Handel (4 page)

Such
coups de théâtre
held an evident appeal for Hamburg audiences and composers, and the German librettists were not slow in providing appropriate material. Some operas were actually based on recent European political events, such as the Neapolitan revolt of 1647, which turned up at the Gänsemarkt as
Masagniello-Furioso, die neapolitanische Fischer-Emporung
, with music by Reinhard Keiser. A record for bringing current affairs to the operatic stage was set by Lucas von Bostel, who dramatized the siege of Vienna by the Turks only three years after it took place. His
Cara Mustapha
introduces King John Sobieski of Poland, the Electors of Saxony and Bavaria and the Duke of Lorraine, mute components of a scene accompanied by an aria from
ein in der Luft schwebenden Engel
.

Nothing was wanting to make the Gänsemarkt productions as handsome as possible. The stage, larger than in most other European theatres of the day, was capable of immense perspective effects and set design reached a peak in the work of Johann Oswald Harms, who had trained in Italy and reflected the slightly eerie influence of Salvator Rosa.
The orchestra was naturally superb and here Handel was able to gain valuable experience as a violinist: since his writing for the instrument is very much an experienced player's rather than a mere listener's, some critics have been led to suggest that this conditioned his vocal writing as well.

With one of his most talented fellow musicians at the opera Handel made contact almost as soon as he arrived in Hamburg. The city's churches fostered a thriving musical life, and on 9 July 1703, in the organ loft of the Magdalenakirche, Handel met Johann Mattheson. Mattheson is a crucial figure in the history of musical criticism. Writings such as his
Untersuchung der Singspiele
, with its spirited defence of opera, and
Das Neu-eröffnete Orchester
offer invaluable clues to eighteenth-century awareness of changing musical trends. Besides producing a spate of theatrical, religious and instrumental pieces, and translating extensively from contemporary English literature (works, for example, by Defoe and Richardson), he held the post of secretary to Sir John Wyche, English resident at Hamburg, and became tutor to his son Cyril. Residual Anglophilia led him to marry Catherine Jennings, daughter of a Wiltshire clergyman, of whom he says, ‘She bore no children, but offered a thousand of those pleasures often lacking in children themselves.'

The two young men at once became great friends, going boating together and making music, and Handel must have profited from professional criticism which, if not always free of envious pedantry, was at any rate candid and intelligent. Mattheson enjoyed his friend's deadpan humour – ‘at first he played second violin in the opera orchestra, and behaved as though he did not know how many beans made five, for he was inclined by nature to dry jokes' – but noted that ‘he knew very little about melodic writing before he got to the Hamburg Opera . . . ' Handel was also able to avail himself of free meals at Mattheson's house ‘and he repaid that by imparting to me several choice touches of counterpoint'.

During that summer both of them were attracted by the prospect of a plum post as organist of the Marienkirche at Lübeck, news of which had reached Mattheson through Magnus von Wedderkopp, President of the Holstein Privy Council and related to the Wyches by marriage. The current holder of the job was the eminent Danish composer Dietrich Buxtehude,
who had taken it under a condition familiar enough in Baroque Germany but altogether more odd to us. This was the stipulation that the prospective organist should marry the daughter of the incumbent, presumably a bonus to his apprenticeship. Buxtehude's wife was indeed the daughter of his predecessor Franz Tunder, and Margreta Buxtehude now awaited the chosen candidate.

On 17 August Mattheson and Handel set off in the coach to Lübeck. It was a pleasant journey, made the jollier by the antics of a travelling pigeon seller and because, as Mattheson says, ‘we made up many double fugues together,
da mente non da penna
'. When they arrived they enjoyed themselves well enough in trying out the best of the city's keyboard instruments, but jibbed at poor Margreta, who had to wait another couple of years until Johann Christian Schiefferdecker was prepared to fulfil the terms of the contract in which she was the sticking point. Bach's visit to Lübeck in 1705, incidentally, was probably not unconnected with the same issue.

Handel's rejection of marriage to Margreta Buxtehude raises the general and hitherto unresolved issue of his relations with women. There is, alas, practically no documentary evidence regarding this aspect of his private life and he is the only major composer of the last three centuries firmly to have barred the doors on the subject. We must make what we can of Paolo Antonio Rolli's comment to a friend in 1719 that Handel was secretly in love with one of his female singers and of George III's annotation in his copy of Mainwaring's biography: ‘G. F. Handel was ever honest, nay excessively polite, but like all men of sense would talk all, and hear none and scorned the advice of any but the Woman He loved, but his Amours were rather of short duration, always within the pale of his own profession . . . He knew that without Harmony of souls neither love nor the creation would have been created and Discord ends here as certainly as the last Trumpet will call us from our various Pleasures . . .' Earlier the King had remarked (this time in German) apropos of the author's observing that the ladies would have preferred Senesino to Handel: ‘that is not so obvious; Handel was very well built and lacked nothing in manliness; the other fellow was just a mule.' More than this is not vouchsafed us by available sources. We can surmise that while in Italy he fell in love with the soprano Vittoria Tarquini, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that he may have felt attracted to certain of his leading singers such as Margherita Durastanti,
Anna Strada and, in later years, Kitty Clive and Susanna Cibber. The assumption that as a lifelong bachelor he must perforce have been homosexual is untenable in an eighteenth-century context, when the vagabond life of so many musicians often made marriage a practical hindrance. Given the fact that much of the music of his operas, cantatas and oratorios constitutes a mature and complex expression of earthly love, the statement by Newman Flower that Handel was ‘sexless and safe' seems strikingly misjudged. So much, apparently, for the creator of Semele, Rodelinda and Alcina. Safe, in any case, from what?

A letter to Mattheson urging his return from Amsterdam, where he was being fêted by the Jews, ‘for the time is coming when nothing at the Opera can be done in your absence', indicates Handel's growing involvement with the theatre's affairs. Musical director at the Gänsemarkt was Reinhard Keiser, the leading German operatic master of his day, a pioneer spirit of boundless inventiveness, with a lasting effect on Handel's sense of priorities in the creation of a dramatic style. His enormous output embodies Hamburg eclecticism, with its continuing sensitivity to changing international trends, and shows a typical capacity for incorporating a whole range of musical genres within a single work.
Der Hochmütige, Gestürzte und Wieder Erhabene Croesus
, for instance, not only contains scenes of tragic intensity, such as Croesus's aria ‘Götter, übt Barmherzigkeit', but includes an extended peasant interlude adapted from Minato's Italian source libretto and cast in authentic German folk idiom. Rough-edged and naïve as Keiser's music may seem to us against a wider eighteenth-century background, there is no denying the inspiration it continued to give to younger talents. His pupil Johann Adolf Hasse, who brought opera seria to a functional perfection, regarded Keiser as the greatest master of the day, and years after his death Scheibe in his
Musiklexikon
described him as ‘perhaps the greatest original genius Germany has ever brought forth'.

Handel's admiration for Keiser shows itself best in the many allusions to the Hamburg operas to be found in works as early as
Agrippina
and as late as
Joshua
. In at least one case Handel was veritably haunted by a Keiser motif. The latter's
Octavia
of 1705 contained an aria for Seneca, ‘Ruhig sein', based on a pattern of repeated quaver phrases. Handel carried this wholesale into two Italian works,
Il Trionfo del Tempo e della Verità
and
Agrippina
,
into a London opera
Muzio Scevola
and into the ravishing G minor trio sonata customarily grouped as ‘number 1' in the Opus 2 set (though originally published in B minor – the G minor version, possibly the authentic one, is first known from a Dresden manuscript). In addition, reminiscences of it turn up, adapted but recognizable, in Tassile's aria ‘Sempre fido e disprezzato' in
Alessandro
, and the merest ghost of the idea hovers through three bars of ‘Va, perfido' in
Deidamia
.

A sense of professional rivalry between the two composers was unavoidable, but Keiser seems never to have felt seriously threatened by the younger master. It was on the friendship of Handel with Mattheson that sooner or later the enclosed, contentious world of the opera house, with its bickering and scandal, was bound to tell. On the evening of 5 December 1704 Mattheson's opera
Cleopatra
was being given its second performance at the Gänsemarkt. The composer not only figured as conductor, but as one of the stars, in the role of Antony (the libretto follows the well-known historical outline). Having fallen on his sword and had his death scene, he was then at liberty to slip into the pit and take over at the harpsichord. Handel, who had migrated from second fiddle desk to the keyboard, now refused to budge, though Mattheson, as director of his own opera, had an acknowledged right to take over.

Furious with each other, they managed to get to the end of the show, while several of the orchestral players egged them on. There was a challenge at the stage door, a crowd gathered, the two men drew their weapons and set to in the open market place outside the theatre. It was a duel which, as Mattheson tells us, ‘might have passed off very unfortunately for both of us, had God's guidance not graciously ordained that my blade, thrusting against my opponent's broad metal coat-button, should be shattered'.

Saved for posterity by a button. It was not like either of them to bear grudges for long. One of Handel's most endearing qualities as a man was the strength and diversity of his friendships, and in less than a month, through the intervention of a Hamburg councillor and one of the Gänsemarkt shareholders, he and Mattheson were reconciled. After a celebratory meal, they went to the rehearsal of Handel's first opera,
Almira
, better friends than ever. Cynics must make what they can of the fact that Mattheson took one of the leading roles.

Almira
received its première on 8 January 1705.
It was an instant success, with some twenty performances, but it is impossible to be more than lukewarm about Handel's unique surviving essay in Hamburg opera. Keiser and Mattheson both did this kind of thing better, but to pick through the forty-two German and fifteen Italian arias for flashes of Handelian brilliance is an absorbing task. The libretto, whose full title is
Der in Krohnen erlangte Glücks-Wechsel, oder Almira, Königin von Castilien
, is an adaptation by Friedrich Christian Feustking of a Venetian text by Giulio Pancieri based on the familiar seventeenth-century dramatic situation of the queen who secretly loves a commoner (Webster's
The Duchess of Malfi
, Corneille's
Dom Sanche de Navarre
and Dryden's
Secret Love
contain similar storylines). The whole thing belongs very much to its Venetian Baroque operatic world, with a loosely-strung plot full of intrigue interlaced with comedy and ballet. Besides the three female and three male leads, the story introduces a buffo servant Tabarco, a Papagenolike figure first seen setting out the card tables for an evening's gaming at the Castilian court. The princes and princesses, by now neatly entangled, sit down to a fraught set of ombre (the game immortalized in Pope's
Rape of the Lock
) followed by a ball during which the horrified Queen Almira sees her secretary Fernando happily dancing with the Princess Edilia. After a multitude of plot twists all comes right in the end, however, and to save the Queen from betraying her class by marrying a mere person, Fernando is discovered to be the long-lost son of the Count of Segovia. Tabarco enters on horseback and Almira says that she will be delighted to share the throne with her quondam secretary.

Handel was evidently powerless to do much towards modifying the rambling drama that Feustking had given some years earlier to Reinhard Keiser. The older composer's
Almira
setting was premièred not in Hamburg but at Weissenfels, in honour of a visit to Duke Johann Adolf by the Elector Palatine. Keiser had his own reasons for clearing out of Hamburg with his opera still unperformed. ‘Being a man of gaiety and expense,' says Mainwaring, ‘he involved himself in debts, which forced him to abscond.' After Feustking had enlarged the text for these princely celebrations, Keiser appears to have passed the original libretto to Handel. Was his second setting of
Almira
, composed in 1706, stimulated by a friendly rivalry with his young protégé?

Handel's version is exactly the sort of apprentice work we might expect.
Imaginative daubs of instrumental colour are scattered here and there (some lessons well learned from Keiser in this respect) and the writing for strings in arias such as Almira's ‘Move i passi' is particularly inspired. Some of the dramatic climaxes, especially those involving the eponymous heroine, show the composer responding keenly to moments of pathos and vulnerability among his characters, two-dimensional as most of them are. Otherwise the vocal writing seems mannered and ungrateful to the singers. Moments of florid grandeur in the word setting, a strong French idiom and a generally uncritical subservience to the Hamburg style are elements bundled together rather than assimilated. The total effect, even if we suppose that Handel would have become as adept a practitioner of this kind of opera as Mattheson and Keiser, is like looking at the ambitious façade to a provincial corn exchange.