Part 2

More or less mystery surrounds Handel’s arrival in Italy, though the time was not exactly propitious, what with the War of the Spanish Succession in full blast and funds in the wanderer’s pocket fairly low. But the composer did not tarry in Florence, his first stop, for long and early in 1707 went to Rome. From the operatic standpoint the Eternal City had nothing to interest him. Pope Innocent III ten years previously deciding that the opera house was immoral, had closed it; then when things promised to improve a bit for musicians a devastating earthquake renewed the religious qualms of the people, so that during the whole of Handel’s Italian sojourn, Rome had not a single performance of opera. However, there was abundant church and chamber music, which spurred him to emulation. To the Easter festivities of April, 1707, he contributed a “Dixit Dominus” and a few months later he wrote a “Laudate Pueri” and other Latin Psalms. But more important for his future were the excellent connections he made. Letters of recommendation from the Medici prince opened the Roman salons to him; and in such aristocratic circles his virtuosity on the keyboard seems to have gained him more fame than even his compositions. “The famous Saxon” (“Il Sassone famoso”), as Handel was called among the Romans even as early as the summer of 1707, was the wonder of musical soirees. And he was making inestimable artistic friendships. When we note that among those with whom he was brought into contact at one time or another in Rome included the Scarlattis, father and son; Arcangelo Corelli, Bernardo Pasquini, Benedetto Marcello—to mention only a few—we can judge to what grandly fertilizing inspirations Handel was exposed. We must mention in passing Cardinals Panfili and Ottoboni, as well as the Marquis Ruspoli, who yielded to nobody in his enthusiasm for Handel’s gifts. All these men belonged to a coterie called the “Arcadians”, which united “the nobility and the artists in a spiritual fraternity not only the most illustrious artists and aristocrats of Italy, but further included four Popes and members of foreign royalty.”

The “Arcadians” held weekly meetings at the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni, where poetic and musical improvisations were given. It was for the concerts in the Ottoboni home that Handel composed his two Roman oratorios, “The Resurrection” and “The Triumph of Time and Truth”, which approximate operas and the second of which was to undergo several transformations during his career. In the Ottoboni palace later took place that celebrated contest between Handel and the incomparable Domenico Scarlatti, which was adjudged a draw. The heart-warming friendship between the two masters was to endure for years. It is by no means out of the question that in the un-operatic atmosphere of Rome Handel, nevertheless, began to compose the first of his Italian operas, “Roderigo”, which was heard for the first time only when he returned to Florence in the autumn of 1707.

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Handel was not to leave Italy till some time during the late spring of 1710, yet there are not a few blanks in his Italian travels, which it is impossible to fill out. He worked as industriously as ever—composed, played, absorbed myriad impressions. In Florence “Roderigo” had a success which it was claimed by some had been achieved partly through the favor of the Grand Duke and the love of a prima donna, Vittoria Tarquini. Possibly it was furthered by the latter but certainly not caused by it. Handel’s life is conspicuously free from conventional “love interest”; and perhaps the most celebrated story of his dealings with women is the one which tells of his raging threat to throw the soprano, Francesca Cuzzoni, out of a window if she did not sing exactly as he wanted what he had written for her. Certainly the middle-aged Tarquini never attracted him physically.

Encouraged by his Florentine luck Handel was moved to try his fortunes in Venice, where opera houses had sprung up everywhere and at one time numbered fifteen. Seven were playing on one and the same evening during Carnival time and there were musical diversions or solemnities of one sort or another in churches and in those women’s conservatories called “hospitals”. Venice was then the musical capital of Italy, somewhat as Milan was to become at a later date. Handel does not appear to have contributed to the operatic life of the city at this time but his chance was to come before long. Yet he did make one encounter in Venice which was to have consequences—he met Ernest Augustus, Prince of Hanover, and the Duke of Manchester, English Ambassador Extraordinary. He went back to Rome (where an unsuccessful attempt was made to convert him to Catholicism); yet he loved the city and regretfully tore himself away from it to make a jaunt to Naples, which contributed importantly to his artistic sensibilities. As he had done elsewhere in Italy he haunted the picture galleries and nourished his enthusiasm for paintings. He assimilated the Spanish and French musical styles which “fought for honors in this city”; saw much of Alessandro Scarlatti, interested himself in the folk music of the place, noted down the melodies of the Calabrian Pifferari, met the Venetian Cardinal Grimani, composed for the Neapolitan “Arcadians” the _serenata_ “Acis and Galatea”. Grimani, whose family owned the theatre of San Giovanni Crisostomo in Venice, supplied him with the libretto of an opera, “Agrippina”, which Handel probably began to compose on the spot. Its performance in Venice was as good as assured and from Naples he returned to Rome, making another useful friend in the Bishop Agostino Steffani, who was charged with secret missions by different German princes and held at the same time the post of Kapellmeister at the Court of Hanover.

“Agrippina” was produced in Venice, 1709-10. Its reception exceeded anything the composer had known till then. The chronicles tell of cries of “Viva il caro Sassone”, also of “extravagances impossible to record.” Obviously his travels in the peninsula had superbly enriched his creative powers and the Venetians found the new work “the most melodious of Handel’s Italian operas.” Nor was its popularity confined to Venice. He seems to have had some idea of going to Paris, became familiar with the French language, used it in his correspondence and Romain Rolland describes his style as “always very correct and having the fine courtesy of the Court of Louis XIV.”

But Handel did not go to France. Instead, he returned to Germany and went to Hanover. Prince Ernest had, in Venice, been completely captivated by “Agrippina” and repeated an invitation he had made once before. The worthy Steffani invited the “dear Saxon” to succeed him as Kapellmeister at the Hanoverian Court. Wisely, “the dear Saxon” accepted. How differently things might have turned had he not been in Venice at just that providential moment! So Handel, as Chrysander said, “walked in the steps of Steffani; but his feet were larger.”

His stay in Hanover in 1710 was brief. Hardly had he prepared to take up his duties than proposals were made to him from England. He asked leave of absence and received it; accepted an invitation from the Elector Johann Wilhelm to visit his court at Düsseldorf; and then, by way of Holland, traveled to London, which he reached late in 1710, unable to speak a word of English. Before he had gone back to the Hanoverian Court he had written an opera, produced it amid prodigious enthusiasm and taken the first steps toward becoming a sovereign British institution.

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He could not have timed his coming better. Purcell’s death sixteen years earlier had given what was something like a death blow to English music; and what now passed for native compositions amounted to pitiable odds and ends. Rolland ridicules the claim of some unthinking people that Handel “killed English music since there was nothing left to kill.” A renewal of the Puritanical opposition which poisoned the English stage contributed to the confusion and discouragement of British artists, and the worst of such attacks as the notorious Jeremy Collier had made on the “profaneness and immorality” of the theatre lay in the fact that, as such things often do, they expressed the deep feelings of the nation. In consequence of a universal hypocrisy foreign elements came to fill the vacuum created. Some bad Italian librettos were set to wretched music and served up with momentary success. Other “entertainments” of the sort mingled Italian and English words and were duly satirized by the jealous and priggish Joseph Addison, nettled by the failure of his own piece, “Rosamund”, to which one Thomas Clayton had composed atrocious music.

Handel came into contact with one Aaron Hill, who managed the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket, and received from him an opera text, “Rinaldo”, which an Italian, Giacomo Rossi, had adapted from Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered.” The new arrival rose magnificently to his opportunity. The music was completed in just two weeks and performed on February 24, 1711. And luck aided Handel by supplying him with some extraordinary singers, all of them new to England—Giuseppe Boschi, a young and astounding bass, and the sensational castrato, Nicolini, who took London by storm. The tale of “Rinaldo” was that of the Venetian “Agrippina” all over again! In one evening the British capital was subjugated, for all the bile and venom Addison and Steele could discharge into the columns of _The Spectator_ and _The Tatler_. The melodies of the opera spread like wildfire and seem to have appealed to the lower classes as well as to the aristocracy. To this day some of them have preserved their vitality. The noble air, “Lascia ch’io pianga”, in sarabande rhythm, is a fairly familiar item on recital programs; and the Crusaders’ March, a fine, swinging tune, was adapted to the words “Let us take the road” by Dr. Pepusch when he assembled out of countless folksongs and dances John Gay’s deathless “Beggar’s Opera”—in 1728 a thorn in Handel’s side but still, after more than two centuries, a classic with an iron constitution.

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Roughly speaking, Handel composed forty-four operas from “Almira”, in 1705, at Hamburg to “Deidamia”, 1741, in London. It is obviously impossible to consider even a small fraction of them here and we shall have to content ourselves with little more than the names and dates of only a few. All the same, it may be well to pause here momentarily to ask ourselves what, in the first place, a Handel opera really is like. For unless we are specialists, not to say antiquarians, we have little means of definitely knowing. The lyric drama of that period cannot be judged by the works of the 19th and 20th Centuries or even by more than a scant handful of masterpieces of Gluck and Mozart. Its problems, its musical and dramatic aspects are basically different. A movement, which had its rise in Germany after the First World War and which continued on and off for several years (even spreading intermittently to other countries, including the United States) demonstrated that these baroque entertainments are essentially museum pieces, prizable as certain of their elements may be. To us, who have been nurtured on the theatre works of Mozart, of the composers of the school of dramatic and pictorial “grand opera”, of the opera buffa and the opéra comique, the _drame lyrique_ of Gounod and Bizet, the works of Verdi, the music dramas of Wagner and his assorted successors of various nationalities—to us the operatic specimens of Handel seem infinitely alien and remote in their premises and calculated stylizations. The nearest we can approach them today is through such surviving examples of the old _opera seria_ as Mozart’s “Idomeneo” or Gluck’s “Alceste”. And even those do not supply genuine parallels.

To the average person reared on the lyric drama as known to two or three generations preceding ours the long-established description of a Handelian opera as a “concert in costume” may suffice at a pinch. But in a larger sense it begs the question, for Handel’s forty odd operas are both more than this and less. We should find their librettos so cut to a pattern that the most old-fashioned “books” of the 19th Century would possibly strike us, by comparison, dramatically bold, even involved. Handelian operas have no trace of psychological subtlety or elementary “conflict”. What theatrical “action” there is passes before us with something like lightning speed. Incidents which need to be communicated to the spectator are, in the main, recounted in recitative. What we understand as “incident” is subordinate to phases of emotional expression; and in ensemble pieces. Joy, rage, sadness, a broad scale of elemental feelings, are recognizably embodied in musical moods and tempos unmistakable in their lyrical or dramatic communications of “affetti” (“emotions”). There is little, if indeed any, of what a later esthetic was to call “the art of transition” and it was nothing in any manner unusual for a fiery or combative _presto_ to precede (or follow) a tender _largo_ or _andante_, and other formalistic clichés. The accompaniment, the orchestra, indeed the “action” and the stage picture is not much more than incidental background and frame.

The true center of gravity of a Handel opera lies in the performance of the singers and their command of declamation, florid utterance, sustained song and artifices at that epoch accepted as supremely expressive. Only in grasping these facts can we put ourselves in the frame of mind needed to understand the essential principles of these baroque masterpieces and to appreciate what—apart from their sheer melodic beauties—lifts them to a higher level than curios lacking any further validity, difficult as it may be for many of us to force our imagination and our feelings into such a mold.

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Having conquered England at a blow and become the idol not only of high society but of the common people as well, Handel recalled in the spring of 1711 that he was still Kapellmeister of Hanover. In London he had made enemies as well as friends and one of the most implacable of his foes was the great but churlish Addison. His admirers, on the other hand, included a child named Mary Granville, later Mrs. Delany, one of his staunchest friends; the Duke of Burlington, through whom he had entrée to Burlington House; and the famous eccentric, Thomas Britton, a coal dealer by day but who, on certain evenings, sponsored memorable concerts in a specially outfitted loft above his coal shop, which drew prominent London musicians and cultured aristocrats to the Clerkenwell “garret”, where Handel frequently appeared as harpsichord and even organ virtuoso.

Back in Hanover June, 1711, he renewed his contacts with Bishop Steffani, composed organ concertos and other chamber music, as well as a quantity of songs to German texts by the Hamburg Senator, Brockes. He would have liked to produce “Rinaldo” but the Hanover Opera was closed. Yet London had entered his blood and nothing would content him but his speedy return, the more so because his English admirers demanded him. He obtained leave “on condition that he return to Hanover after a reasonable time”; and by November, 1712, he arrived in England to supervise preparations for a pastoral, “Il Pastor Fido”, a work hastily thrown together and variously improved more than twenty years later. This time Handel did not repeat his “Rinaldo” sensation and the piece had only half a dozen hearings. To make matters worse, a certain MacSwiney, who succeeded Aaron Hill at the Queen’s Theatre, absconded, leaving nothing but unpaid bills and enraged singers. At this stage there enters the picture a Swiss adventurer, by name Heidegger, a man of unbelievable conceit and homeliness, who was, however, to play an important role in Handel’s future. To recoup the failure of “Il Pastor Fido” the composer turned out in less than three weeks a “tragic opera” in five acts, “Teseo”, with a libretto by Nicolo Francesco Haym, and dedicated tactfully to the Earl of Burlington. “Teseo” came near duplicating the fortunes of “Rinaldo”; and if, as Rolland says, it was “full of haste”, it was also “full of genius.” If anything could have intrenched the composer still more firmly in London it was this opera. He went for a while to live at Burlington House at the Duke’s invitation; met Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, struck up friendships with this and that musician at the Queen’s Arms Tavern in St. Paul’s Churchyard and was never so happy as when he sat with some musical crony, a mug of beer at hand and a harpsichord nearby. The first work he composed in the ideal peace of Burlington House was a Birthday Ode for Queen Anne, whom he had met on his first London visit. The Ode was produced at St. James’s on February 6, 1713, and was the first English he had set to music. All his life Handel’s English remained bad, sometimes even grotesque, and the incorrect accenting in his compositions repeatedly betray his deficiencies in our tongue. Of such faults the Birthday Ode has its full share, in spite of which the Queen was so delighted with the work that she settled on the composer an annual pension of 200 Pounds. He found it politic to write music for patriotic purposes, and instantly complied with the sovereign’s command to supply a “Te Deum” and a “Jubilate” to celebrate the Peace of Utrecht, both compositions given at a solemn service at St. Paul’s before the assembled Members of Parliament.

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Queen Anne died on August 1, 1714, and for a time the skies over Handel threatened to cloud; for on the very day of her passing the Elector of Hanover was proclaimed by the Secret Council King of England. He arrived in London on September 20 and was crowned George I at Westminster a month later. Here was a pretty kettle of fish! His former master to whose service he had most certainly not returned “in a reasonable time” suddenly seated on the English throne—and not even a new “Te Deum” prepared against his coming to the land which Handel now regarded as home!

Handelian luck got him out of what might have been a serious predicament. He must have trusted to his destiny in the first place to help him out of an obviously awkward situation and, being tactful, he made no open move to aggravate it. George I was and remained intensely German, brought to England with him “a compact body of Germans”—chamberlains, secretaries, even his pair of elderly mistresses, the Baroness Kielmansegge and Madame Schulenburg; and all manner of comforts and consolations he could not find in his new island kingdom. He made no effort to shed his German love of music, wherefore as Rolland points out, “he could not punish Handel without punishing himself.” And after he heard Handel’s fascinating new opera, “Amadigi”, in May, 1715, he lost all idea (if, indeed, he ever harbored any) of disciplining his former servant. He appointed Handel music master to the little princesses and when, in 1716, the monarch had to go to Hanover the composer accompanied him on the trip, took occasion to study musical developments in Germany and even wrote a Passion on a text by Heinrich Brockes.

Here is the point to consider for a moment the tale of the “Water Music”, one of the most venerable Handelian anecdotes. The story runs somewhat as follows: Lord Burlington and Baron Kielmansegge, the Master of the King’s Horse, in order to reconcile sovereign and musician, in 1715 persuaded the latter to write a set of light pieces to be played on a boat close to the royal barge at a water party on the Thames. The King liked the music sufficiently to inquire who composed it and, being told, summoned Handel, promised to let bygones be bygones and received him back into favor. Unfortunately for romance, later documents have shown that the “Water Music” was not played till 1717 and then under wholly different conditions. But the legend has become so ingrained in British musical tradition that, as Newman Flower wrote, “it is precisely what ought to have happened.” At all events, the “Water Music” is an adorable suite, definitely English in character—like much else in Handel’s music—and to this day an ornament of concert programs in one or another arrangement.

King George, far from remembering past annoyances, saw to it that Handel’s yearly pension from Queen Anne should be increased to 600 Pounds, so that even without further earnings his financial state was tolerably secure. His good fortunes were enhanced by the musical enthusiasms of the King, who could not hear enough of “Rinaldo” and “Amadigi” (to the spectacular features of which live birds, which sometimes misbehaved, and a fountain of real water, heightened the attractions of sumptuous settings). He went to them, often incognito, several times a week sharing his private box with his bevy of lady friends, new and old; or he would vary his visits to the opera with attendance at plays or concerts, so that his chances to admire the works of Handel, in one form or another, were rarely lacking. Many found that the monarch’s habit of parading his amours before London audiences added to the piquancy of a Handelian score!

By the side of the famed artificial soprano, Nicolini, sang the brilliant Anastasia Robinson, who had been a soprano but whose voice, after a siege of illness, suddenly dropped to contralto. Mrs. Robinson was particularly noted for the fact that her morals were at all times spotless. Mrs. Delany was to describe her as “of middling stature, not handsome but of a pleasing modest countenance, with large blue eyes.... Her manner and address were very engaging, and her behavior on all occasions that of a gentlewoman.” When her husband, Lord Peterborough, died she burned the diaries he had kept, wherein he had noted his various infidelities and other secrets not meant for the scrutiny of his wife.

Handel’s star was steadily rising and his fame was not to be transcended till a number of years later and then only by virtue of his own genius and after many fluctuations of fortune. But when the King returned to London from his trip to Germany opera fell upon bad days. Musical and theatrical life flourished, indeed, yet suddenly farces and other diversions, imported from France, captured the mood of the town and delighted the monarch and his ladies. Now nobody felt like putting up money on opera, since inexpensive vulgarity was a safer bet. At just about this period Handel and James Brydges, Duke of Chandos, former Paymaster-General of the Army during the Marlborough wars, were brought into contact. The erstwhile Earl of Carnarvon had accumulated his wealth by heaven knows what sharp practices, and inherited an estate at Cannons, near Edgware, where he had erected a luxurious palace, including a chapel, a theatre, and other musical appurtenances inseparable from such an establishment. The Prince of Wales was a frequent visitor at Cannons, braving even the swarming footpads of Edgware Road. The Duke of Chandos seems to have been in a position to buy anything which struck his fancy and there is a story that on one occasion, he or his son (the accounts differ) coming across a man unmercifully thrashing his well-favored wife, rescued the lady by buying her on the spot. He, therefore, had no particular trouble securing Handel as master of his music in place of his former employee, the German Dr. Pepusch. Some ten years later Dr. Pepusch had his revenge by compiling the score of the “Beggar’s Opera” which was to become such a grievous obstacle in Handel’s path.