemn for a theatre. To have words of piety made use of only
to introduce good music, is reversing what it ought to be, and most of the
people that hear the oratorio make no reflection on the meaning of the
words, though God is addressed in the most solemn manner.﹄Needless to
say, it was "not equal to Mr. Handel's oratorio of Esther or Deborah."
Mrs. Pendarves was at this time a near neighbour of Handel's in Lower
Brook Street; one of her letters describes a small musical party (her
musical parties were always small) a month later. Apparently there were
not more than ten guests, including Lord Shaftesbury, who begged another
guest to bring him, and was admitted as being "a profess'd friend of Mr.
Handel"; the only professional musicians present were Handel and Strada.
﹃I never was so well entertained at an opera! Mr. Handel was in the best
humour in the world, and played lessons and accompanied Strada and all the
ladies that sung from seven o' the clock till eleven.﹄In such company
Handel could evidently be more agreeable than on the stage at rehearsals,
and it is interesting to note that the amateurs had no timidity about
singing before Strada, and that Handel was willing to accompany all of
them alike.
In July 1734, Handel's lease of the King's Theatre came to an end, and he
found the theatre let at once by some means to his rivals, the Opera of
the Nobility. He therefore entered into an arrangement with Rich for the
use of his new theatre in Covent Garden, but his autumn season actually
opened at Lincoln's Inn Fields on October 5. The probable reason for this
was that the Princess Anne was spending the summer in England and wished
to hear some of Handel's operas. She was a remarkably gifted musician, and
Handel considered her to be the best of his pupils; she not only sang and
played the harpsichord well, but was thoroughly grounded in the
theoretical side of music and quite capable of composing a fugue,
according to a Dutch musician who became acquainted with her after her
marriage. She came to England on July 2 for a long stay, and at once
persuaded Handel to give three additional performances of Il Pastor
Fido, which he had revived that season. Pastor Fido and Ariadne
were given again for her in October; probably Covent Garden was not quite
ready for performances. Princess Anne left England on October 21, and her
last words at parting were to beg Lord Hervey to do all he could to help
Handel.
The chief attraction to the public at Covent Garden was probably not
Handel but Mlle Sallé, a French dancer who had been engaged by Rich. The
first performance at the new theatre was a ballet, Terpsichore, in
order that she might inaugurate the season. Terpsichore, which
includes songs and a chorus, served as prologue to Il Pastor Fido.
The next opera was Oreste, a pasticcio made up by Handel himself
from his own works; on January 8, 1735, he produced his Ariodante, an
opera over which he had spent the unusually long time of ten weeks. The
score was begun on August 12 and finished on October 24. The story is
taken from Ariosto, and, as with Orlando, Handel found that it afforded
opportunities for his peculiar vein of romanticism. On April 16 he
followed it up with Alcina, again on a subject from Ariosto, and one of
even more romantic character. Ariosto's enchantress Alcina was the model
for Tasso's better-known Armida, who provided both Lulli and Gluck with
one of their most dramatic heroines, and Burney says, with some justice,
that Handel's Alcina gave birth to all the Armidas and Rinaldos of modern
times. Both Ariodante and Alcina contained a large amount of ballet music,
and the dances in Alcina, intermingled with choruses in the French manner,
are among Handel's most attractive compositions.
Mrs. Pendarves, after the rehearsal of Alcina, described Handel as himself
"a necromancer in the midst of his own enchantments," but he could not
prevail against the enchantments of Farinelli, who had been engaged by the
rival opera company. There could be no competing against a combination
that included along with him Senesino, Cuzzoni, and Montagnana. The one
powerful counter-attraction that Handel could offer was oratorio on
Wednesdays and Fridays in Lent, when operas were not allowed to be given.
Porpora's David, which the rival management put on, had no chance against
Esther, Deborah, and Athaliah. Alcina carried the Opera on to the end of
the season, the well-known air "Verdi prati," which Carestini had at first
refused to sing, being encored at every performance. Handel's alleged
angry retort to Carestini in comical broken English has been often quoted
from Burney; but Schoelcher very sensibly observed that Handel was pretty
certain to have conversed with Carestini in Italian.
The newspapers informed the world in May that Handel was going to spend
the summer in Germany. His health had been seriously undermined, and it
may well have been possible that he had talked of taking a cure at
Aix-la-Chapelle; but on this occasion he went no farther than Tunbridge
Wells. It was probably in the earlier part of 1735 that he made the
acquaintance of Charles Jennens, a young man who was eventually to play a
great part in his life, for on July 28 he wrote to Jennens to say that he
was just starting for Tunbridge.
The letter is so short that it may be quoted here in full, for it gives us
a great deal of interesting information.
London,
July 28, 1735.
Sir,
I received your very agreeable letter with
the enclosed Oratorio. I am just going to Tunbridge;
yet what I could read of it in haste,
gave me a great deal of satisfaction. I shall
have more leisure time there to read it with all
the attention it deserves.
There is no certainty of any Scheme for
next Season, but it is probable that something
or other may be done, of which I shall take
the liberty to give you notice, being extremely
obliged to you for the generous concern you
show upon this account.
The Opera of Alcina is a writing out, and
shall be sent according to your direction. It is
always a great pleasure to me if I have an
opportunity to show the sincere respect with
which I have the honour to be,
Sir,
&c., &c.,
GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL.
Jennens was a conspicuous figure in the London society of his day. At the
time of this correspondence he was thirty-five, and unmarried; he had
inherited vast wealth in his youth and spent it freely. He was
ostentatious, even for an age when extravagance was fashionable; but
although he was conceited and on occasions foolish, he was certainly
possessed of considerable intellectual gifts, and the things which
interested him most in life were literature, music, and the fine arts. The
letter shows us that he must have admired Alcina sufficiently to
ask the composer for a copy of the score. He also seized the opportunity
of offering him a libretto for a new oratorio. He had a very good opinion
of himself as a poet, and it is possible that he foresaw the importance of
the new type of semi-dramatic entertainment which Handel was creating.
There were plenty of Italian poetasters, even in London itself, who could
put together a conventional opera-book, but English oratorio was still in
the making, and it was not so easy to find a literary framework for it.
In any case, it was evident that Italian opera was a precarious
enterprise. In October the papers again gave out that Handel was going to
give oratorios and concerts at Covent Garden; no operas were announced,
and for the time being Handel appeared to have abandoned opera altogether.
He made no move until Lent 1736, and then brought out Alexander's Feast
(February 19), which he had set to music in the previous two months. Those
ever popular favourites Esther and Acis and Galatea followed
it, and, as in the foregoing season, Handel played organ concertos between
the acts of these works. It is evident that as Handel could not secure the
great Italian singers for his oratorios he felt obliged to offer his
public some other display of virtuosity, and his own performance on the
organ seems to have been considered a very powerful attraction.
The marriage of the Prince of Wales to Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha
(April 27, 1736) provided him with unexpected opportunities for coming
before the public. It seems to have been at the desire of the Princess
herself that he undertook a short Italian opera season of eight
performances, which eventually was extended to ten. Atalanta,
Handel's new opera for this season, in which the chief singer was
Gizziello, then making his first appearance in England, was composed
especially to celebrate the royal nuptials, and seems to have finally
converted the Prince of Wales to the music of Handel. He now became a
regular supporter of Handel's theatre, with the result that the King
promptly withdrew his patronage, as he refused to be seen in the same
house as the Prince. Encouraged by this sign of princely favour, Handel
reopened Covent Garden in November with a revival of Alcina,
followed by Atalanta. Three more new operas were ready, or nearly
so; Handel seems to have prepared himself for the winter in better time
than usual. But neither Arminio (January 12, 1737), nor Giustino
(February 16), nor even Berenice, with its famous minuet (May 18),
could save Handel from ruin. The rival opera-house was in no better case.
Handel was obliged to close Covent Garden on June 1, and the Haymarket
followed suit ten days later. Opera at both houses had been killed, mainly
by the folly of party strife.
CHAPTER VI
Bankruptcy and paralysis—visit to Aix-la-Chapelle—the last
operas—Vauxhall Gardens—Handel's "borrowings"—visit to
Ireland—Messiah and other oratorios.
The collapse of the Opera left Handel not only bankrupt, but with
seriously endangered health. In April 1737 it had been announced that he
was "indisposed with the rheumatism," from which he made a slight
temporary recovery; but before the season was over it became clear that he
was suffering from paralysis. "His right arm was become useless to him,"
says Mainwaring,﹃and how greatly his senses were disordered at intervals,
for a long time, appeared from an hundred instances, which are better
forgotten than recorded.﹄With some difficulty his medical advisers
persuaded him to go to the sulphur bath of Aix-la-Chapelle, where,
according to Mainwaring, he submitted to prolonged and drastic treatment.
His cure was considered remarkably rapid, and the nuns (presumably nursing
sisters) who heard him play the organ within a few hours of leaving his
bath ascribed it to a miracle. "Such a conclusion," observes our clerical
biographer, "in such persons was natural enough."
It has been asserted that during his stay at Aix, Handel composed a
cantata for the five-hundredth anniversary of the foundation of Elbing, a
town in East Prussia between Danzig and Königsberg. A German researcher
about 1869 appears to have discovered documents at Elbing mentioning the
cantata, with the name of the poet and that of a local singer, Jean du
Grain, who composed the recitatives; Handel "of London" was said to have
composed the choruses. No trace of the music has survived, and there seems
to be no evidence whatever to connect this work with Handel's visit to
Aix. Nor is it possible to suggest any reason why the authorities of this
remote place should have applied to Handel for a composition.
According to Mainwaring, Handel stayed six weeks at Aix; the London papers
announced his return on November 7, 1737. The management of the Opera had
now been taken over by Heidegger, but the death of Queen Caroline on
November 20 caused all theatres to be closed from that date until the end
of December. It was announced in the papers that the Opera would reopen on
January 10 with a new oratorio by Handel, called Saul, but this
performance did not take place, and the theatre actually reopened on
January 7 with his new opera Faramondo. This opera was the first
work that Handel had undertaken after his return to London, but its
composition was interrupted by that of the Funeral Anthem for the Queen.
Although she died on November 20, Handel did not receive the King's
command to write the anthem until December 7, as George II was strangely
undecided in making arrangements for the funeral. It was finally fixed for
December 17, and a special organ was hurriedly built for it in Henry VII's
chapel at Westminster Abbey. Handel's anthem was performed by 80 singers
and 100 instrumentalists. Queen Caroline had been one of his most faithful
friends, and his gratitude and affection for her found utterance in music
which Burney placed "at the head of all his works for expression, harmony
and pleasing effects."
It was at ten at night on Christmas Eve that Handel finished the score of
Faramondo; on Boxing Day he began the composition of Serse.
Faramondo had only six performances, and Serse did not
appear on the stage until April 15, when it ran for five nights only. It
is remembered now, if at all, by the fact that the first song in it is the
so-called "celebrated Largo," but the opera as a whole is of curious
interest. "He was neither in health, prosperity, or spirits," says Burney,
﹃when it was composed; appearances remain in his foul score [i.e. rough
copy] of a mind disturbed, if not diseased. There are more passages, and
even whole pages, cancelled in this score, than in any one of all his
former operas.﹄Serse, it must be explained, is a comic opera, and
the only comic opera that Handel ever wrote. What induced him to attempt
this style it is difficult to conceive. It is of course true that the
failure of Handel's earlier operas was largely due to the success of The
Beggar's Opera (1728), and of other comic entertainments which
succeeded it—Hurlothrumbo (1729), Pasquin (1736) and
The Dragon of Wantley (1737). A new type of comic opera had arisen
in Italy too, and comic intermezzi were first seen in Italian grand
opera in London in January 1737, although it was not until 1748 that a
real company of Italian comic-opera singers came over to England. But what
is more important to notice is that the whole style of Italian opera was
changing during the second quarter of the century. Handel had continued to
develop his own style, based on the grand manner of old Scarlatti, but
Handel's operas were practically unknown outside London and Hamburg; in
Italy, Scarlatti's style had already become old-fashioned before his death
in 1725, and opera was moving on towards the lighter and flimsier manner
of Galuppi, who first came to London in this year of Serse, 1738.
In choosing the libretto of Serse, Handel seems to have been making
a desperate attempt to keep up with the taste of the day. Humour he had in
plenty; one has only to recall Acis and Galatea. But the humour of
Serse, diverting as it is to the modern historical student, is
neither the musical nor the dramatic humour of 1737; the plot bears no
resemblance whatever to the Neapolitan comic operas of Vinci and
Pergolesi, but rather recalls the very early operas, based on Spanish
comedies, composed by Alessandro Scarlatti in the 1680's. Serse was
revived a few years ago in Germany, considerably cut about and reduced to
one act, in which arrangement it had some success; but we can well
understand its complete failure on its first London production.
The only satisfaction which Handel received in that unfortunate season of
1738 was the proceeds of his benefit concert at the Haymarket on March 28,
organised for him by his friends, apparently rather against his own wish.
According to Burney the net receipts were £800; Mainwaring puts the figure
at £1,500. Even if we accept Burney's estimate, the sum is remarkable, and
particularly so in view of the known hostility of a large section of
society towards the composer. It can only be supposed that Handel's
physical and mental collapse had been grave enough to awaken a wide-spread
sense of pity for his misfortunes. Another mark of popular appreciation
was the erection of a statue of Handel, executed by Roubiliac, at Vauxhall
Gardens, in recognition of the pleasure which his music had afforded to
the frequenters of that famous resort. This piece of "laudable idolatry,"
as Burney calls it, was thus described by a contemporary journalist:﹃Mr.
Handel is represented in a loose robe, sweeping the lyre, and listening to
its sounds; which a little boy sculptured at his feet seems to be writing
down on the back of a violon-cello. The whole composition is in an elegant
taste.﹄Commissioned by an impresario who had made a fortune out of the
use of Handel's music, it now appropriately adorns the vestibule of
Messrs. Novello's music-shop in Wardour Street.
Charles Jennens, writing to his cousin Lord Guernsey on September 19,
1738, remarks that "Mr. Handel's head is more full of maggots than ever."
Towards the end of July he had begun the composition of Saul, for
which Jennens had provided the libretto three years before. It is evident
that Handel intended to startle his audiences with his new oratorio
scheme. He had ordered a new organ for the theatre at a cost of £500,
constructed so that he might have a better command of his performers, and
he had also acquired another instrument, which Jennens calls a "Tubalcain"—in
other words a set of bells played from a keyboard—which he intended
to use in the scene in which the Israelites welcome David after his
victory over the Philistines. It is curious that Handel should have
dramatised the insanity of Saul just after he had himself recovered from
mental derangement.
No sooner was Saul finished (September 27) than Handel, four days
later, began the composition of Israel in Egypt. Saul was
first performed on January 16, 1739, and enjoyed a moderate success, but
Israel (April 4) was a failure, even after it had been shortened
and made more attractive by the insertion of Italian opera songs.
Israel in Egypt is the most conspicuous example of a strange and
almost unaccountable habit which from about this period began to show
itself in Handel's methods of composition—the incorporation of large
quantities of music by other composers. Samuel Wesley was the first person
to draw attention to this practice of Handel's, though only in a private
letter of 1808. In 1831 Dr. Crotch, in his professorial lectures at
Oxford, named no less than twenty-nine composers whom Handel had﹃quoted
or copied.﹄The researches of Chrysander, Dr. Max Seiffert, Ebenezer
Prout, and Sedley Taylor eventually proved beyond dispute that not only Israel,
but several other works of Handel were largely made up from the music of
other men.
Chrysander maintained that Handel began appropriating other men's ideas as
early as 1707, for not only Rodrigo and Agrippina, but also
La Resurrezione and the Laudate pueri show obvious
reminiscences of Keiser's opera Octavia (Hamburg, 1705). These were
probably subconscious, like Handel's reminiscences of Scarlatti and others
at this period; they need not be taken any more seriously than Schubert's
frequent reminiscences of Beethoven. But in Atalanta (1736) and Giustino
(1737), Prout discovered quotations and adaptations several bars long from
a Passion by Graun, which is known to have been composed not many
years before. Further fragments of this Passion were identified by
Prout in Alexander's Feast and the Wedding Anthem (1736); Saul,
like Israel, incorporates several movements from a Te Deum
by Urio (fl. 1660). From this date onwards until the end of his
career Handel systematically drew upon the works of other musicians.
There has been much controversy over this question, and many attempts have
been made to explain away Handel's "borrowings" so as to leave no moral
stain on his character, which indeed, by all contemporary accounts, was
scrupulously upright. Sedley Taylor (1906) was certainly anxious to clear
Handel's character, but still more concerned to arrive at the exact truth,
and his method of presenting the evidence throws a new light on Handel's
procedure. He showed that in most cases Handel made frequent alterations
in the music which he utilised, almost as if Stradella (to cite one name
out of many) had been a young pupil to whom he was giving a lesson in
composition.
A careful study of these alterations suggests a reason for Handel's action
which seems not to have occurred to any previous writer on the subject. No
one seems to have noticed hitherto that Handel's "borrowings" begin in
1736 on a small scale, and become more frequent in 1737, after which they
develop into a regular habit. It seems only natural therefore to connect
them with Handel's mental collapse; it became acute in the spring of 1737,
but it may well have been approaching in the previous year.
There is no need to go so far as to suggest that Handel suffered from
moral insanity and was incapable of distinguishing between right and
wrong; but it is quite conceivable that his paralytic stroke affected his
brain in such a way that he may sometimes have had a difficulty in
starting a composition. Biographers of Handel have more than once drawn
attention to phases in which he seems to have suffered from the inability
to make a definite decision. Indecision is a common symptom of
overstrained nerves, and anyone who has attempted musical composition or
taught it to students will understand the hesitation and uncertainty which
often attends the first writing down of a musical theme, although, once
the initial idea has been settled, the continuation and development of it
may proceed without difficulty. Any musician who studies the examples
printed by Sedley Taylor will at once exclaim that for a man of Handel's
experience, to say nothing of his fertility or indeed of his genius, it
would have been far less trouble to compose an original setting of given
words than to adapt them so laboriously to music written by someone else
for a totally different purpose. But after his attack of paralysis there
may well have been occasional moments when Handel could not make up his
mind to write down an idea of his own, but may very likely have found that
when once he had an idea ready on paper before him, whether that of
another composer or an old one of his own, he could then continue to
compose, and often make alterations in the music under his eyes which
transformed it from a commonplace into a masterpiece.
In the autumn of 1739 Handel transferred his concerts to the smaller
theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where at first there seemed some hope of
success. On November 17 he produced his setting of Dryden's Ode for St.
Cecilia's Day; it was repeated several times, Alexander's Feast
and Acis and Galatea being added to the programmes. But a month
later an exceptionally severe frost set in; the Thames was frozen over,
and for two months it was useless to open the theatre, owing to the
impossibility of warming it adequately. In February he produced L'Allegro,
adapted by Charles Jennens from Milton's L'Allegro and Il
Penseroso, to which Jennens had added a third part of his own, Il
Moderato; but the public, whether from indifference to the work or
from fear of the cold, refused to come to it. Handel was once more on the
verge of ruin, but that did not prevent him from giving a performance of
his two most popular works, Acis and Alexander's Feast, for
the benefit of a new musical charity.
The charity in which Handel was so keenly interested had been founded in
1738 to assist impoverished musicians and their families; it still carries
on its honourable work under the title of the Royal Society of Musicians
of Great Britain.
The same year saw the inauguration of another charitable institution which
owed much to the continued generosity of Handel, the Foundling Hospital.
Like Hogarth, who was also a benefactor, Handel did not confine his
support to an occasional gift, but took the warmest personal interest in
the place, and eventually both he and Hogarth were made governors of it.
The managers of the Opera had found themselves quite unable to continue
productions on the grand scale of former years. In the winter of 1739-40
there had been an insignificant season at Covent Garden; it seems to have
been directed by the Italian composer Pescetti, who, in the following
winter, started concerts at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. Mrs.
Pendarves, who during the last few years had not lived much in London, and
had thus dropped out of Handel's life, wrote in November:﹃The concerts
begin next Saturday at the Haymarket. Carestini sings, Pescetti composes;
the house is made up into little boxes, like the playhouses abroad.﹄Dr.
Burney gives a comic account of the undertaking.﹃The opera, a tawdry,
expensive and meretricious lady, who had been accustomed to high keeping,
was now reduced to a very humble state. Her establishment was not only
diminished, but her servants reduced to half-pay. Pescetti seems to have
been her prime minister, Carestini her head man, the Muscovita her
favourite woman, and Andreoni a servant for all work.﹄Concerts and pasticcios
formed the main repertory, and Burney ascribes such success as they
enjoyed to the fact that the Little Theatre was a "snug retreat" in which
those who had the courage to quit their firesides during the great frost
might keep reasonably warm.
Handel had nothing to do with this theatre, but in 1740 again rented the
theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where on November 8 he revived Parnaso
in Festa "in its original oratorio manner, with the addition of
scenes, dresses and concertos on the organ and several other instruments."
It had but one performance; on the 22nd, Handel produced a new opera, or,
as Burney calls it, an operetta, which had no more than two
performances. This was Imeneo. On January 10, 1741, he brought out
another new opera, Deidamia, which ran for three nights. Imeneo
is a work of little importance; Deidamia, on the other hand,
contains several very beautiful songs. But Dr. Burney, notwithstanding his
admiration of it, has to admit that much of it was old-fashioned, in the
style of Handel's youth, and sometimes "languid and antique." To Handel's
admirers to-day such criticism may seem ridiculous, but to his audiences
of 1741 these reversions to an earlier style would certainly have been
most unwelcome.
Deidamia was Handel's last work for the stage; the glorious
achievements of his youth and maturity had come to a hopeless end. His own
public had unjustly neglected him, posterity consigned his operas to
oblivion.
At some period during the summer of 1741 Handel received an invitation
from the fourth Duke of Devonshire, then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, to go
over to Dublin and give concerts there for the benefit of the local
hospitals. It is very probable that Mrs. Pendarves may have helped to
secure this engagement for Handel. She had spent a year and a half in
Ireland in 1731-32, and her letters give a lively account of society in
Dublin. Matthew Dubourg, an excellent violinist, was at the head of the
Viceroy's band, and musical entertainments were frequent, for to judge
from Mrs. Pendarves' descriptions the Irish bishops and deans lived almost
as magnificently as the cardinals in Rome. Mrs. Pendarves was naturally a
very popular guest in Dublin society; she was a remarkably fine
harpsichord player for an amateur, and was constantly in demand as a
performer at private parties. There was no one in London or Dublin who had
a more intelligent understanding of Handel's music, and her enthusiasm for
his works was unbounded. She kept constantly in touch with Dublin life
when in England, for she corresponded with Dean Swift, and, what was more
important still, she had in 1730 made the acquaintance of Dr. Delany, an
Irish clergyman, whom she was to marry in 1743.
Handel did not leave London until the first week of November. During the
summer he had been occupied with the composition of a new oratorio, Messiah,
the words for which had been chosen and arranged by Jennens, apparently
with a good deal of assistance from his chaplain, the Rev. Mr. Pooley.
Whether Messiah was composed with a view to production in Dublin is
not known; it was begun on August 22 and finished on September 14. A
fortnight later he had completed the first act of Samson. On the
way to Holyhead he stopped at Chester, where he was obliged to stay
several days on account of contrary winds which prevented his embarking.
He seized the opportunity to try over some of the choruses of Messiah
with local church-singers, and Burney, who was at school at Chester, gives
an amusing account of the little rehearsal, at which Handel was roused to
grotesque fury by the inability of the bass, a printer by trade, to read
"And with His stripes" at sight. On November 18 he arrived in Dublin, and
opened his season at Neal's new music-hall in Fishamble Street on December
23 with a performance of L'Allegro, interspersed with concertos. A
few days later he wrote a long letter to Jennens describing the
unprecedented success which he had enjoyed. Dublin received him with open
arms, and he thoroughly enjoyed his triumph, the more so as he felt
himself to be in unusually good health.
A series of concerts followed, at which various oratorios and other works
were performed. On April 8, 1742, there was a rehearsal of Messiah,
open to those who had taken tickets for the first performance, which took
place on Tuesday, April 13. The choir was provided by the singers from the
two cathedrals, some of whom took the male solo parts as well; the female
soloists were Mrs. Cibber and Signora Avolio. Over seven hundred persons
were present, and about £400 was divided between the three charities, the
Relief of Prisoners, Mercer's Hospital, and the Charitable Infirmary.
Saul was performed on May 25, and a second performance of Messiah
took place on June 3. Handel left Ireland on August 13. In another letter
to Jennens he says that his plans for the winter are undecided; for﹃this
time twelve-month﹄(i.e. September 1743) he intended to continue his
oratorios in Ireland. For some reason or other this second visit to
Ireland never took place.
It was not until February 17, 1743, that Handel came before the London
public again with Samson, which, unlike most of his oratorios, had
an immediate success. He had by this time dropped the Italian singers
altogether, and depended mainly on Mrs. Cibber and John Beard, a tenor who
had more sense of artistic style than power of voice. Mr. Flower says that
his voice was more powerful than sweet; Horace Walpole, who heard him,
said that he had only one note in it, and Mrs. Pendarves, whose judgment
was probably more trustworthy, said that he had no voice at all. The first
London performance of Messiah was given on March 23, but it had no
more than two subsequent repetitions this season. There were many reasons
why it should have fallen flat. Jennens himself was extremely dissatisfied
with it. Israel had been a failure too, and it is extremely
probable that musical people, accustomed to the Italian opera, were
estranged by a setting of Bible words in prose instead of a libretto in
verse laid out on more or less dramatic lines.
William Law's Serious Call had been published in 1729; the book
makes frequent allusions to the frivolity of Italian opera, and
opera-going is picked out as one of the chief characteristics of
irreligious persons. In 1739 John Wesley first began to preach in the open
air; in 1742 Edward Young's Night Thoughts achieved its
extraordinary popularity. These three events were all significant of the
religious movement that was taking place among the more cultured classes
in England, and this movement undoubtedly affected Handel's oratorio
concerts. The ultra-religious were shocked at the association of sacred
subjects with the theatre; those who could combine religion with culture,
like Mrs. Delany, who was now approaching the age of piety, were Handel's
most earnest supporters. It is quite probable that the section of society
which preferred its culture unmixed with religion resented the attitude of
the second party even more than that of the first, because the second
party belonged to their own social class, and this resentment may well
have contributed to the ever-increasing hostility shown by many social
leaders toward Handel. And Handel's personal oddities were becoming
rapidly more acute, partly owing to increasing age, and still more owing
to recurrences of paralysis and associated mental derangement. He had
another attack in this very year—1743.
Messiah and Samson were composed at a more favourable
moment, and show little use of borrowed material, except that Messiah
incorporates some of Handel's own chamber duets, the melodies of which
were more suitably illustrative of their original Italian words than of
the sentences from Scripture to which he adapted them. But his next
important work, the Te Deum in celebration of the victory at
Dettingen (June 27), begun in July and performed on November 27,
incorporates no less than nine movements from the Latin Te Deum by
Urio already drawn upon for Israel in Egypt. Mrs. Delany﹃was all
raptures,﹄and thought it "excessively fine."
It is curious that, whereas the Dettingen Te Deum was largely based
on borrowed material, Semele, composed in the previous month of June,
should be, as far as is at present known, entirely original. The libretto
had been written by Congreve in 1707 for an opera, and it was only natural
that its theatrical sense and its literary grace and distinction should
have inspired Handel to one of his loveliest works. Handel was never quite
at home in the English language, but in his later years he seems to have
developed a feeling for English poetry, more especially for that of
approximately his own time. But Semele did not attract the opera
audience; it became increasingly clear that the opera party would have
nothing to do with Handel, and were in fact deliberately doing all they
could to bring him to ruin. Mrs. Delany and a few other great ladies
remained faithful, but they were in a small minority. It was evidently the
younger generation who were in opposition; Mrs. Delany alludes to them as
﹃the Goths—the fine ladies, the petits maîtres and the
ignoramuses,﹄and seemed surprised that they allowed the oratorio to be
performed without making a disturbance. Mrs. Delany was settling down to
being the wife of a dean.
Joseph (March 2, 1744) fared no better, and Handel himself﹃was
mightily out of humour about it﹄at the rehearsals. The summer was devoted
to the composition of Belshazzar, for which Jennens had supplied
the libretto. The collaboration was not altogether happy, for although
Jennens had considerable sense of the picturesque, and offered Handel
opportunities for what may be called spectacular music on the grand scale,
his literary style was pompous, rhetorical, and long-winded. Handel
protested perpetually against the length of the work, for the Handelian
style of composition naturally extended the prolixity of the words;
Jennens greatly resented the musician's criticism, and insisted on
printing the poem in full.
When the winter came, Handel produced nothing of importance until January
5, when he brought out Hercules, a secular oratorio which he had
composed in the summer during intervals when Belshazzar had to be
laid aside owing to Jennens' delays. Belshazzar was given on March
27. Semele, Joseph, and Saul were revived, but, whatever
oratorio was given, the theatre was almost empty, and the season came to a
premature end on April 23. Handel was again suffering from some form of
illness, and was unable to take any part in the performances, although he
was present at them. Lady Shaftesbury describes﹃the great, though
unhappy, Handel, dejected, wan and dark, sitting by, not playing on, the
harpsichord,﹄and adds that﹃his light had been spent in being overplied
in music's cause.﹄Hawkins states definitely that Handel became blind in
1751, and this date has been generally accepted; Lady Shaftesbury's letter
suggests that he was already blind, or partially so, as early as March
1745, unless the word "light" is to be taken as meaning the light of his
reason. This interpretation, in fact, is confirmed by a later letter of
Lord Shaftesbury in October, in which he says:﹃Poor Handel looks
something better. I hope he will entirely recover in due time, though he
has been a good deal disordered in the head.﹄Another friend of Handel's,
William Harris, met him in London, in August, when he seems at first not
to have recognised Harris and to have behaved with some oddity; "he talked
much of his precarious state of health, yet he looks well enough."
It has generally been stated that in 1745 Handel again became bankrupt,
but Barclay Squire pointed out that his name does not occur in the
official lists of bankrupts. It must be remembered that, however
disastrous his opera or oratorio seasons were, he had always his permanent
pension of £600 a year to fall back on, and Hawkins states that this
pension, originally granted by Queen Anne and George I, was punctually
paid throughout his life.
From the end of August, London was in a panic over the Jacobite rebellion
under the Young Pretender, Charles Edward. The Opera remained closed on
account of the prejudice against the Papist Italian singers; at the other
theatres patriotism expressed itself in appropriate music. Purcell's
"Genius of England" was sung at one, Arne's recently composed﹃Rule,
Britannia﹄at another, and on November 14 a﹃Chorus Song, set by Mr.
Handel for the Gentlemen Volunteers of the City of London,﹄was
sung by Mr. Lowe at Drury Lane. The words suggest that the anonymous
author was familiar with the Epilogue to Purcell's King Arthur;
Handel's music is neither in his own style nor in Purcell's, but resembles
the poorest sort of English patriotic song of the early eighteenth
century. Patriotic poetry was well illustrated by an additional verse for
"God Save the King" which was printed in this same month:
From France and Pretender
Great Britain defend her,
Foes let them fall;
From foreign slavery,
Priests and their knavery,
And Popish Reverie,
God save us all.
On December 6 the Pretender began his retreat from Derby, and panic was
allayed. Handel seized the opportunity to compose and bring out his Occasional
Oratorio, about half of which was taken from Israel in Egypt;
it contains a well-known quotation of "Rule, Britannia," and the point of
the quotation is made clearer when we know that it was one of the
patriotic songs sung at the theatres during the period of panic.
The Duke of Cumberland's defeat of the Pretender at Culloden on April 16,
1746, finally disposed of the Jacobites, and Handel made a further
contribution to the national rejoicings in﹃A Song on the Victory over the
Rebels,﹄which was printed in the London Magazine for July. The
words were by John Lockman; the first and last verses are as follows:
From scourging rebellion and baffling proud France,
Crown'd with laurels behold British William advance:
His triumph to grace and distinguish the day,
The sun brighter shines and all nature's gay.
Ye warriors on whom we due honours bestow,
O think on the source whence our late evils flow;
Commanded by William, strike next at the Gaul,
And fix those in chains would Britain enthral.
In the same month Handel began the composition of a new oratorio in honour
of the Duke; this was Judas Maccabaeus, for which he had discovered
a new librettist, the Rev. Thomas Morell, formerly Fellow of King's
College, Cambridge. Morell has given a lively account of his collaboration
with the great man, whom he did not fear to criticise. Handel's retorts to
him have been reproduced as if they were outbursts of righteous
indignation against a snarling poetaster, but, in view of many other
records of Handel's rough tongue and genial humour (in which he seems
often to have resembled Brahms), we need not take them too seriously. It
is quite clear that Morell was more amused than offended, and the fact
that they continued to collaborate up to the end of Handel's career as a
composer shows that they must have remained on completely friendly terms.
Morell, to judge from the contemporary portrait of him, must have been a
rather comic little figure with a strong sense of humour. He was a
scholar, and something of a musician too. The academic primness of his
verses has endeared him to all lovers of Handel, and to no one more than
Samuel Butler; they are always admirably suited to their purpose, neat and
scholarly, concise and direct, with never a word too many. They run easily
for a singer, and it is not improbable that Morell was acquainted with the
works of that great model of all opera-poets, Metastasio, for his words,
like Metastasio's, acquire an unexpected beauty when they are sung.
Handel must have felt himself fully restored to health in the summer of
1746, for Judas, which was written in five weeks, contains no
"borrowings," apart from a few numbers added some ten years later and
adapted from some of his early Italian opera songs. It was not performed
until April 1, 1747.
CHAPTER VII
Judas Maccabaeus—Gluck—Thomas Morell—incipient blindness—Telemann
and his garden—last oratorios—death—character and
personality.
The new oratorio met with surprising success. In the first place, Handel
had given up the subscription system, and opened the theatre to all
comers. The relief produced by the victory of Culloden had no doubt
encouraged the general public to spend more money on entertainments; the
Duke of Cumberland was a popular hero, and, through the Occasional
Oratorio, Handel's name had come to be associated with him. Judas
was naturally patronised by the court and by the Duke himself, who had
made a handsome present to Morell in recognition of his literary laurels.
And a new class of enthusiasts appeared in the shape of the Jews, we are
told, who were attracted by the glorification of a national hero of their
own. We do not hear much of the Jewish community in London in the days of
Handel, and it cannot have been a very large one, but they appear to have
been worth Handel's consideration. It may be mentioned that Handel's early
librettist in London, Nicolo Haym, must have been a Jew, to judge from his
name. Handel, at any rate, was sufficiently impressed to ask Morell to
find another Jewish subject for his next oratorio; this was Alexander
Balus, produced the following year.
The Italian opera party had this year engaged Gluck as a composer, and he
too celebrated the Duke of Cumberland's achievements with an opera, La
Caduta dei Giganti (January 5), which was a complete failure. It must
have been put together in a hurry, for all of the "favourite songs" in it,
published by Walsh (and no other record of the music remains), were taken
from earlier operas of Gluck's; in any case they are poor stuff, and from
Burney's description of the singers it is no wonder that the opera had no
success. Gluck called on Handel, who told someone that he knew no more of
counterpoint than his cook. Gluck was just under thirty, Handel just over
sixty, and one can understand Handel's attitude; in any case he gave him
some plain and practical advice as to how to please an English audience,
which was not much use to Gluck, as he never visited this country again.
Handel was quite right in his criticism, for Gluck was always very clumsy
in his technique; and, at any rate, Gluck found him friendly enough and
spoke of him forty years later with the profoundest respect. It is
probable that Gluck heard Judas, as he was still in London in
April.
A significant indication of the new popularity which Handel had acquired
was the production of a pasticcio, at the Italian Opera in November
1747, made up chiefly from the operas of Handel; but the experiment was
not repeated. In the autumn of 1748 a company of Italian comic-opera
singers came over to London; they brought an entirely new type of
entertainment, and after their success Handelian opera was buried for
ever.
Alexander Balus was not one of Handel's popular works; Joshua
(March 23, 1748) is now pretty well forgotten, but was a great attraction
when new, mainly because it contained "See the Conquering Hero," which was
afterwards transferred to Judas Maccabaeus.﹃What the English like
is something that they can beat time to,﹄said Handel to Gluck. He agreed
with Hawkins in not caring very much for it himself, but added,﹃you will
live to see it a greater favourite with the people than my other fine
things.﹄Joshua contains two "borrowings," one from Handel's own
opera Riccardo, and another from Gottlieb Muffat.
The productions of the next year (1749) were Susanna (February 10)
and Solomon (March 17); it is not known who wrote their libretti,
though Solomon has been tentatively ascribed to Morell. Susanna
was remarkably successful, perhaps on account of its story, which has
always been a favourite with the painters of the later Renaissance. One
can understand Lady Shaftesbury's saying,﹃I believe it will not insinuate
itself so much into my approbation as most of Handel's performances do, as
it is in the light operatic style.﹄Solomon was a complete
contrast, with its magnificent scenes of oriental pageantry.
The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (October 1748) had no doubt contributed, as
the victory of Culloden did, to make people more inclined to enjoy the
pleasures of life, with beneficial results to the organisers of music and
drama. The King ordered a grand celebration of the event to take place on
April 27, 1749, and preparations for it were begun as early as the
preceding November. The famous theatrical architect Servandoni was
commissioned to design an elaborate entertainment of fireworks on a
colossal scale to be let off in the Green Park, accompanied by the music
of Handel. The Fireworks Music was scored for fifty-six wind instruments.
A rehearsal of it (without fireworks) was held at Vauxhall Gardens a week
before, at half a crown admission, and it is said to have been attended by
a crowd of twelve thousand persons. At the actual performance the
fireworks were a disastrous failure, owing to various accidents, but
Handel's music, accompanied by the firing of ordnance, was the real event
of the evening. A month later Handel repeated the music at the Foundling
Hospital, along with selections from Solomon, and a new work, composed for
the occasion, known as the Foundling Anthem. His next act of generosity
was to present the hospital with an organ, which he inaugurated on May 1,
1750, with a performance of Messiah. Henceforth the performance of Messiah
at the Foundling Hospital for the benefit of the institution became an
annual event, and it was this charitable association which really secured
the work its subsequent popularity.
Handel's next oratorio, Theodora (March 16, 1750), came out at a bad
moment, for a series of earthquakes were being felt in London, with the
result that many people took refuge in the country, and those who stayed
behind were reluctant to go to the theatre. The blame for the neglect
which has always overtaken Theodora has been very unjustly laid on Morell.
Handel himself, remembering the successes of Judas and Susanna, observed
to the poet, "The Jews will not come to it, because it is a Christian
story; and the ladies will not come, because it is a virtuous one."
Theodora was always Handel's favourite among his oratorios, and he
considered the chorus, "He saw the Lovely Youth," to be far beyond
anything in Messiah. None the less, the theatre was half empty when
Theodora was given. "Never mind," said Handel, with grim humour, "the
music will sound all the better."
An old acquaintance reappeared this year in London in the shape of
Cuzzoni, who had continued her quarrelsome career at Venice, Vienna, and
Stuttgart. An unsuccessful benefit concert was given for her, at which
Giardini the violinist made his first appearance in London. Handel engaged
her to sing in Messiah at the Foundling Hospital, but her voice was gone.
She was arrested for debt and bailed out by the Prince of Wales; after a
few years in Holland, where she was again in prison, she died in
destitution at Bologna.
In the summer Handel went to Germany for the last time. Nothing is known
of his movements there beyond the fact that on the journey out he met with
a carriage accident between the Hague and Haarlem. He was seriously
injured, but was stated in a London paper of August 21 to be out of
danger. Nor is it known when he returned; we have no further news of him
until in January he began work on Jephtha. Morell says that he himself
wrote Jephtha in 1751, but, as Handel had completed the first act on
February 2, it is probable that Morell, like Jennens, supplied him with
the words in instalments.
The composition of the music suffered various interruptions owing to the
failure of Handel's eyesight, and possibly to a return of mental disorder
(Streatfeild). He was able to play the organ at the Foundling Hospital in
May, and directly afterwards went for a short visit to Cheltenham,
returning to London on June 13. He resumed work on Jephtha, and finished
it on August 30. It was some time this year (the precise date is unknown)
that he consulted Samuel Sharp, a surgeon of Guy's Hospital, who told him
that he was suffering from gutta serena, and that freedom from pain in the
visual organs was all that he had to hope for during the remainder of his
days. It was a severe shock, especially to a man whose general physical
and mental health was already undermined, and it is no wonder that Handel
began to give way to periods of profound depression. The condition of
Handel's eyes, and of his hand as well, may be clearly observed in the
autograph of Jephtha, and it may be noted that here he again reverted to
the process of "borrowing"—this time from five Masses by Habermann,
a composer twenty years his junior, published in 1747.
It may well be asked how Handel acquired the original copies of all the
works which he utilised in his later years, since it is obvious that they
could not have been well known or easily available to musicians in
England. A guess may be hazarded that he obtained them through his old
friend Telemann at Hamburg. Telemann, it will be remembered, had been a
close friend of Handel's during their student days at Halle; whether they
met again in Germany after Handel had taken up his residence in London is
not known, but it is quite probable. The fact remains that Handel was
undoubtedly in friendly correspondence with Telemann in 1750, for in
December of that year he wrote a long letter to him (in French) thanking
him for a theoretical work. Telemann appears to have been a keen gardener,
and had evidently asked Handel to send him some rare plants. Handel's
reply suggests that he was not much interested in gardening himself, but
was most anxious to do all he could to give Telemann pleasure.
Another letter (again in French) to Telemann, dated September 20, 1754,
explains that Handel had set about procuring the plants when Captain
Carsten of Hamburg, by whose ship he intended to send them, told him that
Telemann was dead; but, after another voyage to Hamburg and back, Carsten
brought the news that Telemann was alive and in good health. He also
brought a list of the rare plants desired, and Handel writes to say that
he has obtained almost all of them, and will send them by Captain Carsten
when he sails for Hamburg again in December.
It is true that there is no mention of any parcel of music in these
letters, beyond Telemann's "System of Intervals," but they suggest that
they were part of a longer correspondence. Telemann was keenly interested
in contemporary music, as his correspondence with Graun shows; he also
seems to have asked Graun to send him plants from Berlin. He is the most
likely person to have sent musical works of interest to Handel; possibly
they were sent on loan, and returned after Handel had made the extracts
which are to be seen in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge.
Jephtha was produced on February 26, 1752. Handel's oratorios had by now
become a lucrative undertaking, and it was characteristic of English
audiences that they came in crowds to see Handel playing the organ in his
blindness, and enjoy the luxury of tears when Beard sang "Total Eclipse!"
Sharp, the oculist, recommended Handel to employ as his assistant John
Stanley, who had been blind from early childhood and was a singularly
accomplished organist. Handel burst out laughing. "Mr. Sharp, have you
never read' the Scriptures? Do you not remember? If the blind lead the
blind, they both fall into the ditch."
He underwent various operations, but derived only partial benefit from
them. During these last years he led a very retired life, but he continued
to play the organ at his oratorios, at first from memory, and later
extemporising the solos in his concertos, which were always an integral
feature of his concerts. The profits of these were enormous, and when he
died in 1759 he left investments to the extent of 20,000. Composition
naturally became a more difficult matter after blindness set in, but new
songs were added to many of the oratorios, and in 1758 he made a complete
revision of his old Italian cantata, Il Trionfo del Tempo. Morell
translated it into English, and seventeen new numbers were added. Some of
these were new, but many were adapted from other works of Handel's,
chiefly from Parnasso in Festa, and there are also borrowings from Lotti
and Graun. Two choruses by Graun had already been utilised in the revision
of the Italian version which Handel brought out in 1737.
All this time John Christopher Schmidt, now known as Smith, had been his
indispensable factotum. Smith made fair copies of his music, and managed
his affairs for him, though Handel, almost up to the end, seems to have
discussed his investments in person with his financial adviser, Mr. Gael
Morris, in the City. Smith's son, who had come with his father to London
as a child, had been educated under Handel's direction, and in 1754 became
the first organist of the Foundling Hospital. In Handel's later years it
was the son who assisted him at the performances of the oratorios and
acted as his musical amanuensis. There is a curious story of a quarrel
which took place at Tunbridge Wells, about four years before Handel's
death, between the two old men. The cause of it is not known, but it is
stated to have been quite trivial; old Smith left Handel abruptly, and
Handel vowed he would never see him again. The son attempted to heal the
breach and even went so far as to say that he would refuse to assist
Handel at his concerts any more unless Handel restored to his father the
legacy which after the quarrel he had intended to leave to the son; young
Smith foresaw that he himself would be accused of having deliberately
alienated the affections of Handel from his father in order to secure the
money for himself.
Handel apparently yielded to some extent, but it is clear that he was not
reconciled to old Smith for a long time.﹃About three weeks before his
death,﹄we are told, in Coxe's Anecdotes of Handel and Smith, published
soon after young Smith's death,﹃Handel desired Smith junior to receive
the sacrament with him. Smith asked him how he could communicate, when he
was not at peace with the world and especially when he was at enmity with
his former friend, who, though he might have offended him once, had been
faithful and affectionate to him for thirty years.﹄Handel was much
affected by Smith's words, and the reconciliation took place. Religion had
gained a strong hold upon Handel in his years of suffering; he spoke much
to Hawkins and others of his delight in setting the Scriptures to music,
and he was a regular worshipper at St. George's, Hanover Square.
His last appearance in public was at the performance of Messiah on April
6, 1759, but at the end of it he was seized with a fainting attack, took
to his bed, and died during the night between the 13th and 14th of April.
He was buried in Westminster Abbey on the evening of the 10th; the choirs
of the Chapel Royal and St. Paul's joined the Abbey choir in singing the
burial music of Dr. Croft, and it is said that three thousand people were
present.
Handel's will, executed June 1, 1750, left the bulk of his fortune to his
niece and goddaughter Johanna Friderica Floerken (nee Michaelsen) of
Gotha; other relatives were also left legacies. To Christopher Smith
(junior) he left 500, besides his large harpsichord, his chamber organ,
his portrait by Denner, and his manuscripts. He had at one time thought of
leaving the manuscripts to the University of Oxford, and, having already
promised them to Smith, offered him a legacy of £3,000 if he would resign
all claim to them. Smith refused, and also refused an offer of £2,000 made
for them, after Handel's death, by Frederick the Great. He kept them until
1772, when he presented them to George III in return for a pension of £200
a year. But he did not hand over the whole of the manuscripts to the King,
and a large collection of rough sketches and fragments was acquired by
Lord Fitzwilliam, who bequeathed them to the University of Cambridge.
The foregoing pages will have shown how singularly few are the definite
facts about Handel's life which can be ascertained with any degree of
certainty. There are a number of portraits which give some idea of his
outward appearance, but most of them represent him as a man of middle age,
and the anecdotes of his life and habits recorded by various
contemporaries belong mostly to the same period. It is almost impossible
to form any idea of his private character and his inward personality.
Biographers of musicians often attempt to deduce their characters from
their musical works, but it need hardly be said that such a procedure is
thoroughly unreliable.
Portraits are notoriously unsafe as guides to the interpretation of
character, but if the miniature reproduced by Mr. Flower as having been
painted in Rome is an authentic likeness of Handel as a young man and it
certainly bears some resemblance to the portrait by Denner painted about
1736 or 1737—he must have been singularly attractive in those days.
It cannot have been his musical abilities alone that won him the immediate
friendship of Telemann at Halle and Mattheson at Hamburg; and, although he
seems from his earliest days to have been ambitious and determined to make
a career for himself, his contemporaries give the impression that he was
retiring rather than self-assertive. In later life he was often described
as bearish and rough-mannered, but this cannot have been the case in his
youth, or he would never have achieved the position which he held in the
most cultured and distinguished society of Rome and Naples. His visit to
Italy must inevitably have been a wonderful education in the humanities,
otherwise he could never have been received as he was on his first visit
to London by the society which most nearly resembled that of his Italian
friends and patrons.
Professional musicians, and especially those connected with the theatre,
were regarded in England as being more or less disreputable, unless they
held university degrees and posts of distinction. Handel moved among them
in his professional life, as was only natural, but his more intimate
friendships seem, throughout his career, to have been confined mainly to
the innermost circle of the well-bred amateurs; we must not forget,
however, that it was only persons of that class whose letters and memoirs
have come down to us. Burney and Hawkins at any rate were well acquainted
with the professional world, and their testimony tends to confirm that
Handel stood more or less aloof from it. It was only in later life that he
associated on terms of friendship with such a person as Mrs. Cibber, the
singer. In an age when all opera-houses were, with some truth, regarded as
centres of sexual promiscuity, it is indeed remarkable that not the least
evidence exists, with one solitary exception, that Handel was ever even
alleged to have had an illicit love-affair. Mr. Flower discovered a copy
of Mainwaring's biography, with marginal notes said to be in the
handwriting of George III, and there we read:﹃G. F. Handel was ever
honest, nay excessively polite, but like all Men of Sense would talk all,
and hear none, and scorned the advice of any but the Woman he loved, but
his Amours were rather of short duration, always within the pale of his
own profession.﹄The Anecdotes of Handel and Smith mention two
occasions on which he was said to have become engaged to be married, or
nearly so, but the writer is so reticent that little faith can be placed
in his statement, and in any case the Anecdotes, published in 1799,
are not very reliable as far as Handel is concerned.
It is not difficult to understand that there were two Handels, one
"excessively polite" (which, in the language of the eighteenth century,
does not mean that he was servile and cringing, but simply that he behaved
like a man of good breeding), as he appeared to such people as Mrs. Delany
and the Harris family, and the other as he showed himself at rehearsals,
or in the society of men friends of more or less his own standing—bluntly
outspoken and perhaps at times inconsiderate. The hostility of a large
number of social leaders may well have been aroused in the first instance
by some careless harsh word.
"The figure of Handel was large," says Burney, "and he was somewhat
corpulent and unwieldy in his motions; but his countenance, which I
remember as perfectly as that of any man I saw but yesterday, was full of
fire and dignity; and such as impressed ideas of superiority and genius.
He was impetuous, rough, and peremptory in his manners and conversation,
but totally devoid of ill-nature or malevolence; indeed there was an
original humour and pleasantry in his most lively sallies of anger or
impatience, which, with his broken English, were extremely risible. His
natural propensity to wit and humour, and happy manner of relating common
occurrences in an uncommon way, enabled him to throw persons and things
into very ridiculous attitudes. Handel's general look was somewhat heavy
and sour, but when he did smile, it was his sire the sun, bursting out of
a black cloud. There was a sudden flash of intelligence, wit, and good
humour, beaming in his countenance, which I hardly ever saw in any other."
Both Burney and Hawkins record that outside his profession he was said to
be ignorant and dull, and the fact that they are at pains to defend him on
this charge shows that there was apparent ground for it. Pepusch said of
him that he was "a good practical musician," which is what one might well
expect of Pepusch, whose devotion to antiquarian learning aroused the
amusement rather than the admiration of his contemporaries. Handel was at
any rate keenly interested in painting, like Corelli, and the third
codicil to his will, dated August 4, 1757, mentions two landscapes by
Rembrandt, one a view of the Rhine, which he bequeathed to one of the
Granvilles from whom he had received both as a gift.
Another characteristic of Handel's for which his early biographers are
hard put to find an excuse was his enormous appetite for food and drink,
satirised by his once intimate friend the painter Goupy in a well-known
print called "The Charming Brute," in which Handel is represented with the
head of a pig, seated at an organ, with various comestibles disposed at
his feet. In this connexion it may be noted that for all his gluttony
Handel was never accused of drunkenness; if he exceeded in the pleasures
of the table, it was as a gourmet and a connoisseur. Yet it is recorded
that he never led an extravagant life, and apart from this particular
weakness he lived as simply in the days of his wealth as in those of his
poverty. Generosity to those in distress was at all times characteristic
of him.
Although Handel became a naturalised British subject, none of his
contemporaries would ever have dreamed of regarding him as an Englishman,
or as a composer of English music. Burney's account of the commemoration
festival of 1784 may be regarded as an official panegyric, but even in
that he goes no further than to say that Handel,﹃though not a native of
England, spent the greatest part of his life in the service of its
inhabitants, improving our taste, and introducing among us so many species
of musical excellence, that, during more than half a century, while
sentiment, not fashion, guided our applause, we neither wanted nor wished
for any other standard. Indeed, his works were so long the models of
perfection in this country, that they may be said to have formed our
national taste.﹄In the pages which deal with the character of Handel as a
composer, he says that he united﹃the depth and elaborate contrivance of
his own country with Italian elegance and facility.﹄Handel's music, he
holds, was from the first congenial to the English temperament, but he
never regards it as being at all English in style, though in other
writings he naturally recognises the occasional indebtedness of Handel to
the influence of Purcell. It was only in the nineteenth century that
Handel came to be regarded as a national institution. His own country for
the most part neglected his works; his operas were thought impossible to
revive, and the oratorios were considered by most Germans as being "too
English"—an opinion which the writer of this book frequently heard
expressed in Germany some fifty years ago. Since 1920 there has been an
astonishing revival of Handel in Germany, beginning with the restoration
to the stage of his operas—the last works of his which most people
would have thought suitable for presentation to modern audiences—and
much energy has been expended by German critics on an attempt to
demonstrate the essentially Germanic character both of Handel's music and
of his personality.
The more closely we study Handel in relation to his own times, and in
relation to the general history of music, the clearer it becomes that
Goupy the caricaturist was only right when he put into Handel's mouth the
words, "I am myself alone."
The foundation of Handel's musical style was Italian, and it was only
natural that this should be the case, for, in his days, Italy dominated
European music as she did European architecture. All music in the grand
manner, except in France, was Italian in its tradition, and if ever there
was a composer who illustrated the grand manner throughout his life, it
was Handel. France had produced a grand manner of her own, though not
without an initial impulse from Italy; in all other countries north of the
Alps native music was only for the humbler classes of society. When Handel
condescended to it, as he did in the political excitement of 1745, he
deliberately adopted the musical style of a tavern song.
Handel's serious music was never written for popular audiences; in his
later oratorios he sometimes admittedly wrote down to the taste of the
middle classes, but we have the records of his conversations with Gluck,
Hawkins, and others to prove how little respect he had for that taste. He
composed for the needs of the moment, and not with a view to immortality,
but he composed for a society which was cultured enough to desire, even in
its entertainments, grace, dignity, and serenity.
If Handel's works have for later generations become a source of joy and
delight to a very different social class, it is because they are the
musical equivalents of those palaces and gardens of Handel's day which are
now national monuments and open to all comers. We walk beneath their
colonnades, peopling them in imagination with the gracious and stately
figures of the past; and from the museum of memory there arise the unheard
strains of Handel's music:
Hark! the heavenly sphere turns round,
And silence now is drown'd,
In ecstasy of sound!
How on a sudden the still air is charm'd,
As if all harmony were just alarm'd
And every soul with transport fill'd!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mainwaring, J.: Memoirs of the Life of the Late G. F. Handel.
London. 1760.
Burney, Charles: A General History of Music. London. 1776-89.
Burney, Charles: An Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster
Abbey, etc. London. 1785.
Hawkins, Sir John: A General History of the Science and Practice of
Music. London. 1776.
Coxe, W.: Anecdotes of G. F. Handel and Y. C. Smith. London. 1799.
Schoelcher, Victor: The Life of Handel. London. 1857. The first
attempt at a complete and documented biography.
Chrysander, Friedrich: G. F. Händel. Leipzig. 1858-67. This
biography does not go beyond 1740, but it is the most valuable source for
carefully documented facts.
Delany, Mary: Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs.
Delany. Edited by Lady Llanover. London. 1861-62.
Taylor, Sedley: The Indebtedness of Handel to Works by Other Composers.
Cambridge. 1906.
Robinson, Percy: Handel and His Orbit. London. 1908.
Streatfeild, R.A.: Handel. London. 1909. The best biography of
Handel and critical study of his works in English.
Squire, W. Barclay: Handel in 1745 (Riemann-Festschrift). Leipzig.
1909.
Rolland, Romain: Haendel. Paris. 1910.
Flower, Newman: George Friederic Handel: His Personality and His Times.
London. 1923.
This book contains much new biographical matter. I have to thank Mr.
Flower for kind permission to make use of his valuable discoveries.
Leichtentritt, Hugo: Händel. Stuttgart. 1924. Biography based
mainly on Streatfeild; gives a detailed analysis of all Handel's works.
Young, Percy M.: Handel. London. 1947.
HANDEL'S WORKS
OPERAS
Almira (Hamburg, 1705).
Nero (Hamburg, 1705, music lost).
Florindo (Hamburg, 1707, music lost).
Dafne (Hamburg, 1707, music lost).
Rodrigo (Florence, 1707?).
Agrippina (Venice, 1709).
The following operas were all produced in London:
Rinaldo (1711).
Il Pastor Fido (first version, 1712).
Teseo (1712).
Silla (1714).
Amadigi (1715).
Radamisto (1720).
Muzio Scevola (1721, only Act III by Handel).
Floridante (1721).
Ottone (1723).
Flavio (1723).
Giulio Cesare (1724).
Tamerlano (1724).
Rodelinda (1725).
Scipione (1726).
Alessandro (1726).
Admeto (1727).
Riccardo I (1727).
Siroe (1728).
Tolomeo (1728).
Lotario (1729).
Partenope (1730).
Poro (1731).
Ezio (1732).
Sosarme (1732).
Orlando (1733).
Arianna (1734).
Parnasso in Festa (1734).
Il Pastor Fido (second version, 1734).
Terpsichore (1734).
Ariodante (1735).
Alcina (1735).
Atalanta (1736).
Arminio (1737).
Giustino (1737).
Berenice (1737).
Faramondo (1738).
Serse (1738).
Jupiter in Argos (1739, announced but never performed).
Imeneo (1740).
Deidamia (1741).
ORATORIOS:
St. John Passion (German, Hamburg, 1704).
La Risurrezione (Italian, Rome, 1708).
Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (Italian, Rome, 1708).
Aci, Galatea e Polifemo (Italian, Naples, 1709).
Brockes Passion (German, Hanover, 1716).
All the following oratorios are in English:
Esther (first version, London, 1720).
Acis and Galatea (London, 1720).
Esther (second version, London, 1732).
Debora (London, 1733).
Athalia (Oxford, 1733).
Alexander's Feast (London, 1736).
Saul (London, 1739).
Israel in Egypt (London, 1739).
Ode for St. Cecilia's Day (London, 1739).
L'Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il Moderato (London, 1740).
Messiah (Dublin, 1742).
HANDEL 139
The following oratorios were all produced in London:
Samson (1743).
Semele (1743).
Joseph (1743).
Belshazzar (1744).
Hercules (1744).
Occasional Oratorio (1746).
Judas Maccabaeus (1747).
Alexander Balus (1747).
Joshua (1747).
Solomon (1748).
Susanna (1748).
Theodora (1749).
The Choice of Hercules (1749).
Jephtha (1752).
The Triumph of Time and Truth (1757).
SACRED WORKS:
Laudate Pueri (Rome, 1707).
Dixit Dominus (Rome, 1707).
Nisi Dominus (Rome, 1707).
Gloria Patri (Rome, 1707).
Salve Regina (1707?).
Silete Venti (1707?).
Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate (London, 1713).
Te Deum in D (1714?).
Te Deum in B flat (Chandos) (1718-20).
Te Deum in A (1727?).
Twelve Chandos Anthems (1716-19).
Four Coronation Anthems (1727).
Wedding Anthem for Princess Anne (1734).
Wedding Anthem for the Prince of Wales (1736).
Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline (1737).
Dettingen Te Deum (1743).
Dettingen Anthem (1743).
Foundling Hospital Anthem (1749).
SECULAR VOCAL MUSIC:
Birthday Ode for Queen Anne (1713).
Italian Cantatas, Duets and Trios.
German Songs.
INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC:
Six Concertos (so-called "Oboe Concertos"), published 1734.
Three Concertos ("Select Harmony"), published 1741.
Twelve Grand Concertos, op. 6 (published 1740).
Three Concertos a due cori.
Overtures, Marches, Dances, etc.
Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra.
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra.
Water Music (1715-17).
Forest Music (1742, probably spurious).
Music for the Royal Fireworks (1749).
Six Concertos for Harpsichord or Organ, op. 4 (1738).
Six Concertos for Harpsichord or Organ (1740).
Six Concertos for Harpsichord or Organ, op. 7 (1760).
Many of these are arrangements of other works.
Sonatas for Flute, Oboe or Violin and Bass (19).
Six Sonatas for two Oboes and Bass.
Six Sonatas for two Violins (Oboes or Flutes) and Bass, op. 2 (1733).
Seven Sonatas for two Violins (Flutes) and Bass, op. 5 (1739).
Sonata for Viola de Gamba.
Suites de Pièces pour le Clavecin (8) (1720).
Suites de Pièces pour le Clavecin (8) (1733).
Miscellaneous Harpsichord Music.
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