Handel (28 page)

The libretto, loosely linked with history (Richard's queen, Berengaria, here appears as Costanza), involves Coeur de Lion's exploits on Cyprus and derives, via a Rolli adaptation, from Francesco Briani's drama
Isacio Tiranno
set by Lotti for the S. Giovanni Grisostomo season of 1710 and perhaps passed on to Handel personally by the composer. Rolli's inexpert juggling with the text results in a notably uneasy relationship between recitatives and arias, clumsy and vague transitions in the actions and one or two downright unconvincing situations.

All this does much to spoil what is otherwise one of Handel's most appealing works. Burney's comment that ‘the last act of Richard is replete with beauties of every kind of composition' applies equally well to the other two. Throughout, the orchestration is supremely imaginative, its sensuous textures contrasting sharply with those of the ‘basic band' in
Admeto
, two-thirds of whose arias are supported by oboes and strings. This may well have been owing to Handel's awareness of the need for some additional means of persuasive advocacy for a work so much less obviously self-propelled than its predecessor. The overture, one of Handel's best, has independent oboe and bassoon parts, flutes, including a traversa bassa, characterize Costanza, already sharply defined by her identification with F minor, Riccardo directs the siege of Limassol to a background of paired trumpets (three are required in the ensuing chorus) and an alternative setting of Pulcheria's ‘Quando non vedo', replaced before the first performance, exists for two chalumeaux, members of the clarinet family.

Despite its inconsistencies, the recitative is handled with typical sureness of touch. We have to wait until Gluck's
Iphigénie en Tauride
for anything as spirited as the opening scene, which replaces the last movement of the overture with a splendid tempest on Limassol beach, with a timpani part (given dynamic markings in English by the composer) and a dialogue between the shipwrecked Costanza and Berardo growing out of the subsiding storm. Two of the arias, at any rate, spring spontaneously from the recitative: Pulcheria's ‘Bella, teco non ho' is a successful attempt to silence Costanza with the first words of the aria, and Costanza's ‘Lascia la pace all'alma' is merely a natural consolidation of what she has just been saying to the evil Isacio.

The apportionment of roles to singers is an interesting reversal of what Handel had contrived for
Admeto
. Faustina as Pulcheria became the youthful ‘
vezzosa e vaga
' figure, and in Costanza Cuzzoni was given a character of genuine weight, almost another Rodelinda in the wifely loyalty suggested by her name. Boschi as Isacio had a far more important part to play in the drama than almost any he had been awarded earlier in the Academy operas, and two fine arias to prove it. As for Senesino, he was required to do little more than simper and bluster as the cardboard eponym, most conventional of the four protagonists.

Handel's borrowing habit was as deeply ingrained as ever. Though
Admeto
, interestingly enough, contained hardly any music based on other sources,
Alessandro
had used material from Agostino Steffani's opera on the same subject, as well as hints from Handel's mentor and rival Reinhard Keiser and snatches from Roman cantatas. In
Riccardo Primo
a new fount of ideas had been tapped for the first time. The year of the opera's première, 1727, had also seen the completion of the initial instalment in a major series of cantatas published by Georg Philipp Telemann under the title
Harmonischer Gottesdienst
. These tuneful chamber works for solo voice, a single instrument and continuo were to become a major resource for Handel throughout his career. Their melodic inspiration, first invoked in a revival of
Floridante
, is detectable everywhere from
Alcina
and the Coronation Anthems to
Samson
and
Solomon
. Telemann appears to have been untroubled by his friend's recourse to these pieces, since he adapted
Riccardo Primo
for performance in Hamburg in 1729, adding his own newly composed sub-plot. The mutual regard established on their first meeting in Halle nearly thirty years earlier was built to last and it is possible that Telemann saw Handel's continued pilfering in terms of the oblique compliment that in some sense it was.

After eleven performances
Riccardo Primo
was shelved, never to be revived until 1964. It was a respectable run, but it could not save the Academy. Mrs Pendarves told her sister: ‘I doubt operas will not survive longer than this winter, 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 broken up before; Senesino goes away next winter, and I believe Faustina, so you see harmony is almost out of fashion.' Around the time of the
Astianatte
fracas in June the directors had made several rather querulous appeals to the subscribers,
but we can scarcely blame the Academy's financial supporters for an increasing reluctance to lay out money on exorbitant stars. Opera was no longer a novelty, the wave of interest in the rival divas had broken, Bononcini had retired once again to his patroness and the whole thing had become a deuced expense.

The success of John Gay's
The Beggar's Opera
, which played to packed houses during the early months of 1728, had little to do with the Academy's relapse, despite what has often been stated. As an associate and admirer of Handel's, Gay was not out deliberately to ruin his old acquaintance of Burlington days, and though his pioneering comic masterpiece pulled in a substantial proportion of Haymarket regulars, this was merely another large hole knocked in an already foundering ship. Much of the precision in Gay's parody is inevitably lost on those who appreciate the work simply for its ‘popular' flavour: one wonders how much of the burlesque element Bertolt Brecht, for example, could relish. Hogarth's painting of the Gaol Scene effectively underlines the formal parallels, with Macheath as the Senesino figure between Polly and Lucy as Cuzzoni and Faustina (or vice versa) against a backdrop that could easily pass for one of the prison scenes in the King's Theatre stock.

Perhaps the most important contribution to the development of Handel's art made by
The Beggar's Opera
was its revelation of an English public that liked hearing English words to English tunes. Ballad opera was now set going as a genre, with countless variations on Gay's original. Via Charles Coffey's
The Beggar's Wedding
it established itself in Germany in the
Singspiel
format, which would reach its apogee in Mozart's
Die Entführung aus dem Serail
and
Die Zauberflöte
. In Samuel Johnson's
The Village Opera
, the simile aria, already parodied by Gay, gained a magnificent absurdity:

My Dolly was the Snow-drop fair,

Curling Endive was her Hair;

The fragrant Jessamine her Breath;

White Kidney-Beans, her even Teeth.

Two Daisies were her Eyes;

Her Breasts in swelling Mushrooms rise;

Her Waist, the streight and upright Fir;

But all her heart was Cucumber.

Colley Cibber wrote the attractive
Chuck or The Schoolboy's Opera
, in which Chuck, with his friends, bunks school, but bribes the schoolmaster Dionysius to commute a threatened beating by offering him a ‘new-mill'd Crown'.

Handel pressed inexorably on with a new opera, provisionally titled
Genserico
and centred on the figure of the fifth-century Vandal leader Gaiseric, whose libretto was probably adapted for him by the trusted Nicola Haym. After writing the overture and half a dozen arias, he set it aside in favour of another Haym adaptation, based this time on a work representing the very cutting edge of new Italian theatre poetry. First produced on 17 February 1728,
Siroe
used a text by the greatest of the opera seria poets and one of comparatively few librettists who have had a decisive influence on the nature of operatic form. It is difficult to think of many other writers in the eighteenth century whose international reputation equalled that of Pietro Metastasio and whose fame declined so swiftly with the changes in taste brought about by the rise of Romanticism. Chilly and limited as we may find Metastasio's classicism (embodied at its most precious in his surname, a Hellenizing of the workaday Italian Trapassi) there is no denying the profound impression made on contemporaries by his single-mindedness as a theatre poet determined to raise his professional role from that of a hack versifier to a dignified arbitrator preoccupied with artistic standards. His dramas, despite their mechanical solutions, at any rate codified opera seria conventions, cutting away trifling underplots, tightening up the story element, and forging a much stronger link between character and moral decision. Their clean lines and scrupulous observance of the exit aria rule made them favourites with singers and composers alike, and it is no surprise to find that practically every operatic composer from Handel to Mozart (
La Clemenza di Tito
is rebuilt Metastasio) set these texts again and again.

There is no space here to investigate the reasons why not a single one of all these settings should have achieved the classic status of, for instance, Gluck and Calzabigi's
Orfeo ed Euridice
. Sufficient to note that none of Handel's three such efforts is among his best work, though each is of course an efficient piece of craftsmanship.
Siroe
, a pseudo-historical Persian tale,
is the least successful of them. The score is strangely colourless, as though the lofty aridities of the poetry had somehow unmanned the composer. Once again, by simple contrast with the effects in
Riccardo Primo
and, in turn, with the sobrieties of
Admeto
, we can see how very far from stereotyped or haphazard is Handel's approach to the orchestra. Here there is nothing but oboes and strings, and in Act III the oboes do not play at all between the opening sinfonia and the final coro.

Though alert to the libretto's various dramatic challenges, Handel was evidently impatient of the restrictions imposed by the very long passages of recitative, already cut down by Haym. It is tempting to think that Siroe's ‘Deh, voi mi dite, o Numi' at the beginning of Act II was broken off through sheer irritation at the rigidity of the textual structure. The text itself has in any case its full measure of Metastasian strengths and weaknesses: on the one hand, a tightly knit intrigue, skilfully interlocked situations and strong characters, on the other the usual exit convention, huge swaths of dialogue unlikely to interest a London audience unless it was prepared to pore carefully over its wordbooks and a plot which, for all its nods in the direction of Aristotelian purity, conveys little of that element of chance that has played such a vital part in good drama from Aeschylus down to our own day.

Strongest of the protagonists is undoubtedly the scheming Medarse, sung by the ‘second man' Baldi, to whom Handel gave three fine airs, culminating in the hugely ironic ‘Benche tinta del sangue fraterno', in which pure black comedy clothes the villain's gloating. ‘Even tinged with a brother's blood, the crown loses none of its splendour: a bold stroke for the throne, if it misfires, finds no mercy, but if it succeeds is always termed valour' – all this to a jaunty dotted F major tune with an accompaniment of dancing triplets and trills. ‘Every family', said an Italian critical commentator on Metastasio, ‘has its Medarse' and this ultimate proof of the piquancy of Handelian wit helps us to credit it. Otherwise the best pieces are Laodice's ‘Mi lagnerò tacendo', where the simplest of orchestral lines (unison violins, no violas, rhythm bass) is touched with plangent chromaticisms, and Cosroe's ‘Gelido in ogni vena', whose harmonic structure is founded on a creepy semi-quaver ostinato allowing some free modulation (F sharp minor – E major – C sharp minor – B major) and reflecting a sort of shivering horror,
which Boschi had rarely before been asked to portray. Siroe himself emerges as a pallid, neurasthenic hero, allowed his moment in the excellent Act III
scena
‘Son stanco, ingiusti Numi', in the ‘remote' key of B flat minor. The two ladies are both dull sticks.

The perfunctory quality of the seven-bar symphony evoking a civil broil in the square at Seleucia makes us realize how low the Academy was brought since the days of
Alessandro
and it is noteworthy that everything about
Siroe
, perhaps even Handel's selection of it, suggests an urgent economy drive. Certain patrons, however, stayed loyal. George II, though a preposterous figure in the eyes of contemporary chroniclers, deserves a word of praise from musicians for his staunch and discerning championship of the composer. In any case, eighteen performances imply that things cannot have been altogether hopeless, though an anonymous attack on
The Beggar's Opera
in the
London Journal
for 23 March spoke of ‘The Neglect into which the Italian Operas are at present fallen', and berated ‘the fickle and inconstant Temper of the
English
Nation'.

In April a meeting of the Academy's governors ‘agreed to prosecute the subscribers who had not yet paid' and considered the possibility of legal action. On the 30th Handel's last Academy opera,
Tolomeo, Re d'Egitto
, was given the first of a run of seven performances. It was to be Handel's final collaboration with Nicola Haym and it is tempting to suppose that the librettist's pastoral interpolations in his version of Sigismondo Capeci's
Tolomeo ed Alessandro ovvero la Corona Disprezzata
, originally set by Domenico Scarlatti in Rome seventeen years earlier, were made with a genuine sense of the composer's fondness for country life. With the exception of one scene at the opening of Act III the entire opera takes place in the open air. Of the six scene changes two are duplicated and one other could quite easily be intended to appear later on as the
Campagna con villa deliziosa
. Evidently employing Goupy and Tillemans was out of the question, and the rest of the scenery was perhaps in too tatty a condition to be used.