Handel (11 page)

The Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket opened under Vanbrugh's direction on 19 April to a prologue spoken by Anne Bracegirdle, the most accomplished actress of her day, written by the royal physician Sir Samuel Garth:

Garth's lines introduced a pastoral entertainment,
Gli amori d'Ergasto
, by Jakob Greber, an undistinguished German composer who two years earlier had written the music for Nicholas Rowe's popular tragedy
The Fair Penitent
. The new opera was notable solely as the first to be given in London with foreign singers and an Italian text. It was at Drury Lane, however, in the preceding January, that the town had been introduced to ‘An Opera after the Italian manner, all sung' in the shape of
Arsinoe
, an English-language adaptation of a Venetian libretto with music provided from various sources by Thomas Clayton, a member of the Queen's band. The project, in which Clayton was joined by the harpsichordist Charles Dieupart and the cellist Nicola Haym, later to become one of Handel's librettists, was aimed at introducing the London public to the Italian operatic style by tacking the musical entertainment on to the end of a spoken dramatic performance. The first run reached twenty-four performances and a 1706 revival ran to eleven, but
Arsinoe
's success probably owed more to its novelty value, enhanced by some exceptionally handsome sets designed by England's leading decorative painter Sir James Thornhill, than to the quality of the score Clayton had cobbled together.

London had not heard the last of Clayton. Two years later, zealous for the triumph of vernacular opera, Joseph Addison, by now one of the most respected components of the Whig propaganda machine, brought out
Rosamund
, based on the life of Henry II's unfortunate mistress, to Clayton's settings. Addison's high-flown muse was unsuited to lyric-writing, and matters were made worse by his attempt to imitate the by now outmoded Venetian habit of introducing low comedy characters. He can hardly be blamed outright for
Rosamund
's failure (a miserable three-night run) since he seems to have known little about music and the operas he saw on his Italian travels in 1701 included Pollarolo's
Cato Uticense
, another of Matteo Noris's surreal lyric farragos. Ironically, nevertheless, he was able to note among the Venetian theatre poets ‘a multitude of particular words that never enter into common discourse . . . For this reason the Italian Opera seldom sinks into a poorness of language, but amidst all the meanness and familiarity of the thoughts, has something beautiful and sonorous in the expression.'

The
Rosamund
fiasco soured Addison's view of Italian opera for good. His comments, distributed to London breakfast tables in the
Spectator
, set the tone for an opposition to the genre so rootedly English in its xenophobic, philistine simple-mindedness as to have survived in certain quarters almost unchanged to this day. One of the chief objections, in a decade during which Englishmen saw themselves as embattled champions of liberty, was the fairly basic one that it was foreign:

wrote his fellow journalist Richard Steele, neatly summarizing the common view. Writers, what is more, saw their public being snatched away by the new craze. In a letter to Ambrose Philips, Jonathan Swift, as proud as other Augustan literary men of not being musical, says, ‘The Town is run mad after a new Opera. Poetry and good Sense are dwindling like Echo into Repetition and Voice. Critick Dennis vows to G— these Opera's will be the ruin of the Nation and brings Examples from Antiquity to prove it. A good old Lady five miles out of Town askt me tother day, what these Uproars were that her Daughter was always going to.'

High-minded and humourless, John Dennis pitched into opera with a blinding obtuseness. It could not, he said, ‘inspire publick Spirit and publick Virtue, and elevated Notions of Liberty'. Music, unless subservient to Reason, encouraged vanity, selfishness and stupidity. Opera was ‘Barbarous and Gothick' and unpatriotic. ‘If any Yeoman of Kent or Sussex should neglect to sow his Wheat or his Barley, should grub up his Fruit-Trees, and demolish his Hop-Grounds, and fall a planting the Olive of Lucca, the Orange of Naples, and the Muscatello of Monte-Fiascone, or of Mont-Alchin, what would his Neighbours think of such a Proceeding?' – and it promoted homosexuality – ‘ . . . if our Subscriptions go on, at the frantick rate that they have done, I make no doubt but we shall come to see one Beau take another for Better for Worse, as once an imperial harmonious Blockhead did Sporus.'

Heedless of such warnings, the public avidly embraced the new form. The earliest complete Italian opera given in London was Giovanni Bononcini's
Camilla
, originally written for Naples to a text by Silvio Stampiglia, now translated for the English production, opening on 30 March 1706 at Drury Lane. The buffo characters Linco and Tullia were retained as roles for the popular playhouse singers Leveridge and Salway (who sang the part
en travesti
) and the opera's triumph was reflected in its sixty-four performances between 1706 and 1709.
An apparently deathless controversy over singing opera in the original language found a compromise in the half-English, half-Italian version of Scarlatti's
Pirro e Demetrio
, but Italian finally conquered with
Almahide
and
L'Idaspe Fedele
, given at the Queen's Theatre with almost exclusively foreign casts.

In January 1708 a definitive separation was made by the Lord Chamberlain Charles Talbot, Duke of Shrewsbury, between the domains of lyric and spoken drama in the Haymarket and Drury Lane. Opera became the sole preserve of Vanbrugh's company at the Queen's Theatre, while plays were restricted to Drury Lane under the management of the impresario Christopher Rich. Shrewsbury's attempt to hive off the two entertainment forms was what Vanbrugh had for some time been aiming at, but though he was optimistic that ‘Operas will settle and thrive in London', the new arrangement proved far from ideal. Vanbrugh's misgivings, arriving all too soon, had a timeless ring: ‘you are sensible the daily Receipts of the Operas are not near sufficient to answer the Daily and monthly demands and whenever they fail there will be a full stop . . . ' Writing to the Duke of Manchester in Venice, he deplored ‘the Pride & Charge of Our Present Singing Ladys, who Cost the House four hundred pounds a Year apiece'. Even Vanbrugh's virtuosity and resourcefulness were daunted by the complexities of opera management. Stepping back from hands-on administration, he handed over the running of the Queen's Theatre to a sequence of lessees.

Foremost among these when Handel arrived in the autumn of 1710 was the enterprising figure of Aaron Hill, the son of a Wiltshire lawyer, who had travelled in Egypt and the Levant before involving himself in various doubtful money-making schemes. The age was crazy for speculation of all kinds, and overseeing the affairs of an opera company must have seemed no more uncertain a project than exporting Scottish timber, sinking a coal mine or making a cheap substitute for almond oil out of beechmast, at each of which Hill had tried his hand. Now he embarked on an opera libretto, devising a scenario to be turned into verse by the Haymarket's Italian theatre poet Giacomo Rossi. The work, loosely based on an episode from Torquato Tasso's epic poem
Gerusalemme liberata
, was entitled
Rinaldo
and the composer selected to write the music was ‘Mr Hendel, the Orpheus of our century'.

Some of Handel's works had already been aired before London audiences by the time he completed the score, probably in February 1711. Before Christmas the Queen's Theatre had a taster in the shape of ‘Ho un non so che nel cor' from
Agrippina
, slipped into a revival of Scarlatti's
Pirro e Demetrio
and sung by Francesca Vanini Boschi, who had taken part in the première of Handel's opera. Earlier still, before he had even set foot in London, the overture and dances from
Rodrigo
had turned up as incidental music for a revival of Ben Jonson's
The Alchemist
, all attributed by their publisher John Walsh to ‘an Italian Master'.

The court of St James was also interested in Handel. Queen Anne herself was fond of music, having learned as a girl to sing and play the harpsichord, but her increasing obesity and gouty legs now ruled out the theatre trips she had enjoyed when younger. The opera instead came to her –
Arsinoe
and
Camilla
were given command performances at St James's – and royal birthdays were celebrated, according to custom, with a specially commissioned ode, a ball and a banquet. On 6 February 1711 the festivities were particularly lavish. ‘The nobility and gentry went to compliment her majestie in richer habits than has been known since 1660; the ladies appeared with jewels very glorious . . . and the evening concluded with bonefires, illuminations &c.' In the afternoon, noted another report, ‘was perform'd a fine Consort, being a Dialogue in Italian, in Her Majesty's Praise, set to excellent Musick by the famous Mr
Hendel
 . . . with which Her Majesty was extreamly well pleas'd'.

The soloists on this occasion were Italian singers from the Queen's Theatre and the work itself may have been Handel's cantata
Echeggiate, festeggiate
,
^*(e)
known to have been written in London around this time. Evidently assembled in some haste from already existing material, the work is a setting of a self-consciously political text, in which various Olympian deities hymn the blessings of peace. The Tories, currently in the ascendant after Anne had quarrelled with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, were eager to bring Britain's ongoing war with France over the Spanish Succession to a close and prepared to quit the Austrian alliance,
which had carried the conflict forward over eight victorious years. Campaign fatigue was in the air, the Duke of Marlborough, formerly the nation's hero, was suddenly yesterday's man, mired in corruption charges, and the war was now portrayed by government propagandists as costly, pointless and without obvious benefits for the nation.

Did
Rinaldo
, the new opera presented a fortnight after the royal birthday, offer its own contribution to the increasingly partisan atmosphere of politics and society in London at this time? Tasso's epic, the plot source, tells a story set against the background of the First Crusade, with inset episodes involving adventures of knights and heroines beset with various perils, among them the enchantment of the sorceress Armida, which ensnares gallant young Rinaldo. Aaron Hill was a Whig and tickets for the performances were sold at the Whig stronghold of White's coffee house. Though Handel himself had been ready to provide the Queen with a cantata whose sentiments were broadly Tory, his master the Elector of Hanover, as a key ally of Austria, was alarmed by England's drift towards a unilateral peace with France.

It is hard not to detect an implicit parallel between the heroic crusaders and Marlborough's generals on the one hand, and on the other between the devious infidel Saracens and the Catholic enemy, with all its sophistications, across the Channel. Tasso himself, when
Gerusalemme liberata
was first published in 1581, had encouraged readers to look for spiritual allegory in the poem, and a political subtext would have been still more welcome to Londoners in 1711. The native English tradition of semi-opera, represented at its best by Purcell and Dryden's
King Arthur
(1691), had its own political agenda and several features of this hybrid form plainly inspired Hill in shaping the text for
Rinaldo
. As for Handel's music, what most obviously gives the game away are the two marches in Act III of the opera, played while the two armies, Christian and Muslim, parade across the stage. The latter's mincing little ditty, scored for strings reinforced with oboes and bassoons, has a markedly Gallic cast to its melodic line and a general air of effeminacy, which accords with the sort of xenophobic sneers directed at French foppery by Englishmen at this period. It is a piece for the ballroom, not for the parade ground. The crusaders, on the other hand, arrive to the clangour of trumpets and rattle of drums, hammering out a march whose beefy rumbustiousness made it an instant popular hit with British audiences.
Such a contrast could scarcely be more blatant, though there is no evidence that the peace party in
Rinaldo
's first-night audience were unduly discomfited by it.

According to Giacomo Rossi in his preface to the published libretto, Handel ‘while composing the music, scarcely gave me the time to write, and to my great wonder I saw an entire opera put to music by that surprising genius, with the greatest degree of perfection, in only two weeks'. The composer was generally a fast worker, but his speed is less remarkable in this instance when we realize how much of the score, like that of
Agrippina
, is derived from his earlier works. Recycling is what artists have always done and we should not be surprised to find Handel engaged in it, living as he did at a time when the adaptation of already existing material to fresh contexts was a generally accepted practice.
^*(f)
What is noteworthy about him is the frequency with which he resorts to it. The experienced Handel enthusiast hails the constant reappearance of old numbers in new surroundings with pleasure rather than irritation, and the continued use of certain cadential formulas (two in particular stand out) is tantamount to a stamp of authenticity on the work in question. Neither this nor the epic proportion of Handel's borrowings from other composers should be seen as devaluing his creative achievement.