Handel (50 page)

During the summer the Middlesex opera project finally crashed, a victim of ruinous overspending by noble dilettanti eager to prove the true extent of their Italianized taste. Subscribers were asked to defray the £1,600 debt incurred by the directors,
one of whom absconded, another discreetly retiring into the country and a third becoming ‘as pale as death and trembles for his money'. Apart from a November revival of Handel's own
Alessandro
as
Rossane
(annotations on the conducting score suggest that the composer had some connexion with this and he seems to have been asked to coach some of the cast) Haymarket presented no more opera until 1746. When Middlesex became engaged to the heiress Grace Boyle, Walpole wrote, ‘She proves an immense fortune; they pretend a hundred and thirty thousand pounds – what a fund for making operas!'

In the summer of that year the European war to which England was committed took a more decisive turn with the sweeping victory gained at Dettingen, near Frankfurt, by combined British and German forces against the French army led by the Dukes of Grammont and Noailles. An action of great rashness and heroism lasting from daybreak until ten at night, the battle was distinguished by the bravery of King George himself. Forsaking a restive horse, he had personally led the infantry, crying, ‘Now boys, now for the honour of England; fire and behave bravely, and the French will soon run,' as, indeed, for all Grammont's vigorous leadership, they did.

Handel was the natural choice to provide a festive Te Deum and anthem to celebrate the victory. Given in the Chapel Royal on 27 November 1743, the
Dettingen Te Deum
gained rapid popularity and as a neat fit on a disc it has been more often recorded than many of his other works, yet of them all it is surely the most overrated. Relying heavily on a Te Deum by the seventeenth-century Milanese composer Francesco Urio, it pushes home its illusions of splendour with an almost cynical blatancy of effect. Handel is famous for his economy and straightforwardness of expression, but a certain coarseness of grain in the style of this piece makes it strangely inauthentic, and we turn with relief to the more discriminating language of the anthem, beginning, like its predecessor written for the 1727 coronation, with ‘The King shall rejoice in thy strength, O Lord' and similarly based on verses from Psalm 21. Several of its movements make skilful use of material from sonatas by Telemann, one of them having provided the melodic germ of ‘Bless the glad earth' in
Semele
, further recycled here.

Handel's recovery had taken a more positive form in the composition of two new pieces for the coming season. Nothing more perfectly illustrates the way in which his imagination depended upon the powerful inspiration of a strong dramatic text than the fact that the first of these,
Semele
, is nowadays acknowledged as among the finest creations of his mature years and that the second,
Joseph
, written only a month or so afterwards, is perhaps the least satisfying of all his dramatic works.

Semele
is an English opera, using a libretto originally written by William Congreve, with music by John Eccles, and published by the poet in 1710. We know nothing as to who prepared the drama for Handel or made the effective additions from other sources, including the score's most famous number, ‘Where'er you walk', whose words are taken from one of Pope's pastorals, but the cumulative result is a text of admirable conciseness and variety, the lively pulse of whose action is not seriously slowed down even by the obligatory romantic sub-plot. The charm of the piece lies in the extraordinary sophistication of its comedy: the story of Jupiter's love for Semele and Juno's vengeful jealousy is treated by Congreve with just the degree of delicate wit we might expect from the author of
The Way of the World
and
The Double Dealer
, but his abundant sense of irony probes beneath the comic surface, exposing veins of tenderness and melancholy, and allowing Handel a relaxed freedom of mood. Thus the underplot, describing the apparently hopeless passion of Semele's sister Ino for Prince Athamas, can be seen as a conventional commentary on the wilder, more frankly erotic behaviour of Jupiter and Semele. In essence, however, the drama belongs to two women, Semele herself, the heedless mortal compromising all her finer qualities in the fulfilment of vain dreams of immortality, and the implacable goddess Juno, wholly unmoved by her rival's plight as, by means of disguise and temptation, she drives her towards self-destruction.

The spirit in which Handel rises to the challenge of all this confounds any idea that abandoning the operatic stage involved a renunciation of worldliness. It also underlines his sensitivity to dramatic nuance, to the way in which a scene ought to go, to the fluctuations of feeling within an individual character. To type
Semele
as a comedy in the modern sense is too severely limiting: it is more obviously a musical blend of opera seria's most attractive elements, emphasizing amorous intrigue, and those of oratorio, where the chorus plays its classic role as commentator on the action. When we laugh it is with a rueful sense of the inevitable.
Most of Handel's audience would have known the story, and an awareness that the uproariously funny exchange between Juno and Somnus, god of sleep, is meant ultimately to hasten the catastrophe lends additional spice to an already potent brew.

Limiting his instrumental palette to a series of finely wrought string accompaniments (oboes are used for choral reinforcement and a brace of horns lends colour to the first act) the composer produced a work of marvellous inventiveness, which in modern times has taken a justified place in the operatic repertoire. We can sense the driving enthusiasm carried over from the opening surges of the dark-hued overture into the unconventional patterns of the first act, with its abundance of accompanied recitative, a quartet foreshadowing an even greater ensemble in
Jephtha
, and the urgent participations of the chorus, defining, describing, but never overwhelming the intimate central drama.

Congreve's professionalism ensures that dramatic interest is kept alive by tautly constructed incidents and a continuous novelty element. From the first stages of Semele's hubris, marked by the joyousness of ‘Endless pleasure', we shift abruptly to her irate rival Juno, bursting on to the scene – with Iris in tow in one of those passages of passionate declamation in which the score is so rich. This in its turn gives way to the first of Semele's scenes with Jupiter, where Handel's true gift for sensuous evocation is allowed full play in ‘O sleep, why dost thou leave me', whose languorous melismas perfectly catch the sense of lazily awakening beauty, and in the lilting choral dances for her attendant cupids and zephyrs. Ino's arrival, however, leads to a duet and chorus whose reflective abstractions create a meditative interlude similar to ‘Wretched lovers' in
Acis and Galatea
, if less obviously menacing. Act III, beginning with Juno's appearance in the Cave of Sleep (Winton Dean calls it ‘the licensed rudeness of a matron entering a school dormitory') hurries inexorably towards Semele's death in a blaze of lightning, the rash consequence of her determination to see Jupiter in his full godlike splendour. The chorus, here as elsewhere fully committed, breaks into music whose expression of poleaxed disbelief succeeded by an awed recognition of the moral truth makes us aware of how well Gluck must have known and appreciated the work, and that
Semele
is surely a lineal ancestor of
Iphigénie en Tauride
,
Alceste
and
Orfeo ed Euridice
. The classicism of ‘O terror and astonishment' is as essentially eighteenth-century as the work's conclusion.
Wonderfully Euripidean as Congreve's ‘And all our boasted fire is lost in smoke' may have been, the age demanded a serene close. Apollo promptly descends, in a majestic sinfonia, and promises the infant Bacchus as the pledge of Jupiter's and Semele's amours. Juno's triumph is ephemeral, and the spirit of hedonistic delight with which Semele has from the outset been identified now reigns supreme.

Opera or oratorio? The Handelians knew it for the former. Lord Shaftesbury calls it ‘a Dramatic Piece of Mr Congreve's', Mainwaring refers to it as ‘an English opera, but called an Oratorio', while Jennens dismisses it as ‘a bawdy opera' and later quotes a friend as having dubbed it ‘Bawdatorio'. The first-night audience on 10 February 1744 may have been pardonably confused by an offering less Lenten than carnival, and Mrs Delany noted ‘the house full, though not crowded'. Beard, Reinhold and Avolio were among the soloists, and Arne's sister-in-law Esther Young doubled as Juno and Ino. Francesina excelled herself in the title role: ‘her notes are more distinct, and there is something in her running divisions that is quite surprizing.' Handel apparently thought so too, for Semele's airs are distinguished by a wealth of florid roulades, but no amount of versatility or inventiveness could create a loyal following for the work or establish it with the public in the same way as
Saul
or
Samson.
A solitary revival that December made no impact and, apart from ‘Where'er you walk', the first of Handel's two English operas went to ground, to be rediscovered during the twentieth century and accepted at last for what it is, a mature music drama, vividly expressive and consummately theatrical.

From a sublime pagan tragicomedy to a sacred oratorio whose more mediocre levels even the most devoted Handelian can hardly deny,
Joseph and his Brethren
was the second new work in the 1744 Covent Garden programme. A bitter paradox, which Handel himself must have appreciated, since he revived it in four later seasons and made plans for a fifth, decreed that it would be remembered when
Semele
had been long ignored. The librettist, Joseph Miller, vicar of Upcerne, Dorset, was already known to the composer, who had written a song for Kitty Clive in his Drury Lane comedy
The Universal Passion
seven years earlier. A contemporary describes him as ‘firm and stedfast in his Principles, ardent in his Friendships, and somewhat precipitate in his Resentments'. These principles were those of opposition to Sir Robert Walpole and support for the idea of the Patriot King, ideas underlying the oratorio's portrayal of Joseph as a model servant of the state,
attentive to the public goods. Miller was a versatile dramatist, but his dedication of
Joseph
to John, Duke of Montague, deplored the restricting nature of oratorio, which prevented adequate time being allowed for development of the hero's character. Nowadays we may tend to feel that it has all been too much rather than too little.

Everything possible is wrong with the libretto, translated from a 1722 oratorio text by the Habsburg court poet Apostolo Zeno. Its handling of the Bible story concentrates most of the action within the last of its three parts, discards any awareness of dramatic motive or human interest, reduces the soprano heroine Asenath to a superfluity and writes off the principal bass role of Pharaoh altogether after Act I. Miller's poetry is often so excruciating as to be truly hilarious, invoking shades of
The Critic
or
The Rehearsal
. Choruses like

we might overlook, but the world of fustian, as Pope's
Dunciad
had reminded Miller and his contemporaries, was a large one, and the vicar of Upcerne explores it to the full. Lines such as ‘Treasure for the public hoarding' and ‘Ah Jealousy, thou pelican' are grim harbingers of the matchless exchange between Joseph and Simeon:

and the gem that occurs when Joseph answers Asenath's anxious enquiries as to what is the matter with him in the words: ‘A slight disorder – public cares . . .'

Handel did what he could with all this: often it was not very much. The first act holds practically nothing to detain the listener between the excellent overture and prison scene that open it and the rousing bass aria ‘Since the race of time begun' with obbligato trumpet,
which initiates its finale. A second prison episode in Act II, for Simeon, leading to a turbulent G minor air, has greater harmonic interest and dramatic force, and its impetus spills over into Joseph's expression of longing for his homeland through an extended accompanied recitative and a dulcet pastorale over a drone bass. The whole matter of Joseph and the brethren, indeed, seems to have fired Handel's flagging inspiration and such moments as Simeon's ‘Impostor! Ah! my foul offence', where his feelings of remorse dictate the shape of the aria, or the fascinatingly fluid encounter between the hero and his brothers in Act III, where arioso and varied recitative are continually blending, recall far finer points elsewhere in the oratorios.

Why did the composer settle for such a farrago? As the best-known figure in the London musical world he must have received any number of oratorio texts, whether from dilettante squires, parsons interested in eking out their stipends, or even true Grub Street hacks. Mrs Delany herself, in March of that year, was passing her time in hammering out a drama ‘to give Mr Handel to compose to' from Milton's
Paradise Lost
, though its subsequent fate is unknown. Good-natured as he always was to the needy, he perhaps wanted to do Miller a good turn. In any event, though the
Joseph
rehearsals were unpromising (the alto Sullivan, in the name part, was described as ‘a
block
with a very fine voice', and he and Beard between them put Handel in a bad temper), the piece had a respectable success and at dinner at Mrs Delany's in Clarges Street in April, soon after the season ended, Handel entertained the company by playing over the new oratorio at the keyboard.