Handel (36 page)

None of Handel's dramatic works is so bad that we would rather not hear it performed again.
Arianna
is to him what
Alzira
and
Il Corsaro
are to Verdi, stilted and mechanical when viewed as a configuration of notes and staves, but full of crude, resistant life when heard in performance. There are a few notable set pieces: the fine overture follows the same pattern as
Ezio
's in introducing Act I with an instrumental item following the raising of the curtain (in this case the much-admired ‘Minuet in Ariadne'); there is also a splendid fight with the Minotaur, which grows directly from the ritornello material of Teseo's ‘Qui ti sfido, o mostro infame'. A musical and dramatic peak is gained at the beginning of Act II in the hero's dream scene, where five pages of the score show Handel abandoning formal considerations for the sake of pace and authenticity. A few of the arias have genuine distinction. Arianna's ‘So che non è più mio' in Act II shows Handel's interest temporarily reviving in the evident care he has taken over the accompaniments and this impetus is continued in the following aria, ‘Qual Leon, che fere irato', with its virtuoso bassoon and viola parts, and paired horns adding a gloss to the texture. There is a great deal of rather flashy coloratura, especially for Strada and Carestini in the Ariadne and Theseus roles.

Hawkins's verdict as to ‘the Ariadne of Handel, in which, excepting the minuet at the end of the overture, there is scarce a good air' seems more or less correct, particularly when we remember that the previous year had produced
Orlando
, and that
Ariodante
and
Alcina
were soon to follow. Brooding over the score is the spectre of Handel's wish to beat Porpora at his own game, something he had tried earlier with Bononcini in
Floridante
, and which consistently clogs his style, so though the music is new, we seem to have heard most of it somewhere before. It might pass muster as the worthy offering of an Italian composer in the later Venetian manner of Lotti and Gasparini, but as a piece by the creator of the Academy masterpieces or even of the flawed brilliance of
Poro
and
Sosarme
, it demonstrates the overpowering waywardness of Handel's talent.

None of
Arianna
's shortcomings had the least effect on its popularity, enhanced by the novelty of Carestini.
Colman's Opera Register
mentions it as ‘a new Opera & very good & perform'd very often – Sigr Carestino sung surprisingly well: a new Eunuch – many times perform'd' – seventeen times during this season, with revivals the following November and December. We cannot discount an element of
succès de scandale
either at the Haymarket or at Lincoln's Inn Fields, since the whole issue of competition was focused so strongly on the ever-widening rift between the Prince of Wales and his parents. Lord Hervey summed up the matter in his memoirs:

The King and Queen . . . were both Handelists, and sat freezing constantly at his empty Haymarket Opera, whilst the Prince with all the chief of the nobility went as constantly to that of Lincoln's Inn Fields. The affair grew as serious as that of the Greens and the Blues under Justinian at Constantinople. An anti-Handelist was looked upon as an anti-courtier, and voting against the Court in Parliament was hardly a less remissible or venial sin than speaking against Handel or going to Lincoln's Inn Fields Opera. The Princess Royal said she expected in a little while to see half the House of Lords playing in the orchestra in their robes and coronets; and the king (though he declared he took no other part in this affair than subscribing £1,000 a year to Handel) often added at the same time he did not think setting oneself at the head of a faction of fiddlers a very honourable occupation for people of quality.

Handel had, of course, been music master to Anne, the Princess Royal, and her loyalty to him was one of the causes of Prince Frederick's patronage of the Opera of the Nobility. The Prince's animus against his sister was increased by her impending marriage to the Prince of Orange, Stadholder of the Netherlands. ‘A miserable match, both in point of man and fortune, his figure being deformed and his estate not clear £12,000 a year,' says Lord Hervey, adding that ‘Her Royal Highness's opinion was . . . whether she would go to bed to this piece of deformity in Holland, or an ancient maid immured in her royal convent at St James's'. The Stadholder was hunchbacked and halitotic, and the Princess was fat and pock-marked, but their innate common sense and a Civil List jointure of £80,000, financed by the recent sale of crown lands in St Kitts and Nevis,
made it a mutually acceptable match. The attendant rejoicings were shared in by everyone except Frederick, incensed at his sister's marrying before him.

The behaviour of the engaged couple retained a dignity made the more touching by the King's arrogant treatment of the bridegroom, who fell ill on the morning before the proposed wedding ceremony and had to remove, first to Kensington and thence to Bath. In March 1734 preparations originally scheduled for the previous November got under way once more, and the
Daily Journal
advertised ‘amongst other publick Diversions that are prepared for the Solemnity of the approaching Nuptials . . . a Serenata, call'd, Parnasso in Festa . . . some what in the Style of Oratorio's. People have been waiting with Impatience for this Piece, the celebrated Mr Handel having exerted his utmost Skill in it.'

On the evening of 13 March the entire royal family, including the Prince of Wales, who had been studiously polite to the Stadholder so as to annoy the King and Queen, attended the first of Handel's two nuptial offerings,
Il Parnasso in Festa
, performed at the Haymarket by the opera soloists. A
festa teatrale
of the sort later exemplified by such occasional pieces as Gluck's
Le nozze di Ercole ed Ebe
and Mozart's
Ascanio in Alba
, the work has suffered much the same species of oblivion as
Deborah
and for substantially similar reasons, since much of the music is recycled
Athalia.
Neglect has been comparably undeserved. Though the sketchy plot, an
omnium gatherum
of classical deities and demiurges celebrating the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis, is unlikely to interest us, the chance to hear again
Athalia
's stirring, ample choruses is surely not to be rejected, and the freshly composed items, including a finale alternating a solo for Carestini as Apollo with choral interjections, are wholly delightful.

At seven o'clock the following night came the wedding itself, in the Inigo Jones chapel at St James's, approached ‘by the Light of Flambeaux' through an enormous covered gallery leading from the palace. Fond of making a splash, the King had laid on a splendid occasion, heightened by the magnificence of the Prince of Orange's retinue and of his gift of a necklace worn by the Princess ‘which was so large that 22 diamonds made the whole round of her neck'. George behaved very well, but Queen Caroline and the other princesses, according to Lord Hervey, caused the procession to the chapel to ‘put one rather in mind of an Iphigenia leading to the altar than of a bride'.
After the vows (the ceremony was conducted by Bishop Gibson in his capacity as Dean of the Chapel Royal) ‘a fine anthem compos'd by Mr Handell, was perform'd by a great number of voices and instruments'.

To students of Handel the anthem, a rerun of movements from
Il Parnasso in Festa
in whose use we can detect either an unmitigated cynicism or else a wish that the old
Athalia
numbers should not be forgotten, is altogether less interesting than the circumstances attached to its commission. For it seems that this had originally, during preparations the previous October, been given to his old rival Maurice Greene, ‘the humpback organist of St Paul's and the King's Chapel, the chief undoubtedly of our English composers now living', as Lord Egmont calls him. Evidently Handel secured the commission because of the royal family's general penchant for his work, but at a time when he was in need of friends the fact is likely to have cost him a useful ally or two in the musical world.

Yet, as we might expect, his sociable nature and somewhat eccentric charm, as well as, presumably, the possibility that he might be ready to sit down to an extempore performance, was collecting a circle of devoted and emphatically partisan acquaintance. Further down Brook Street lived Mrs Mary Pendarves, soon to marry a music-loving Irish clergyman and become Mrs Delany. From her letters during this period we catch a charming glimpse of the unbuttoned composer relaxing among friends. ‘I must tell you of a little entertainment of music I had last week,' she writes to her sister, ‘. . . I never was so
well
entertained at an
opera
. Mr Handel was in the best humour in the world, and played lessons and accompanied Strada and all the ladies that sang from seven o'clock till eleven. I gave them tea and coffee, and about half an hour after nine had a salver brought in of chocolate, mulled white wine and biscuits. Everybody was easy and seemed pleased, Bunny staid with me after the company was gone, eat a cold chick with me, and we chatted till one o' the clock.' Among the guests were Lord Egmont's son and daughter-in-law, and their relative Anne Donellan, to whom Handel was to bequeath fifty guineas. Biography is best confined to facts but there is something irresistible to the imagination in the idea of Mrs Pendarves and her brother Bernard ‘Bunny' Granville sitting down to pick at their ‘cold chick' after the guests' departure, and indulging in a pleasurable post-mortem on the evening.

Several of these loyal Handelians subscribed to the editions of his works, which had been published since his arrival in London by the printer John Cluer and later by the firm of Walsh at the sign of the Harp and Hoboy in Catherine Street off the Strand. Cluer died around 1727, but the business, under the direction of Thomas Cobb, continued for a time to issue the ‘favourite songs' from Handel's operas. John Walsh the elder, meanwhile, had published a number of the composer's works, including the airs in
Floridante
,
Flavio
and
Ottone
. Both printers were bound to observe the terms of the copyright privilege originally issued on 14 June 1720 by the Secretary of State James Craggs, a man of immense political influence and considerable wealth, whose name appears in the patrons' list for the first Royal Academy. According to this, ‘
George Frederick Handel
, of our City of
London
, Gent' who ‘hath with great Labour and Expence composed several Works, consisting of
Vocal
and
Instrumental
MUSICK' was granted a fourteen-year privilege to issue his works, with a strict warning to ‘all our Loving Subjects' that they should not ‘Import, Buy, Vend, Utter or Distribute any Copies there of Reprinted beyond the Seas', let alone ‘Reprint or Abridge the same'.

During the early 1730s, with an eye to the privilege's expiry date, Walsh began issuing editions of Handel's sonatas for solo instrument (recorder, oboe or violin) and continuo, and of his trio sonatas, the latter representing one of the favourite Baroque musical genres, regarded as a touchstone of any composer's technical skill. Handel himself did not authorize the publication and the title pages bore the forged imprint of the well-known Amsterdam music printing firm of Roger. The brevity and simplicity of the solo sonatas is made more appealing by the limpid fluency of their melodic lines, evoking that world of song in which Handel was paramount, but several of those issued under his name here are not authentic. The trios, on the other hand, typify this favourite contemporary form at its best, and the presence of a third voice in the dialogue gave some happy inspirations to the composer, who made effective use of material from the Chandos Anthems,
Esther
and
Acis and Galatea
.

Custom dictated the application of opus numbers to instrumental collections and these two duly appeared as Opus 1 and Opus 2. The third of Walsh's unofficial Handel editions, published in 1734, was a set of six concertos, several of which, as their earliest title page tells us, ‘were perform'd on the marriage of the Prince of Orange with the Princess Royal of Great Britain in the Royal Chappel of St James's'.
The publication as a whole was probably not overseen by Handel, though he presumably allowed Walsh to go through with it. The result is a set of concertos which, at first glance, seem to look forward, in their freedom of design, to the organ concertos Handel was to write for his oratorio evenings during the 1740s. Most of the movements were gathered together from earlier works, but Handel himself appears to have been responsible for giving the second and fifth concertos their present form by adding fresh movements to an existing overture or sinfonia. In the case of Concerto No. 4 in F major he used music written for an orchestral benefit night during performances of
Amadigi
in 1716. The use of oboes in five of them (No. 3 is for solo flute or oboe) led to their early labelling as ‘Hautboy Concertos', though prominent parts are variously given also to recorders, bassoons and solo violins, while the last of the set contains a reworked version for organ of a movement from the D minor keyboard suite of 1720.

In the case of others, Walsh and his assistants threw together already extant Handelian items from the same period to create viable concertos, presumably to satisfy the growing demand for the form from players both professional and amateur. The result is scarcely orthodox in terms of where the Baroque concerto had been heading under the influence of Vivaldi, Geminiani and other leading orchestral composers of Handel's period. The end product is a gallimaufry, but the glitter and contrast of its instrumental colouring and the rhythmic verve and panache of successive movements remain irresistible to the listener. As a hard-nosed businessman, Walsh would have been alert to a ready market for these works among the concert clubs and music meetings of London and the provinces.