Handel (12 page)

The audience at the first night of
Rinaldo
on 24 February 1711 was unlikely to be aware of the second-hand goods being set before them. The new opera could scarcely fail in terms of its quality and consistency. The cast, besides Giuseppe Maria Boschi and his wife Francesca, already encountered in Italy, and Elisabetta Pilotti, whom Handel had known in Hanover, included one of the century's finest singing actors, Niccolò Grimaldi, known as ‘Nicolino' or ‘Nicolini', as the eponymous hero. Born in Naples and early employed in the Royal Chapel, he starred in three of Scarlatti's most successful operas and went on to spectacular triumphs in Bologna and Venice. He arrived in London in 1708 and gained instant popularity for the extraordinary grace and dignity of his stage presence. Steele, who saw him in
Pirro e Demetrio
, could not forbear praising him. ‘Every limb and every finger', he wrote, ‘contributes to the part he acts, inasmuch that a deaf man may go along with him in the sense of it.
There is scarce a beautiful posture in an old statue that he does not plant himself in, as the different circumstances of the story give occasion for it.' Even more striking was his combat with a lion in Mancini's
L'Idaspe fedele
, the singer having apostrophized the brute in an aria ‘Monstro crudel, che fai?'. This frequently got an encore and the lion, admired by one foreign visitor because his human hands and feet were properly concealed, had to live to fight another day, like the dragon in a mummers' play. Addison thought it all very silly and unworthy of Nicolini's talents, but Mary Wortley Montagu particularly commended the way that he ‘represented nakedness so naturally'.

Rinaldo
's success was not solely due to its exceptional cast. Hill had recently made some technical improvements to the Queen's Theatre stage and the results were evidently meant to figure in the performances. The
Spectator
found the opportunities for ridicule irresistible: ‘the Opera of
Rinaldo
is filled with Thunder and Lightning, Illuminations and Fireworks; which the Audience may look upon without catching Cold, and indeed without much Danger of being burnt; for there are several Engines filled with Water, and ready to play at a Minute's Warning, in case any such Accident should happen.' Steele and Addison recommended Hill to insure the theatre and poked fun at the promises made in his printed stage directions which the
mise-en-scène
failed to carry out. There was no chariot with white horses for the pagan champion Argante, and the live sparrows and chaffinches in the ‘delightful Grove' of Act I flew out into the pit and shat upon the audience, while inefficient stagehands forgot to move the wing flats, so that the sea suddenly appeared among the trees and Steele saw ‘a well-dressed young Fellow, in a full-bottom'd Wigg . . . without any visible Concern taking Snuff.

But London was well pleased and the piece, which was given several subsequent revivals, became a firm favourite. It is not hard to see why. The effects of Handel's recycling are cleverly calculated throughout, and it is important to realize that, as far as English audiences were concerned, this was new music in the newest style, designed to show the young composer's technical and dramatic ranges at their most expansive. The libretto, although far removed from Tasso's Mannerist gravities in its primitive array of sensational set pieces, at least helped Handel to achieve this as directly as possible, and it is precisely this quality of immediacy which makes the opera among his most attractive.

For
Rinaldo
is hardly to be compared as a unified dramatic organism with such later masterpieces as
Rodelinda
or
Orlando
, or even with the earlier
Agrippina
. It contains a string of magnificent numbers, from ‘Cara sposa', ‘one of the best airs in that style that was ever composed by himself or any other master, and by many degrees the most pathetic song, and with the richest accompaniment, which had then been heard in England', the ideal utterance of intensely private grief, through the wrily comic lovers' tiffs of the warrior Argante and the sorceress Armida, to the pantomime episodes of battle, magic and mythology, with seductive sirens, fire-breathing dragons, ‘ugly spirits' and parading armies. Yet the music, owing perhaps to the uses Handel has already made of it, never seems wholly involved with the text, either as something arising quite naturally and necessarily from a given situation or as an element supplying a needful momentum. With the exception of Armida and Argante, who bring a species of crude energy to all their scenes, the characters are conventional enough, yet theirs is the charming woodenness of the Sicilian puppet plays based, like
Rinaldo
, on Italian Renaissance epics. If Handel explores no profundities here, he shows in recompense an unflagging inventiveness, consolidating upon that sense of theatre he had developed in
Agrippina
, for which the opera's triumph was a well-merited reward.

Performances went on at intervals till the end of May, the later ones apparently at the desire of various aristocratic theatre patrons.
Rinaldo
was printed by the firm of Walsh and Hare, the first major work of Handel's to appear in England and foreshadowing a later publishing connexion that was to last until the composer's death. The third issue of ‘All the Songs set to Musick in the last new Opera call'd
Rinaldo
' contained Handel's own harpsichord ritornellos to Armida's aria ‘Vo' far guerra' concluding Act II. Six years afterwards the theatre orchestra's bassoonist William Babell had grown so impressed by the composer's keyboard improvisations at the various revivals that he published a reconstruction of them (Burney dismisses it as ‘wire-drawing the favourite songs . . . into showy and brilliant lessons'), which is perhaps the nearest we shall ever come to appreciating the impact made by Handel as an instrumental performer.
Rinaldo
's first successful run was not necessarily the good omen he might have wanted for writing operas in London.
He must have been aware from the outset of the uncertain footing on which the Queen's Theatre was managed. Box office takings, even for a work as popular as this one, would surely not have covered the costs of a lavish production, including elaborate scenic effects (cloud-borne monsters, dancing mermaids, a disappearing palace et cetera), ballet numbers between the acts and a large cast of supers.

Far from remaining to capitalize on his triumph, Handel returned to Hanover as soon as the opera season was over. Stopping on the way at Dusseldorf, he was invited by the Elector Palatine to try out some musical instruments and give an expert opinion. So concerned was Johann Wilhelm not to offend his fellow elector Georg Ludwig that he accompanied his note of apology with another to Hanover's Dowager Electress Sophia, asking her ‘straightway by your noble intercession, supreme above any other, to persuade your son to this end, that he shall not interpret amiss the delay of the above-mentioned Handel, occurring against his will, and that consequently this man may yet again be established and retained in the grace and protection of his Prince Elector'. A visit to Halle in November coincided with his niece's christening; she was given the names Johanna Friderica and her uncle ‘Herr Georg Friedrich Händel, Court kapellmeister to the Elector of Hanover' was one of the godparents.

Before the London opera season had ended that summer, yet another change took place in the volatile management structure of the Queen's Theatre. Aaron Hill's experience of running the house was not a happy one. Renting it from the Tory MP William Collier, who himself paid rent to Vanbrugh's tenant Owen Swiney, Hill had taken on the existing roster of (mainly) Italian soloists, including Nicolini on a staggering 800-guinea yearly contract. Any chance to prove his mettle as an impresario was cut short, however, when Collier, on 3 March 1711, ‘in a Violent manner Entered upon the said House, turn'd out the Treasurer and other servants which were Intrusted with the Receiving and distributing the publick money received from the Audience and put new ones in their places, took possession of all the Cloathes scenes ffurniture and other Goods And set himselfe up for sole Master and director of the Theatre Royall'.

Poor Hill found himself personally liable for various bills from the theatre's suppliers, though, as he complained to Lord Chamberlain Shrewsbury, he had already begun the process of paying them off with the money collected from the subscription audience when Collier pounced so inopportunely for repossession.
According to Hill's infuriated petition, the MP had not merely pocketed the sum paid by the subscribers to Mrs Elizabeth White of White's Chocolate House, but was ‘Combining and Confederating' with her to defraud him. Shrewsbury was unlikely to have set much store by Hill's claim that those who might substantiate his story were either dead ‘or gone into places beyond the seas remote and unknowne to Your Orator', but since the bill of complaint was filed on 11 July 1711, Handel, who would surely have known about the whole affair, must have been numbered in the latter category. Hill's suit failed, but Shrewsbury, clearly suspicious of Collier, kept a sharper eye on Haymarket business affairs. By the time Handel returned to London during the autumn of 1712, another manager had assumed – or in this case re-assumed – control of the Queen's Theatre.

This was Owen Swiney, who had been central in running London theatres for several years and in 1708 had taken over management of the opera company until Shrewsbury shifted him to Drury Lane. The son of an Irish Protestant vicar from County Wexford, he had been educated at Trinity College, Dublin, before coming to London in 1706 to begin a showbusiness career. By then thirty years old, he may have travelled in Italy during the intervening decade, since he was certainly au fait with the world of Italian opera and aware of the standards a theatre like the Queen's ought to be maintaining. It was Swiney who brought Nicolini to London to make his debut in
Pirro e Demetrio
, and the Haymarket audience had every right to expect an improvement, both aesthetic and administrative, now he took over once again as impresario.

Whether or not Swiney personally commissioned the new opera Handel completed on 24 October 1712, a musical version of Guarini's classic Italian pastoral
Il Pastor Fido
, we do not know. The genre held an enduring popularity among the English, though it was already in the process of transforming itself into something altogether less artificial and more directly related to modern rural life, in works such as Gay's burlesque
The Shepherd's Week
or Somerville's
Hobbinol
. Of Handel's two surviving essays in dramatic pastoral, the one,
Acis and Galatea
, is as full-blooded as the other,
Il Pastor Fido
, is generally vapid.

Various modern revivals have enabled us to see that the fault does not lie wholly with the composer. Though several of the arias are based on music from the Italian years (Eurilla's ‘Di goder il bel ch'adoro' is the last number of the cantata
Tu fedel, tu costante
) and the by now rather hoary favourite ‘Ho un non so che nel cor' turns up at the beginning of Act III,
a characteristic sensitivity has gone into the creation of a series of rustic miniatures whose lightness of texture is wholly suited to the gauze and tinsel of romantic tragicomedy. At least six numbers are accompanied by figured bass alone, contrasted attractively with others using flutes, paired oboes, solo violin and pizzicato strings. By such skilful variations in the weight of his accompaniments Handel is able to make an effective differentiation between the various pastoral stereotypes. Dorinda and Silvio, the soubrette couple, are slenderly supported throughout, either by a simple bass or unison violins. Mirtillo alternates between the continuo and the full band. Amarilli, with whom the Act III duet finally unites him, achieves deepening perspective culminating in her sustained G major outburst ‘No! non basta un infedele', but much of the best music goes to the scheming Eurilla, whose ‘Ritorna adesso Amor', an elegantly scrupulous piece of fuguing, is a splash of Handelian academic wit.

One of the theatre's most dedicated audience members had started making notes on successive opera productions and was to maintain this habit for almost the next two decades. Once known to writers on Handel as
Colman's Opera Register
from its supposed author, Francis Colman, later English envoy at Florence and a useful contact for Handel, the journal commented somewhat acidly on ‘the New Pastorall Opera called the Faithfull Shepherd' that ‘the Scene represented only ye Country of Arcadia. ye Habits were old – ye Opera Short'. Pilotti and Valentini starred once more, and Handel's company was joined by Valeriano Pellegrini (the creator of Nerone in
Agrippina
) and Margherita L'Epine as Eurilla. Known as ‘Signora Margherita' or ‘Greber's Peg' from her association with a German impresario, she was notorious for having seduced Lord Nottingham, First Lord of the Admiralty, so successfully that, according to one epigrammatist:

Later on she settled down to a happy marriage with Johann Christoph Pepusch, who nicknamed her Hecate for her swarthy complexion.

The excellent overture, an orchestral suite Handel had probably written for the Hanoverian court during his recent visit,
at once became popular, but
Il Pastor Fido
had thin houses and it was time for an altogether more spectacular production to bring back the audiences. Somebody hit on the ambitious project of staging an Italianized version of Philippe Quinault's five-act lyric tragedy
Thésée
, written for Lully at Versailles in 1675. As far as the staging was concerned the piece, loosely based on the story of Theseus and Medea, and introducing a companion pair of lovers Arcane and Clitia, offered splendid opportunities for mechanical effects and handsome costumes, but to adapt anything so diffuse as a French lyric drama to the conditions of Italian opera proved too much for Handel's librettist, Nicola Haym, and for Handel himself. While Haym occasionally cut out pieces of Quinault's original text upon which a clear appreciation of the dialogue depends, Handel impatiently lopped chunks from Haym's version in his efforts to mould the thing into as manageable a form as possible.