Handel (21 page)

The obligatory second pair of lovers, Princess Rossane and Timante, Prince of Tyre, whom a competent theatre poet could have worked neatly into the intrigue,
are dramatically superfluous throughout (until late in Act III when Timante turns up to rescue Floridante with all the timeliness of the United States Cavalry). Ironically, Handel bestowed some of his most affecting music on their exchanges, including the F minor siciliano ‘Oh dolce mia speranza' in which the vocal line is shaded with the lightest dapplings of orchestral sound, and the unashamedly sentimental Act II duet, in which a reference to cooing doves is made by a pair of bassoons.

One scene, however, has always deserved its admirers. The latent romanticism of Handel's genius cherished the opportunities given by his librettists for night scenes, in which darkness and moonlight enhance the atmosphere of amorous confusion, and
Floridante
features one of the best of them all. In a dark gallery Elmira awaits the arrival of her lover, who has slipped back into the kingdom disguised as a Moorish slave. She begins to apostrophize the night that will return her Floridante to her, but her aria, in the unusual key of B flat minor, breaks off into accompanied recitative after twelve bars as she thinks she hears somebody approach. Could it be he, leaving the secret room and coming up the stairs (‘
quella furtiva scala
')? ‘Open the door, come in!' she cries, but ‘ah, no! my passion deceives me, oh! how wretched waiting for him makes me', and the aria resumes. This is one of several such moments in Handel opera in which the composer, aided by the libretto, disturbs the formal convention to heighten dramatic immediacy.

First performed on 28 November 1721,
Floridante
was given fourteen further performances that season, the last of them at the end of May. Rolli had dedicated the libretto to George Augustus, Prince of Wales, who had only recently been reconciled with the King after several years of openly declared antipathy. Either this, or a more general audience awareness of the opera's analogy with current political events, caused embarrassment at one of the early performances. In a letter from a friend dated 19 December 1721 the Tory politician Edward Harley was informed that ‘some things have happened at a new opera which have given great offence. It is called
Floridante
. There happens to be a right heir in it, that is imprisoned. At last the right heir is delivered and the chains put upon the oppressor. At this last circumstance, there happened to be a very great and unseasonable clapping, in the presence of the great ones.'

Whatever the repercussions of such an incident, the Royal Academy of Music could report a highly successful season at its close with a performance of Bononcini's
Crispo
on 16 June 1722. Both he and Handel were fortunate in the quality of the singers currently on the King's Theatre payroll. In Senesino they had a lead castrato of exceptional virtuosity and one whose acting skills had notably improved in the course of his career, so that he could convince audiences both as warrior and lover – as the title role of
Floridante
indeed demands. Margherita Durastanti, with whom Handel in particular had a good working relationship, would be asked back for the forthcoming season as a gifted singing actress, Anastasia Robinson had made a notable impact in Bononcini's
Griselda
and the company bass Giuseppe Maria Boschi was reliable as an angry father or a pugnacious villain.

To this distinguished roster the theatre management now added a second castrato, in the giraffe-like form of Gaetano Berenstadt. Son of a German timpanist working for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, he had trained in Florence before removing to Dusseldorf and had first appeared on the London stage in 1717. He apparently liked his English theatrical experience well enough to tell Heidegger that he was ready to return to the King's Theatre for a £250 salary plus a benefit evening. By no means an attractive stage presence – audiences were put off by his ‘hideous Jaws' as well as by his grotesque stature – he was an intelligent character, with interests outside his profession, and evidently a capable actor. With wry amusement he defined the sort of parts he was called upon to sing alongside Senesino and the other principals as ‘candlesticks', lending symmetry and additional lustre without upstaging the big names.

Plans were afoot to add a still more dazzling star to the projected cast for that autumn's new operas, a singer who was a prima donna to the marrow of her bones. Francesca Cuzzoni is pithily evoked for us by Horace Walpole. He never actually saw her in her heyday, but his mother, an enthusiastic patroness of hers, must have furnished an accurate description. ‘She was', he says, ‘short and squat, with a doughy cross face, but fine complexion; was not a good actress; dressed ill; and was silly and fantastical.' The virtuoso flautist and composer Johann Joachim Quantz, who heard her on his visit to London in 1727, praised her clarity of voice and purity of intonation, detailed her double octave compass, but pointed out tactfully that ‘her figure was not advantageous for the stage'.
She was famed for her effortless divisions and, as Burney says, for ‘enriching the cantilena with all the refinements and embellishments of the time . . . she had a creative fancy, and the power of occasionally accelerating and retarding the measure in the most artificial and able manner, by what the Italians call
tempo rubato
'.

So obvious an asset needed a new opera to show her off to the fullest advantage and as Handel finished his latest work in time for the opening of the 1722–3 season Cuzzoni was presumably expected to appear for the rehearsals, which began in October. ‘There is a new Opera now in Rehearsal at the Theatre in the Haymarket, a Part of which is reserv'd for one Mrs Cotsona, an extraordinary Italian Lady, who is expected daily.' True to form, however, the extraordinary Mrs Cotsona was doubtless proving tough over contract terms, for the new opera had to be shelved, and the early part of the season was eked out with
Muzio Scevola
and
Floridante
revivals until she condescended to appear in the last week of the year. Sandoni, the Haymarket's second keyboard player, had been sent to fetch her over and was shrewd enough to marry her on the way. With glacial irony the
British Journal
commented: ‘Seigniora Cutzoni is expected here with much Impatience for the Improvement of our Opera Performances; and as 'tis said, she far excells Seigniora
Duristante
, already with us, and all those she leaves in Italy behind her, much Satisfaction may be expected by those who of later Years have contributed largely to Performances in this Kind, for the great Advantage of the Publick, and softening the Manners of a rude
British
People.'

Ottone, Re di Germania
, Handel's first opera for the new season, received its première on 12 January 1723. He had begun work on it during the previous August and the score underwent two extensive revisions before going into rehearsal. The piece in its latest form would mark Cuzzoni's London debut, but Handel was not prepared to throw away all his most effective music simply because it had originally been destined for another singer (probably Durastanti). The test case, pitting his practical wisdom against Cuzzoni's vanity, was her entrance aria in the character of the Byzantine princess Teofane, comparing the effete Adelberto, posing as her betrothed Ottone whom she has never seen, with a portrait of the original. ‘I was sent here as a token of established peace between the Greek and German empires,'
she says with political disingenuousness, ‘not so that there should be eternal war between my spirit and my sense of duty,' and launches into one of Handel's most haunting soprano arias. Constructed in the old Venetian manner with the string ritornello at the end and the vocal line strung over a slow dotted bass, ‘Falsa immagine' is a mere twenty-eight bars, yet its nonchalant artistry is breathtaking. The sense of Teofane's baffled disappointment growing towards anguished amazement, as she contrasts supposed reality with a painted likeness she has been led to believe is closer to the actual thing, is wonderfully conveyed by pitting the simplicity of the opening melody, to the words ‘False image, you have deceived me, you showed me a lovely face', against the ornate dotted semiquavers of ‘and that face attracted me', ending with a melisma on the word ‘
allettò
' (attracted). Through purely musical means the incipient sexual allure created by the picture of Ottone is thus depicted in the shape of the phrases, and the same alertness to the text dictates the plunging intervals on the words ‘
orrore
' and ‘
affanno
' (trouble) in the little middle section.

Cuzzoni was understandably disappointed with ‘Falsa immagine' and refused point blank to sing it in rehearsal. She did not know her man. Handel, unaccustomed to dictation from his singers on points of art, took hold of the fractious diva, shouting (in French, which he seems to have spoken more readily than Italian): ‘
Madame, je sais que vous êtes une véritable diablesse, mais je vous ferai savoir, moi, que je suis Beelzebub, le chef des diables
' and threatened to throw her out of the window. The ‘little Siren of the stage' was no match for ‘the Charming Brute'. She gave in and her victory over the London audience was assured.

The whole venture was one of Handel's greatest triumphs and its success must feelingly have recalled the
Rinaldo
nights more than a decade earlier. Much of this
réclame
was due to Cuzzoni herself.
Colman's Opera Register
noted that she was ‘extreemly admired' and the
London Journal
scurrilously observed: ‘His Majesty was at the Theatre in the Hay-Market, when Seigniora Cotzani performed, for the first Time, to the Surprize and Admiration of a numerous Audience, who are ever too fond of Foreign Performers. She is already jump'd into a handsome Chariot, and an Equipage accordingly. The Gentry seem to have so high a Taste of her fine Parts,
that she is likely to be a great Gainer by them.'

Fabrice compared the run on tickets to the South Sea Bubble. Such was the audience's critical enthusiasm for Cuzzoni that a footman in the gallery was moved to shout out: ‘Damme, she has a nest of nightingales in her belly.' This was apparently not the only disturbance from that part of the house and the directors had to publish a warning in the
Daily Courant
that the footmen's gallery would be shut if the disorders continued. Among the theatre's smarter echelons a quarrel broke out, during the opera's ninth performance, between ‘a Scotch Nobleman and an English Baronet', only prevented from turning into a duel when an army general, happening to be present, placed both of them under arrest. Gay, writing to Swift in Dublin, caught the mood of the moment when he said: ‘As for the reigning Amusement of the town, 'tis entirely Musick. Real fiddles, Bass Viols and Haut boys not poetical Harps, Lyres and reeds. Theres no body allow'd to say I Sing but an Eunuch or an Italian Woman. Every body is grown now as great a judge of Musick as they were in your time of Poetry, and folks that could not distinguish one tune from another now daily dispute about the different Styles of Hendel, Bononcini and Attilio. People have now forgot Homer, and Virgil & Caesar, or at least they have lost their ranks, for in London and Westminster in all polite conversation's, Senesino is daily voted to be the greatest man that ever liv'd.'

An objective opera-goer, if there were any such in London, would have given
Ottone
a rather more mixed reception. The libretto, originally prepared for Lotti's
Teofane
, which Handel had seen at Dresden, is by Stefano Pallavicino, son of a noteworthy Venetian composer and appointed ‘Poet in the Italian tongue' to the Saxon court when he was only sixteen. His literary gifts were considerable. Apart from such feats as translating Locke's treatise on education from its French edition into Italian verse, he had provided Agostino Steffani with a fine drama in
Tassilone
, and seems to have specialized in libretti with a political flavour,
Teofane
being designed to celebrate an Austro-Saxon marriage alliance. Though this aspect was unlikely to have interested Handel, Haym or the Haymarket, the text's prevailing style is far superior to those of many other Handel libretti, especially in the vivid language of the recitatives, and the characterization is splendidly forceful throughout.

Burney rightly praises the overture,
one of whose movements was later to be used in the last of the Concerti Grossi Opus 3. Noting that ‘the number of songs in this opera that became national favourites, is perhaps greater than any other that was ever performed in England', he makes the significant point that ‘the passages in this and the other operas which Handel composed about this time, became the musical language of the nation, and in a manner proverbial, like the
bons mots
of a man of wit in society. So that long after this period all the musicians in the kingdom, whenever they attempted to compose what they called Music of their own, seem to have had no other stock of ideas than these passages.' This may have been so, yet Haym's adaptation of Pallavicino, though concentrating the focus of the various episodes on the crucial exit arias (probably at Handel's instigation), involved ruthless and awkward compressions, and a consequent weakening of dramatic motivation. Handel himself heavily revised the first draft, cutting no less than ten arias and rewriting four others, but enough of the dash and vigour of the basic text remained for him to be able to project Pallavicino's characters in powerful and consistent musical terms, so that
Ottone
, in a sense, succeeds in spite of itself.

It was not enough for Handel to offer his public a vivid representation of real people in credible situations, the ambitious matriarch Gismonda, her son the faineant Adelberto, Emireno the good-natured pirate, and Teofane herself, touchingly human in her devoted courage. The variety of his sympathies, which makes him one of the greatest of musical dramatists, turns the opera, for all its structural flaws, into a brilliant emotional display. Ottone alone travels much further than the traditional ardour and languishing in which Senesino was a noted adept. Like Teofane he is introduced with an ingenuous simplicity, in the siciliano ‘Ritorna, o dolce amore', and thereafter his music is a continually arresting contrast between buoyant virtuosity, in numbers such as the ‘modern'-sounding ‘Dopo l'orrore' (a superb illustration of Handel's structural mastery) and the introspective lyricism of pieces like ‘Tanti affanni', in which the psychological confusions of the recitative are not so much subdued as concentrated within the enfolding gloom of the aria.