Handel (34 page)

The opportunity for open revolt arose from a scheme set afoot during the summer of 1733 and explained in a letter from the Earl Delawarr to the Duke of Richmond. ‘There is a Spirit got up against the Dominion of Mr Handel, a subscription carry'd on, and Directors chosen, who have contracted with Senesino . . . The General Court gave power to contract with any Singer Except Strada, so that it is Thought Handel must fling up, which the poor Count [Heidegger] will not be sorry for, There being no one but what declares as much for him as against the Other, so that we have a Chance of seeing Operas once more on a good foot . . . We doubt not but we shall have your Graces Name in our Subscription List . . . There seems great Unanimity, and Resolution to carry On the Undertaking
comme il faut
.' So what has become known as the Opera of the Nobility was born, as the most blatant and powerful gesture of inimical rivalry Handel had yet needed to contend with in his career as a composer.

Several of its directors were former Academy members and may have been genuinely motivated by a wish to bring the latest Italian successes to London, though Delawarr's ‘Operas once more on a good foot' and ‘the Undertaking
comme il faut
' hint at somewhat more characteristically snobbish reasons for the project. Other forces too were at work. A glance at the list of directors detailed in Delawarr's letter reveals a marked political bias towards the anti-Walpole parliamentary opposition,
formed by the Tories and malcontent Whigs led by Pulteney, which was to become even more marked after the election of the coming year. Though, of the three dukes mentioned, Richmond and Rutland were government supporters, Bedford was an opposition Whig, as were the Earls of Stair and Cadogan (once inimitably described by Dr Atterbury as ‘a bold, bad, blundering, blustering, bloody booby') and Lord Limerick. Lord Bathurst, one of the dedicatees of Pope's
Moral Essays
, was a noted Tory, member of the party traditionally supported by Delawarr's own family, while of Thomas Coke, Lord Lovel, the lampoon ran:

They were joined by three opposition MPs, Henry Furnese, Sir Michael Newton and Sir John Buckworth (who seems to have been personally acquainted with Handel). The unkindest cut must have been the adherence of Lord Burlington, apparently prepared to sacrifice his enthusiasm for the composer to the trivialities of politics.

The patron of the enterprise was Frederick, Prince of Wales, by now deeply committed to that mutual detestation between parents and offspring which occurred with striking consistency in the Hanoverian royal family over several generations, and childishly eager for any excuse to defy the King and Queen. He was a tolerable hand on the cello, as Philippe Mercier's charming group portrait of the prince making music with his sisters emphasizes, and something of a composer himself, as well as a patron of English music at his country house at Cliveden, where ‘Rule Britannia' was first heard as part of Arne and Thomson's
Alfred
in 1740. His presence was all that was needed to complete a picture of the whole scheme as a species of political rallying ground for the various elements opposed to George, Caroline and Walpole. Some Handel scholars have tried to suggest that there was no musical factionalism on Frederick's part, pointing out that he gave £250 to each of the rival companies impartially over several years. It is noteworthy all the same that during 1733–6 the Prince would not patronize those operas supported by his parents and that when Handel presented
Atalanta
in 1736 to honour Frederick's marriage, he chose to go to the play at Drury Lane rather than attend the opera's première with the rest of the royal family.
The snub, we should understand, was directed at the King and Queen rather than at their favourite musician.

Politics and royal partisanship aside, a share of the fault was Handel's own. Burney's implication that he saw in the oratorio performances a handy means of bailing out the opera seasons are borne out by manuscript comments on Mainwaring's published memoir, written around 1760 by the composer's friend Lord Shaftesbury. One of these tells us: ‘In the Spring 1733, Mr Handell finding that the Oratorio of Esther had been well received, the Oratorio of Deborah, which he reckoned into the number of the 50 Opera's Subscribed for, and – as he had taken great Pains, and as this was a new kind of Musick attended with some Extraordinary Expence, and more over for his own Benefit, he took double Prices, viz – a Guinea for Pit & Box's. This Indiscreet Step disgusted the Town, and he had a very thin House.'

In justice to Handel it must be said that this is almost the only example of sharp practice in which we can find him engaged, but the town was indeed disgusted and ready to invoke comparisons with Walpole's unpopular and ultimately unsuccessful Excise Bill, brought in only three days before
Deborah
's première. A few weeks later, on 7 April, there appeared a letter in the opposition journal
The Craftsman
, concurrently attacking both the minister and the musician, glancing at the conduct of the former while ostensibly pillorying the latter. Though this is of far more significance politically than musically, the letter touches on some familiar traits: for instance, ‘he had, for some Time, govern'd the
Opera's
, and modell'd the
Orchestre
, without the least Controul. No Voices, no
Instruments
were admitted, but such as flatter'd his Ears, though they shock'd those of the Audience.
Wretched Scrapers
were put above the
best Hands
in the
Orchestre.
No Musick but
his own
was to be allowed, though every Body was weary of it; and he had the Impudence to assert
that there was no Composer
in England
but himself
.' The author signed himself ‘Your very humble Servant, P—LO R—LI'. Although an Italian version has been found among Senesino's papers in the Biblioteca Communale at Siena, the letter was probably written in English under Rolli's name by another hand, while relying on the kind of backstage gossip the poet himself would have been only too quick to pick up and pass on.
It is enough to add that he became the Opera of the Nobility's official librettist.

Handel finished
Deborah
on 21 February and the first performance took place at the King's Theatre on Saturday, 17 March, with ‘the House . . . fitted up and illuminated in a new and particular Manner' and all the solo parts taken by Italians. The impressions of mass and weight created by the massed forces on the
Acis
and
Esther
evenings of the previous year had suggested new paths to the composer, and as we listen to
Deborah
, with its rich eight-part choral opening, we can readily appreciate the exciting experience it afforded of hearing what, apart from the 1727 coronation music, was perhaps the grandest noise so far known in eighteenth-century London of blended voices and instruments. No wonder Lady Lucy Wentworth could write four years later that ‘last Sunday there was a vast deal of musick at Church, too much I think, for I doubt it spoilt everybody's devotion, for there was drums and Trumpits as loud as an Oritoria'. Lord Perceval noted of the piece that ‘it was very magnificent, near a hundred performers, among whom about twenty-five singers', and Lady Anne Irwin told Lord Carlisle that ‘'tis excessive noisy, a vast number of instruments and voices, who all perform at a time, and is in music what I fancy a French ordinary in conversation'.

The work as a whole has generally been written off either as being a pasticcio – which to a large extent it is – and thus unworthy of comment, or simply as bad because its libretto is so heavy-handed. This is unfair, as anyone who has actually heard
Deborah
in performance will at once realize. True, Handel, eager to capitalize upon the novelty enthusiasm for oratorio and probably fired by Maurice Greene's
Song of Deborah and Barak
advertised the previous October, had hustled the piece into existence by redesigning large chunks of the Canons Anthems, the
Brockes Passion
, the
Dixit Dominus
and three sections of
Il Trionfo del Tempo
, and had made use of Samuel Humphreys to carry out the Procrustean business of adapting to his music one of the most unattractive episodes in the Book of Judges, culminating in the spectacular betrayal of time-honoured Oriental traditions of hospitality whereby Jael, having lulled Sisera to sleep, nailed his head to the ground with a tent peg. Yet the cumulative effect, enhanced for the seasoned Handelian by the sense of
déjà entendu
in the succession of favourite numbers, is undeniably fascinating.

It is, of course, the choruses which make the most telling impact and whose general predominance in the work anticipates
Israel in Egypt
, written some five years afterwards. Nearly every one contains some point of dramatic interest in its use of earlier material, as, for instance, in ‘See, the proud chief ', where the
cantus firmus
of the first number of the
Dixit Dominus
is used to create the impression of the Canaanite army's approach, and in ‘Plead thy just cause', based on the same source but using it this time to express the Israelites' remonstration with God and introducing it with an astonishing fourteen-bar choral prelude designed to establish the mood in a few magisterial strokes – a field in which, as Mozart perceived, Handel has no rivals. Among the newly composed numbers the best are the magnificent duet for Deborah and Barak ‘Where do thy ardours raise me?' which, in terms of rhythm, harmony and texture, is quite unlike anything he had ever written before (it sounds more like Hasse or C. P. E. Bach than Handel) and the chorus ‘Doleful tidings', in which the full significance of the closing words, ‘despair and death are in that sound', is evoked by stripping away the orchestral accompaniment, leaving the vocal lines as a series of chromaticisms gasped out between rests, fading into four bars of concluding organ continuo. But even if the total effect of hearing such familiar pieces as ‘O praise the Lord with one consent' recast in twenty-four vocal and instrumental parts as ‘Eternal Lord of Earth and Sky' is like hearing new music,
Deborah
is without homogeneity either in intention or design, a galimatias of Italian, English and German idioms in which we can see Handelian eclecticism at its least disciplined.

The new oratorio enjoyed a run of six performances, for five of which Handel charged the ordinary prices, but the damage was now done and on 13 June the Opera of the Nobility's subscribers were summoned to appear in person or by proxy at Hickford's Rooms in Panton Street, a dancing school famous for concerts featuring Geminiani, Veracini and other noted soloists of the day, ‘in order to settle proper Methods for carrying on the Subscriptions'. The recipe was very much a case of ‘the mixture as before' – a successful foreign composer, in this case the Neapolitan master Nicola Porpora, one year Handel's junior, a leading exponent of the newest Italian style, and a clutch of dazzling soloists, including, besides Senesino and Montagnana, the resurrected Cuzzoni and the most brilliant castrato star of the age,
Porpora's own pupil, Carlo Broschi, nicknamed Farinelli, whose comparatively brief London career was a meteoric sequence of triumphs culminating in the appropriate if blasphemous accolade given him when a fashionable spectator exclaimed: ‘One God, one Farinelli!'

Handel's response was typical. At some stage during the spring of 1733, perhaps even earlier, Dr William Holmes, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, had invited him to a revival of the annual encaenia ceremony, taking place immediately after the end of Trinity Term, to accept an honorary degree and to give a series of concerts with Strada, the sole remaining member of his Haymarket company, and other soloists, mainly English (exceptions were the bass Gustavus Waltz and the tenor Filippo Rocchetti). We still do not know why, if it really was offered to him, Handel declined the degree, but the Oxford jaunt was exactly the kind of boost to his morale he most needed at this critical stage in his fortunes. That he took the experience to heart is proved by the fact that some eight years later he followed a similar course in retreating to Ireland in search of a justly appreciative audience.

Oxford had long been a notorious Adullam for Tory and Jacobite sympathizers, and it says a good deal for the success with which, by closely monitoring official appointments, Walpole and Bishop Gibson used their influence to neutralize the university that its members should so eagerly have welcomed the favoured musician of the Hanoverian monarch. Perhaps more remarkable still is the fact that the Vice-Chancellor himself was president of St John's, a college that even today perpetuates fervent Stuart loyalties. The Public Act, or encaenia as it is now known, was scheduled to take place on Friday, 6 July, and the Sheldonian Theatre had been specially fitted up for a Handelian musical fortnight. Two days before the festivities began, a correspondent to
Read's Weekly Journal
described the unprecedented enthusiasm which heralded the occasion: ‘Almost all our Houses not only within the City, but without the Gates, are taken up for Nobility, Gentry and others: Many of the Heads of Houses and other Gentlemen of the University of Cambridge will be here on Wednesday Night; and we are so hurry'd about Lodging, that almost all the Villages within three or four Miles of this City, make a good Hand of disposing of their little neat Tenements on this great Occasion.'

Handel arrived probably on the Wednesday and gave a performance of
Esther
‘to a very numerous Audience,
at five Shillings a ticket' at five o'clock the following day. Amid the plaudits could be heard one remote but persistent grumbling voice. It was that of the diehard Jacobite antiquarian Thomas Hearne, whose diary records the archetypal observations of someone who did not approve and stayed away. That evening he wrote: ‘One Handel, a forreigner (who, they say, was born in Hanover) being desired to come to Oxford, to perform in Musick this Act, in which he has great skill, is come down . . . This is an innovation. The Players might as well be permitted to come and act. The Vice-Chancellor is much blamed for it.'