Handel (40 page)

The second of Handel's new operas was doomed to a failure which seems to have had little connexion with the suffrage of the audience.
Giustino
was scheduled for performance on 16 February, and a run at Covent Garden was presumed to carry over into Lent, when performances were advertised on Wednesdays and Fridays. Somebody (Burney suggests the Lord Chamberlain but it was possibly Bishop Gibson) piously interfered and a ban was placed on all Lenten opera at Covent Garden – an obstacle the composer had never had to face during the Academy seasons. Handel was thus forced to cobble together a programme of non-dramatic works to fill the theatre until Easter.
Parnasso in Festa
,
Alexander's Feast
and
Esther
were all revived, and
Il Trionfo del Tempo
was dusted down,
given several additional numbers and rechristened
Il trionfo del tempo e della verità
. This was the label that would stick to the two Italian versions of the work, rather than the longer title originally bestowed by Cardinal Pamphilj.

As on other occasions in Handel's career, accident dictated precedent and the Lenten oratorio season established itself as a major element in his professional calendar. This was, as Burney says, ‘not merely on account of their gravity and fitness for that holy time, but to avail himself of the suspension of all other public amusements which were likely to divide the public attention and favour'. (Charles Jennens made a similar point in 1744.) Like Mozart, Handel was a working entertainer and had long ago realized that ‘we that live to please must please to live'. The improvised season, what is more, had its successful peaks, especially during the
Alexander's Feast
performances, at one of which ‘the Prince and Princess of Wales were present, and seem'd to be highly entertain'd, insomuch that his Royal Highness commanded Mr Handel's Concerto on the Organ to be repeated, and intends to Honour the same with his Presence once again . . .'

Yet the loyal Handelians were distinctly perturbed by what they saw as the composer's gradual collapse under the strain of hard work and fluctuating popularity. Mrs Pendarves's niece wrote despondently to her mother on 8 March: ‘Music is certainly a pleasure that may be reckoned intellectual, and we shall
never again
have it in the perfection it is this year, because Mr Handel will
not compose any more
!' There seems to have been a prevailing notion among friends and admirers that he was ready to relinquish creative endeavour for good since, some eight weeks after this letter, another anxious voice signalled alarm. The savant James Harris, brother-in-law of Handel's friend Sir Wyndham Knatchbull, wrote to his cousin Lord Shaftesbury in a valedictory strain: ‘If Mr Handel gives off his Opera, it will be the only Pleasure I shall have left in ye musicall way, to look over his Scores, and recollect past Events – Here Strada used to shine – there Annibale – This was an Excell Chorus, and that a Charming peice of Recitative – In that I shall amuse my Self much in the Same manner as Virgil tells of ye Trojans . . . the war yr Lordp knows was renewed with double Earnestness & Vigour. May my Pleasure find ye Same Fate, & be lost by ye Return of that Harmony wch I have given over, Supported & carried on by ye Same Spirit & Resolution.'

After six performances before the Lenten interdict
Giustino
was brought back for three more, two in May and one, as a species of last bid, almost a month later. Thereafter, save for the shadows of its melody which appear in
L'Allegro
and
Il Penseroso
, it sank without trace. It is impossible to guess what special possibilities Handel could have seen in Nicola Beregan's libretto, originally written in 1683 for Giovanni Legrenzi and later revised by Paolo Pariati (Handel used a version made for Vivaldi in 1729). The plot, based vestigially on events in Byzantine history and tracing the rise to glory of the humble ploughboy Giustino, ultimately bidden to share the imperial dominion, is typical of seventeenth-century Venetian opera in its frantic efforts to alleviate the boredom of the spectators by incessant twists in the story and, as such, offers an interesting contrast with the simplified narrative outlines of Metastasian drama. Focal interest is by no means concentrated on Giustino and practically everybody has their moment; one heroine enters ‘pursued by a bear', another is saved from a sea monster, the Emperor Anastasio indulges in a burst of jealousy, the Empress Arianna is followed by a hopeless lover, the brigand Vitaliano, who makes one of his appearances on a rope suspended from a tower and is identified (by means of a strawberry mark and the operation of a divine voice) as Giustino's long-lost brother.

Perhaps it was this very diversity that most appealed to the composer. Few of his operas display such a remarkable catholicity of style, and the various troughs of doodling and banality typical of an overburdened invention such as Handel's during this period are counterbalanced by the untiring range of his resources. We can scarcely ignore the signs of exhaustion – his obsessive reliance, for example, on descending scales as a sort of binding agent in the statement of themes – but at the same time the opera's diffuseness allows us to appreciate the wealth of its allusions. The polyglot Handel, who spoke, wrote and thought in a sophisticated babel of tongues, exercises a similar freedom in his music and an appreciation of this is central to our understanding of his work during the late 1730s when, besides showing himself to be an accomplished practitioner of modern styles, he worked back towards the origins of his own in the choral and operatic traditions of the previous century.

Thus in
Giustino
we find recollections of his more orthodox Academy manner in the smooth siciliano measures of Anastasio's ‘O fiero e rio sospetto' and in the majestic tread of Giustino's ‘Sull'altar di questo nume', with its dotted quavers
larghetto e staccato
and sturdy melodic line.
Cheek by jowl with these lie such successful essays in the style of Porpora as the simile arias ‘Zefiretto, che scorre nel prato' and ‘Quel torrente che s'innalza'. Beside these in their turn Handel includes one of those little French sinfonias to which he remained loyal from
Rinaldo
to
The Choice of Hercules
, and at least one scene which, in structure and tone, recalls the Venetian operatic world from which its text ultimately derived. This is the moment at which Fortune, seated on her wheel and surrounded by genii, appears to Giustino asleep beside his plough. Fortune's aria, with its contrapuntal imitations, its motto figure in the accompaniment, and its welding, via a recitative, with the subsequent chorus (based on the same material) recalls the style of Legrenzi's own works with which Handel was fully familiar. Borrowings add to the eclectic mix, from Bononcini, Alessandro Scarlatti and Vivaldi among others.

The opera reflects his apparently unquenchable enthusiasm for romantic narrative, seldom without a hint or two of picaresque adventure and comedy, but handled far more primitively here than in
Orlando
or
Alcina
. Finished at almost the same time as
Giustino
,
Berenice
, brought on at Covent Garden in May 1737, returns us immediately to the universe of strangled emotions among monarchs and courtiers, which provides the most familiar territory of Baroque lyric drama. Salvi was once again the author, subtitling his libretto ‘The Contests of Love and Politics', a phrase neatly included in the work's closing coro, and mirrored in the amatory dilemmas faced by the Egyptian Queen Berenice, her sister Selene and their various lovers as a result of diplomatic bullying from Rome.

Salvi's plot has much to commend it, and the story opens with sensational abruptness as the heroine's public and private lives clash head on. Two of the characters, Princess Selene and her clandestine admirer Demetrio, are presented sympathetically enough for the drama to be really theirs. The denouement, however, is more than usually artificial: some six or seven bars before the coro the villainous Arsace, responsible for most of the misery and deception in the story, having exulted at the thought of possessing Selene, suddenly experiences a twinge of pity for her and Demetrio, and is rapidly turned into the generous rival who cedes all his sentimental advantages. Salvi, as we saw in
Rodelinda
, could make an expert job of last-moment remorse, but Grimoaldo's guilty change of heart is rather different from Arsace's preposterous heroic flourish.
erhaps the greatest flaw lies in Berenice herself who, far from engaging our compassion, seems motivated by self-will, sexual greed and peevishness, as she attempts to manipulate political realities by trampling on the emotions of those closest to her.

This was surely not what Handel or Salvi intended. The interest of
Berenice
lies in the distinction with which it so consistently fails to transcend these limitations and in its various attempts to do so. Amid the music's platitudes, shown at their worst in Arsace's ‘Amore contro amor', whose vacuous gesticulations bring it close to the realm of parody, we can sense the flickers of a response to a fast-moving and generally cohesive libretto which, ten years earlier, would have evoked a genuine quickening in the composer. Interestingly, it is the numbers most unabashedly recalling the idiom of earlier operas that breathe real life into the work, pieces such as Demetrio's ‘No, soffrir non può il mio amore', an exquisite elaboration of the materials of Teofane's ‘Falsa immagine' in
Ottone
, and his vigorous, elegant duet with Berenice, ‘Se il mio amor fu il tuo delitto', with its reminiscences of the lighter moments of
Partenope
or
Alcina
, which closes Act I. Nothing in the work, however, quite lives up to the promise of the masterly overture, a worthy rival to that in
Alexander's Feast
and featuring one of those gently paced triple-time airs whose delicate simplicity makes them uniquely Handel's.

As in
Siroe
, the orchestra for
Berenice
is simply the basic band of strings, oboes, bassoons and continuo, with the oboes only heard in three numbers and a solo for Sammartini. Handel is so obviously one of the great masters of orchestral sound, gifted with a rarefied sense of timbre, balance and colour, that it would be absurd to suggest that this limited palette was among the work's shortcomings, yet, given the financial state of the Covent Garden enterprise, we might suppose that the composer was making a desperate retrenchment. If so, it was useless.
Berenice
enjoyed a miserable four performances and the season concluded with revivals of
Alcina
,
Giustino
and the pasticcio
Didone abbandonata
, which had first been brought on in April.

Handel might have been consoled by witnessing the almost simultaneous collapse of his Nobility rivals at the King's Theatre, Haymarket, as audiences, by now bored and satiated with novelty fare and the erstwhile amusement of pitting one company against another, fell rapidly away.
Porpora had left London the previous year after the failure of his royal wedding offering
La Festa d'lmeneo
, and Farinelli now slipped out of England as well, soon to begin the most bizarre adventure in his extraordinary career, as a sort of music therapist to the psychologically disturbed King Philip V of Spain, whom he soothed with the same four songs nightly for nine years. Several of Handel's own singers returned to Italy, including Conti and Annibali, while Strada, though remaining in London until the summer of 1738, never sang again for the composer who had done so much towards making a distinguished career for her.

‘Great fatigue and disappointment', says Lord Shaftesbury, ‘affected him so much, that he was this Spring 1737 struck with the Palsy, which took entirely away the use of 4 fingers of his right hand; and totally disabled him from Playing: And when the heats of the Summer . . . came on, the Disorder seemed at times to affect his Understanding . . .' He had witnessed the onset of Handel's illness early in May and written apprehensively to James Harris, the tone of whose reply indicates the intense respect in which the composer was now held by discerning English music lovers. ‘. . . When ye Fate of Harmony depends upon a Single Life, the Lovers of Harmony maybe well allowed to be Sollicitous. I heartily regrett ye thought of losing any of ye executive part of his meritt, but this I can gladly compound for, when we are assured of the Inventive, for tis this which properly constitutes ye Artist, & Separates Him from ye Multitude.' Shaftesbury must have thought that Handel was on the way to recovery, for Harris adds, ‘It is certainly an Evidence of great Strength of Constitution to be so soon getting rid of So great a Shock. A weaker Body would perhaps have hardly born ye Violence of Medicines, wch operate So quickly.'

Experts are still undecided as to what actually caused Handel's palsy. It may have been recurrent muscular rheumatism exacerbated by nervous exhaustion. Colic, headaches, irritability and cognitive dysfunction have all been diagnosed as symptoms of lead poisoning brought on by excessive port drinking, and his gluttony, which may have been comfort eating to relieve stress, undoubtedly contributed its share. Elsewhere a cause has been located in ‘psychological distress at being unable to satisfy his patrons with the entertainment that he thought they desired'. A measure of Handel's significance in Augustan cultural life is offered by the fact that his paralysis made news in the papers. The
London Daily Post
reported a likely recovery on 30 April,
but a fortnight later the
London Evening Post
noted that ‘the ingenious Mr Handell is very much indispos'd, and it's thought with a Paraletick Disorder, he having at present no Use of his Right Hand, which, if he don't regain, the Publick will be depriv'd of his fine Compositions'. Whatever the origins of his complaint, treatment at a spa was the most obviously available therapy. ‘But tho' he had the best advice, and tho' the necessity of following it was urged to him in the most friendly manner,' Mainwaring tells us, ‘it was with the utmost difficulty that he was prevailed on to do what was proper, when it was in any way disagreeable.' Who suggested the baths of Aachen to Handel we do not know – possibly his former pupil the Princess of Orange, whose husband had taken a successful cure there in 1730 – but the prescription was perfect almost to a miracle.