Handel (38 page)

The closing
scena
of Act II, a proof, if one were needed, of Handel's dramatic mastery, is a worthy successor to Orlando's mad scene in its complete dramatic integration of music and text. Alcina's increasingly frantic attempts at rallying her dark forces for vengeance against her faithless lover are mirrored by a gradual dissolution in the music itself, an extended recitative and arioso, whose use of the orchestra to double the vocal line in its final section creates a kind of mocking echo effect almost unbearable in its poignancy. Her closing ‘Ombre pallide' is the more effective for being so understated, an aria of mournful beauty culminating in the words ‘
Perché?Perché?
' (Why? Why?), as the sorceress breaks her magic wand. The moment recalls Shakespeare's Cleopatra after Antony's death:

9

The picture of Handel that emerges during the late 1730s has the curiously haunting air of solitude about it, which we are much more accustomed to associate with artists of the Romantic era and after. One of the most intriguing aspects of his life is provided by the fact that we possess more details of audience reaction to his music than exist for any other Baroque composer and it would be easy enough to write a whole monograph on the responses of eighteenth-century listeners from Cardinal Pamphilj to Mrs Pendarves. From the remarks of his acquaintance, the endless series of laudatory verses inspired by his compositions and performances, and the comments of musical Londoners, partisan or otherwise, we can discern an attitude towards him that combines an awed respect with a sense of remoteness and mystification. People watched him with an interest which was or was not sympathetic, and reported to each other on what his intentions might be: he was both ‘a man of the vastest genius and skill in music that perhaps has lived since Orpheus', in the words of Lord Percival, and an eccentric, volatile bachelor who, in spite of English naturalization, would remain a lonely foreigner among his adopted countrymen until the day of his death.

Two reactions from among his 1735 audiences offer typical examples of the way in which London looked at him. An anonymous ‘Philharmonick' in Henry Fielding's
Grub Street Journal
described the effect of
Alcina
as a synthesis between her magic and Handel's art:

Or she improves his wondrous lay;

Or he by a superior spell

Does greater melody convey,

That she may her bright self excel . . .

When Handel deigns to strike the sense,

'Tis as when heaven, with hands divine,

Struck out the globe (a work immense!)

Where harmony meets with design.

Towards the end of the year Lord Hervey, in waiting to the King, attended Veracini's
Adriano in Siria
at the Haymarket. Returning bored and angry at ‘yawning four hours at the longest and dullest Opera that ever the ennobled ignorance of our present musical Governors ever inflicted on . . . an English audience', he sat down at once to describe the occasion to his cousin Charlotte Digby. Besides the ineptitude of Veracini's music and the vocal inadequacies of Senesino (Farinelli and Cuzzoni were also starring) Hervey noted the presence of Handel, who ‘sat in great eminence and great pride in the middle of the pit, and seemed in silent triumph to insult this dying Opera in its agonies, without finding out that he was as great a fool for refusing to compose, as Veracini had shown himself by composing . . . (Handel) having more sense, more skill, more judgement, and more expression in music than anybody . . . What his understanding must be, you may easily imagine, to be undone by a profession of which he is, certainly the ablest professor . . . His fortune in music is not unlike my Lord Bolingbroke's in politics. The one has tried both theatres as the other has tried both Courts. They have shone in both, and been ruined in both; whilst everyone owns their genius and sees their faults, though nobody either pities their fortunes or takes their parts.'

There is something touching in Hervey's generous fury at what he considered the perversity of Handel's genius. He was correct in saying that Handel gained little public sympathy during these years. Though, as we have already seen, a group of loyal and admiring Handelians was beginning to assemble around him, they were not enough to provide the sort of audience he deserved, an audience which could confront and appreciate the singular individuality of most of the works created in these years of sudden triumph and gloomy disaster, between the move to Covent Garden in 1735 and the journey to Dublin in 1742.

We can go some way towards reconstructing a Handelian public through examining the lists of names published at the front of the subscription editions of various of his works (there were thirteen of these in all). Many of the subscribers were fellow musicians, not always professed admirers of Handel but doubtless privately eager to see what the man was up to. Thus,
among familiar figures such as John Stanley, Bernard Gates, John Travers, organist of St Paul's Covent Garden, and Thomas Chilcot, doyen of musicians at Bath, we also find the names of Pepusch, Greene and Festing, along with leading instrumentalists who played for Handel such as the violinist Carbonelli and the flautist Weidemann. Musical societies, in which eighteenth-century England abounded, were quick to subscribe, and orders came in from Oxford and Exeter, the Windsor Apollo Society, the Dublin ‘Accademy for Vocal Musick' and the ‘Musical Society on Wednesday at the Crown and Anchor'.

Besides the imposing rosters of royalty and aristocracy (more obvious in the later publications) the names of several significant figures connected with various aspects of Handel's life appear. There are Charles Jennens, Handel's collaborator on
Saul
,
Messiah
and
Belshazzar
, Theodore Jacobsen, later one of the benefactors of the Foundling Hospital, Handel's favourite charity, and John Christopher Smith, the composer's chief musical assistant. Interesting also is the appearance of members of London's Sephardic Jewish community, such as Isaac Nunes and Moses Mendez da Costa, who were to form a mainstay of Handel's oratorio audiences during the 1740s. Several of the names have a distinctly bizarre, exotic or fanciful ring to them. Who were Leake Okeover and Fitzherbert Plumbtree, Henry van Couwenhovengz or Obstrapus Danby, and what did David Boswillibald, a musical diplomat in the King of Prussia's service, make of the
Admeto
to which he subscribed?

Hervey was wrong in thinking that Handel was simply refusing to compose. In fact, he was about to embark on a spate of composition that would have killed anyone less stalwart and which forms one of the most remarkable (we might almost say grotesque) episodes in his life. By the middle of January 1736 he had finished his setting of Dryden's St Cecilia ode
Alexander's Feast or The Power of Music
. Dryden's poem, originally set by Jeremiah Clarke, takes the form of a series of vivid Baroque narrative pictures, such as might have been painted by Giordano or Solimena, based on the destruction of Persepolis by Alexander, fired by the songs of Timotheus and the beauty of the courtesan Thais. The work presents a combination of imaginative grandeur, lyrical tenderness and a characteristic Augustan wit, upon which, in addition to the poem's deliberate changes of mood,
Handel's genius readily seized.

His sensitivity to the superior quality of the text before him irradiates this stirring and brilliantly conceived piece, one of the noblest examples of English Baroque art and the finest setting of a vernacular text since Purcell. What had been started in
Athalia
, the authentic sound of Handel's English voice, not heard since
Acis and Galatea
and even there pronouncedly Italianate, was here given its fullest articulation. The choral writing breaks new ground in its dramatic outbursts, most notably in the passacaglia ‘The many rend the skies with loud applause', in the threnody for the dead Persian king, where a deliberate monotony in the accompaniment underscores the prevailing gloom, and in ‘Break his bands of sleep asunder', whose farouche, cacophonous screams over an ostinato figure imitating the sound of timpani create a type of music without obvious parallel until the infernal choruses of Gluck's
Orfeo ed Euridice
, which it surely helped to inspire.

The solo numbers, by turns elegant, rousing and meditative, show the warmest of responses to the nature of Dryden's original concept, an ode that would adequately reflect the varying moods and powers of music. Several, such as ‘Bacchus ever fair and young', with its agreeably vulgar horns sustaining a tune which shows that Handel seldom lost the common touch, and ‘Thais led the way', a piece of bland and sinister loveliness, perfectly suited to its theme, are linked with choral treatments of their material. Others feature instrumental obbligato: we must remember that in the midst of his difficulties Handel never allowed performance standards to decline and his orchestra throughout the 1730s was of the very best, including the virtuoso oboist Giuseppe Sammartini, the Castrucci brothers Pietro and Prospero, both violinists (the latter traditionally Hogarth's ‘Enraged Musician'), and Valentine Snow, sergeant-trumpeter to the King. Snow was presumably the trumpeter in ‘Revenge, Timotheus cries', the most grandly conceived of all Handel's bass arias, an intensely dramatic
scena
whose clangorous outer sections frame a vision of the Grecian ghosts made the eerier by its dotted accompaniment figures on a trio of bassoons. Beside ‘Softly sweet in Lydian measure' Handel wrote in the foul score the name of Andrea Caporale, the cellist who, with Pasqualino, another of the original performers in the ode, brought the instrument into solo prominence in the London concert world.

Alexander's Feast
was prepared for Handel's setting by Newburgh Hamilton, who wrote in his preface: ‘I confess my principal View was, not to lose this favourable Opportunity of its being set to Musick by that great Master, who has with Pleasure undertaken the Task, and who only is capable of doing it Justice; whose Compositions have long shewn, that they can conquer even the most obstinate Partiality, and inspire Life into the most senseless Words.' Hamilton, a devoted Handelian and author of the libretti to
Samson
and
The Occasional Oratorio
, was gentleman house-steward to the Earl of Strafford, mingling a love of music and a taste for poetry (he addressed some verses to the Countess herself ) with the humdrum business of paying off servants, chivvying tradesmen, looking after the horses and handling the accounts. To the Earl's children, the young Wentworths, he was more of a friend than a servitor, and he seems to have taken good care to foster a firm Handelian partisanship in the family.

As well as dividing Dryden's ode into formal aria, recitative and choral sections, Hamilton added a conclusion designed to emphasize the celebration of St Cecilia, to whom the original poem merely alludes in the closing lines. Judging by this and other features of the first performance it seems probable that what we are now accustomed to hearing, the Dryden poem without Hamilton's final section, is only about two-thirds of Handel's initial concept, which was clearly designed as a kind of musical festival to which
Alexander's Feast
itself formed the containing framework (he may also have been concerned that the audience should feel it was getting its money's worth). Magnificent as they must already have appeared in the ode, the band were given further chances for display in the performance of three concertos. One of these was for lute and harp, later published as the sixth of the Opus 4 organ concertos, played, as the autograph indicates, before the accompanied recitative ‘The song began from Jove'. Between the end of the poem and Hamilton's ‘Additional Chorus', ‘Your voices tune', came the Organ Concerto in G minor (Opus 4 no. 1), probably written for the
Athalia
revival at Covent Garden in the April of 1735, and at the opening of Act II, already enriched by the Italian cantata
Cecilia, volgi uno sguardo
, sung by the lutenist Carlo Arrigoni, appeared the C major
Alexander's Feast Concerto
.

Throughout the piece Handel had thrown the young tenor John Beard into sharp relief with a succession of fine arias and recitatives. Born around 1717, Beard had been trained by Bernard Gates in the Chapel Royal choir and took part as a soloist in the 1732
Esther
performances at the Crown and Anchor. As a tenor lead he made his debut in 1734 as Silvio in
Il Pastor Fido
, causing Handel to declare that ‘he will surprise the Town with his performances before the Winter is over' and rapidly earning praise thereafter for his dignified stage presence and professional integrity. ‘He let his own discretion be the tutor', said a contemporary, ‘and held the mirror up to nature.' His personal charm and good looks were matched by a notable versatility, whether as a singer in pantomimes and ballad operas or as a soloist in the premières of successive Handel oratorios. The part of Jupiter in
Semele
and the title roles in
Samson
,
Belshazzar
,
Judas Maccabaeus
and
Jephtha
show how much importance the composer attached to a singer in whom virtuosity was always tempered with sensitive intelligence.

Alexander's Feast
had the acclaim it deserved. The first performance took place on 19 February and on the following night, with members of the royal family present, the
London Daily Post
observed that ‘never was upon the like Occasion so numerous and splendid an Audience at any Theatre in London, there being at least 1300 Persons present; and it is judg'd that the Receipt of the House could not amount to less than 450 l.'. Some found the remoteness of the performers rather inconvenient, and one disgruntled auditor pencilled in his libretto the words ‘O for Senesino!'. It was two years, however, before John Walsh the younger published his splendid subscription issue of the ode, costing two guineas, with a separately released portrait, drawn and engraved by the Dutch artist Jacob Houbraken, surmounting a cartouche by Hubert Gravelot showing Alexander, Thais and Timotheus in the palace of Persepolis.