Handel (24 page)

Somebody had the idea of recasting Sir John Suckling's ‘A Session of Poets' in the form of a session of musicians, which appeared as an anonymous pamphlet towards the end of the 1724 season, and presents an interesting conspectus of contemporary opinion on the London musical scene. Apollo settles on the opera house as an appropriate venue for his court, and Boschi and Berenstadt, by virtue of their loud voices, are nominated as the ushers. All the town musicians arrive, from ‘the Op'ra Orchest' and the playhouse bands to waits, organists, dancing masters and the fiddlers from riverside taverns. The composers then present themselves one by one, and are dealt with by the god strictly according to their deserts: Pepusch is slily criticized for his preoccupation with academic degrees, Galliard, Ariosti and poor mad Thomas Roseingrave are gently though patronizingly brushed aside, the Scottish violinist William Corbett is banished, with heavy irony, ‘to cleanly Edinburgh' (the city was noted at the time as one of Europe's dirtiest) and Greene and Croft are damned out of hand for dullness. Geminiani gets a fairer hearing:

and Jean Loeillet is implicitly commended for his modest good-fellowship:

The preference shown to Haym as opposed to Rolli, distinguished only for his ‘scoundrel Op'ra Words', suggests that the writer must have been in the know as to the nature of the Haymarket factions. Bononcini, scornful to the last, appears with the Robinson on his arm, but his music simply succeeds in sending everybody to sleep. It is, of course, Handel who, by implication ‘since but one Phoenix we can boast, he needs no name', wins the coveted bays:

This sort of pamphleteering underlines the exposed position into which Handel's gifts thrust him throughout his English career. The assumption is a naïve one, which depicts him as the uncontested king of London musical life, and he was now beginning to discover the true perils and responsibilities of fame, talent and success in a city where the public's reserves of caprice were as unlimited as its supply of cash. Professional jealousy was incessant and it is clear that certain composers, such as Pepusch and later Charles Avison, a severe critic, were genuinely blind to certain aspects of his genius, which we now take for granted. Others, notably Maurice Greene, felt actively threatened by him and since Handel, unlike the heroes of his operas, was not given to playing the
generoso rivale
, the resentment is likely to have been mutual.

He was taking no chances with the new operas for the 1724–5 season. True victories are those quickest followed up and the triumph of
Giulio Cesare
was an ideal springboard. Zamboni, writing to a friend in September, a month or so before the opening night, looked forward to a bumper season. Besides Senesino and Cuzzoni at the top of their form, the company,
having shed Durastanti, had gained a good replacement in Anna Dotti, who had arrived from Paris presumably as an offshoot of the abortive foreign touring negotiations of the previous year. Berenstadt had gone back to Italy, where, like others of his kind, he dabbled in picture dealing while continuing his singing career, and his place was now taken by the versatile alto castrato Andrea Pacini.

The casts of the new Haymarket shows were further enriched by the acquisition of Francesco Borosini, one of the greatest tenors of his day. Yet another Modenese, he had been a popular singer at the imperial court (becoming, incidentally, a director of the Kärntnerthor Theatre) and was an exciting find for Handel who, as well as creating two outstanding new roles for him, recast the part of Sextus for a tenor in the revival of
Giulio Cesare
the following year. Borosini appears to have arrived, what is more, with the libretto of one of his more recent successes in his pocket. Zamboni tells his friend Gaburri that ‘the first opera will be Bajazet, set to music by Handel'. In fact, Handel had completed a draft score, based on Haym's adaptation of Agostino Piovene's
Il Bajazet
, before the new tenor appeared. The text had originally been set by Francesco Gasparini in 1711,
^*(k)
but now Borosini produced a new version of it, with music by the same composer, expressly written for him and premièred in Reggio in 1719.

A member of a leading family of Veneto nobility, Piovene had produced his popular libretto on the story of the Mongol conqueror Tamburlaine and Bajazeth, the Turkish emperor, based on an already extant text by Antonio Salvi with additional love interest worked up from Ducas's Byzantine history, in 1710. To the Reggio version Borosini, notable in a cast that included such past and future Handelians as Antonio Bernacchi, Faustina Bordoni and Diana Vico, had caused a special scene to be added, as the title page tells us: ‘the poetry is by the noble Venetian Piovene, apart from the last scene, which was composed by Zanella, a famous Modenese poet, and founded on an idea of Signor Borosini's.' The idea was evidently the spectacular onstage death agony of the wretched Bajazet, dying gasps and all, a relative rarity in Baroque opera and one which is not carried all the way, since the unfortunate sultan actually leaves the stage to die.

Tightened up by Handel,
Haym and the Reggio adaptors,
Tamerlano
(note the change of emphasis indicated by the London title) emerges as one of the strongest of the Academy's libretti. As the only Handel opera of the 1720s to be predominantly tragic (the happy ending implied by the coro is softened by the glumness of the music), it is also his only work of this period to be firmly rooted in the world of French neoclassical drama. Apart from Ducas, its main literary source is indeed a French tragedy,
Tamerlan ou la Mort de Bajazet
by Jacques Pradon, famous as a jealous competitor with Racine and a tool of the factions that brought about the initial failure of the latter's
Phèdre
, and the spirit of the original play has heavily conditioned the atmosphere of the opera.

It is an atmosphere very different from those of
Giulio Cesare
and
Ottone
, a sparse, bare, dark, indoor world, whose sense of hopelessness and claustrophobia, as though we were viewing it through an infinite corridor, has a far closer kinship to the sort of drama produced in our own century than to the age of Zeno and Metastasio. There is a startling absence of that element of spectacle and occasion, which punctuates so many of the earlier operas, no marching armies, bird-haunted groves, jolly symphonies and dances, scenes of transformation, combat or seduction. Nor are the women, those Handelian catalysts who set the tone of each opera, characters in the mould, say, of Teofane, Gismonda or Cleopatra. Theirs is not even the majestic theatricality of a Zenobia or a Cornelia. Princesses both, Asteria and Irene are humanized to a point at which their plainness speaks more powerfully than any magniloquent gesture.

These stock figures of opera seria take life from the composer's firm grasp of dramatic consistency, as do the four male protagonists. Tamburlaine himself, swaggering and decadent, has all too evidently created the air of violence and corruption which overwhelms the refinement of somebody like Andronico, a Senesino sighing-lover role given a deeper irony by his articulate impotence, the baffled intellectual at the tyrant's court. Leone, the Boschi bass, has the task of emphasizing, as a marginal commentator, the crushing futility at the core of this extraordinary work. As for Bajazet, it is he who from the outset dominates the opera and offers a superb illustration of Handel's ability to portray human suffering. Monumental in quality though much of his music is in its quasi-religious vein (two of his arias, significantly, are derived from
La Resurrezione
and another is from the
Brockes Passion
),
he remains the archetypal father and ruler, gradually stripped of power and authority until allowed to die in circumstances as poignant as King Lear's. The music for this episode shows Handel working in the medium of which he had been a master since the days of
Teseo
and
Amadigi
, a free-flowing accompanied recitative, in which ungoverned emotion temporarily annihilates form and tonality. The scene looks forward, in its depiction of passionate despair, to moments like Dejanira's madness in
Hercules
or ‘Deeper and deeper still' in
Jephtha
, and seems to have been well appreciated from the first.

Handel's manuscripts reveal the extraordinary care he took over this and other aspects of a work that drew on his utmost creative resources. Another example of his attention to balance and detail is the moment in Act II when Asteria, in order to save her father and her lover, has agreed to marry Tamerlano, though he is already betrothed to Irene. Bajazet, Andronico and Irene turn from her in horror as she ascends the throne, but she then discloses that she planned to stab Tamerlano as soon as he came near. The angry tyrant sentences father and daughter to death, and leaves Asteria to face the recriminations of the others. Each responds to her appeal in a brief air beginning with the word ‘No!' and Asteria finishes the scene alone, with a grand da capo piece designed to give full play to Cuzzonian versatility. With its controlled key scheme (the three exit arias are in E minor, E major and G major respectively) and deliberately condensed forms (no ritornellos except to usher the characters off ) this is one of those points that triumphantly validate the artificiality of opera seria. It recalls, of course, the triumph scene in
Agrippina
, where the characters ruthlessly drop away from Ottone one by one, and both episodes justify the use of that exit convention which was to become standardized in the mechanical dramas of Metastasio.

Haym dedicated
Tamerlano
to the first Duke of Rutland, a talented amateur violinist who had introduced the Haymarket orchestra's leader, Stefano Carbonelli, to England. The opera was a success, though it never succeeded in joining
Rinaldo
and
Giulio Cesare
among Handel favourites, and Anna Dotti as Irene caused unintentional laughter among the audience, as Lady Bristol told her husband: ‘You know my ear too well for me to pretend to give you any account of the Opera farther than that the new man takes extremely,' she wrote, ‘but the woman is so great a joke that there was more laughing at her than at a farce,
but her opinion of her self gets the better of that. The Royal family were all there, and a greater crowd than ever I saw, which has tired me to death, so that I am come home to go to bed as soon as I have finished this.' Cluer published the score, with Handel's own corrections and figurations, ‘and to render the Work more acceptable to Gentlemen and Ladies every Song is truly translated into English Verse, and the Words engrav'd to the Musick under the Italian, which was never before attempted in any Opera . . .'

After nine performances of Ariosti's
Artaserse
and a successful
Giulio Cesare
revival, the second of Handel's new works for the season was brought on. For the first time in his English career, Handel turned to the writings of Antonio Salvi, whose libretto
Vincer se stesso e la maggior vittoria
(
Rodrigo
) he had set during his stay in Italy. Salvi's speciality was precisely the sort of ‘human predicament' story that was bound to appeal to Handel. Like Piovene he had felt the influence of French drama, and had actually produced his own version of Pradon's
Tamerlan
for performance at Pratolino in 1706, introducing a character called Rossane ‘so as to follow the Italian custom of bringing at least two women on to the stage'. For the libretto, which Handel was later to use for
Rodelinda, Regina de' Longobardi
, Salvi turned to Corneille's
Pertharite, Roi des Lombards
, produced in Paris in 1652, but he may well have done this with an eye to the current vogue for ‘Gothic' subjects among Italian librettists and composers. Looking, for example, at the list of operas given at Venice between 1700 and 1710 we can find at least nine, including such titles as
Edvige, Regina d'Ungheria
,
Berengario, Re d'ltalia
,
Engelberta
,
Fredegonda
,
Ambleto
(Apostolo Zeno's version of the Hamlet story) and an adaptation of
Pertharite
made by another librettist for Pollarolo.

Salvi's treatment of Corneille is sensitive throughout to the nature of Italian opera as opposed to French tragedy, but even more interesting is the way in which Handel and Haym treated Salvi. Large amounts of recitative were whittled away (even with its wordbooks the English audience is unlikely to have welcomed recitativo semplice as a dominant element in the work) and though the proportion of arias was not seriously reduced, their distribution was adjusted so as to throw the major figures into greater relief. Certain new scenes were added which bear witness to the imaginative strength of the collaboration. We shall never know whether Haym or Handel was responsible for the interpolation of such poignant utterances as Bertarido's ‘Dove sei' and Rodelinda's ‘Ho perduto il caro sposo',
but they make perfect sense in their dramatic context.

Rodelinda
stands in complete contrast to the annihilating gloom of
Tamerlano.
From the outset Handel loads the odds in favour of the eponymous heroine, a wife who believes her husband is dead and repels the advances of the tyrant who has dispossessed him. Her music conveys all the strength of character which her opponent, the peevish, vacillating Grimoaldo, lacks. The arbitrary power that lays its threatening hand on the protagonists of
Tamerlano
is progressively weakened, in the palace of the Lombard usurper, by constancy and fortitude, so that when we reach the closing scene of Act III, in which Grimoaldo, wrung with remorse, wishes that he could change places with the shepherd of a poor flock, the conventional aristocratic hankering for pastoral simplicity is made the vehicle for a comprehensible change of heart, conveyed by the composer in one of his most melting sicilianos.