Part 3
But until 1720 Handel was in the service of the Duke of Chandos, even if he spent much of his time in London, busily attending to the musical instruction of the daughters of Caroline, Princess of Wales, and writing numerous “Lessons” and clavier suites for his royal pupils. Which brings us to another celebrated Handelian fiction, “The Harmonious Blacksmith.” The legend is quite as diversified and even more far-fetched than the one about the “Water Music.” For well over a century the world has been fed the story of the blacksmith and his forge near Whitchurch, close to Edgware. In the house of this blacksmith Handel is supposed to have taken refuge from a thunderstorm, the blacksmith meantime continuing his hammering. When the storm was over the composer went forth and, still haunted by the rhythm of the pounding, set down the melody and then proceeded to write variations on it. This “Air and Variations” form part of Handel’s Fifth Suite of clavecin pieces, but it was not till 1820 that some imaginative publisher, taking his cue from an apprentice who continually whistled Handel’s tune, invented the fanciful title; and not till 1835 that the London _Times_ published an anonymous letter retailing the legend of the blacksmith and his forge. We have no place here to recount the complex ramifications of the amiable myth which culminated in the auctioning off of an old anvil—supposedly the very one which the composer heard struck! But the publisher had the last word and to the end of time the Fifth Suite will assuredly remain “The Harmonious Blacksmith.”
Far more important in the development of Handel’s style are the “Chandos Anthems” (or Psalms), composed during the years from 1717 to 1720 while the master, at Cannons, was steadily evolving. They fill three volumes of the Complete Handel edition and “stand in relationship to Handel’s oratorios in the same position as his Italian cantatas stand to his operas. In these religious cantatas, written for the Duke’s chapel, Handel gives the first place to the chorus.... There is already in them the spirit and the style of ‘Israel in Egypt’, the great monumental lines, the popular feeling. It was only a step from this to the colossal Biblical dramas.” (Rolland) And Handel took this first step with “Esther”, called in its first form “Haman and Mordecai, a masque.” It was staged on August 29, 1720. Almost simultaneously he wrote the exquisite pastoral tragedy, “Acis and Galatea”, a Sicilian legend he had already treated during his Neapolitan days but which, in its later shape took on an unsurpassable element of classical finish.
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Yet there were breakers ahead! Whether or not he could discern them from afar it is probably unlikely that the prospect of conflict would have troubled over much a nature as powerful and combative as Handel’s. Indeed, difficulties were what this prodigious vitality and ever renewing creative inspiration best throve upon. As so often happens in lands where opera is fundamentally an exotic people again wanted opera. It was a logical time to end the Cannons interlude. The psychology of the moment, to which Handel was sensitive, came just when company-promoting took on almost the aspect of a hobby. There was money aplenty and the South Sea Bubble, which was indeed swelling, had not yet burst. So Lord Burlington and other peers raised capital for a new season of Italian opera, appointed Handel director-in-chief, made the ugly but efficient Heidegger stage manager, rounded up librettists and sent Handel to the Continent to engage singers for what was to be known as “The Royal Academy of Music”—an English duplication of the official name of the Paris Opéra. And the _Weekly Journal_ soon announced that “Mr. Handel, a famous Master of Musick, is gone beyond the sea, by order of His Majesty, to collect a company of the choicest singers for the Opera in the Haymarket.”
“Mr. Handel” visited Hanover, Düsseldorf, Dresden and Halle, where he went to his birthplace “Am Schlamm”, saw his old mother, who was going blind, and her aging spinster sister. And at this point occurred one of the most poignant incidents of musical history—that meeting of Handel and Bach, thwarted by an inscrutable destiny. Bach learned that his contemporary was in Halle, went there on foot from Coethen to seek him out and—missed him by a day! Even Bach’s subsequent dispatch of his son, Wilhelm Friedemann, to invite Handel to visit him misfired and the two were destined forever to remain personal strangers.
Handel secured some extraordinary singers in Dresden, where the Italian opera was blooming. In addition to Boschi, the bass, who had sung in “Rinaldo”, he bagged the great Signora Durastanti and the castrato Senesino, who until the subsequent coming of the mighty Farinelli, was perhaps the artificial soprano whom London most worshipped at a time when castrati were completely the rage. Senesino played incredible havoc with the hearts of deluded women. Handel, in addition to the countless duties of a music-director had also operas to compose, and in due season he was somehow turning out three a year. Nicola Francesco Haym supplied him with a libretto adapted from Tacitus, “Radamisto”, and this work, produced on April 27, 1720, was a triumph such as even Handel had never experienced. It ran till the season ended late in June; “crowds flocked to ‘Radamisto’ like a modern mob to a notorious prize-fight.” (Newman Flower)
The first season of the Royal Academy finished in a flourish, aided by the circumstance that the metropolis was in the throes of an orgy of financial speculation. We can read of incredible schemes and “bubbles” with the help of which money was to be lured from private pocket-books. Newman Flower tells of “one for trading in hair, another for the universal supply of funerals in Great Britain, one for a wheel of perpetual motion, one ‘for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is’.” Still another project contemplated “breeding silkworms in Chelsea Park.” By the time things were ready for the opening of the Academy’s second season Lord Burlington imported from Rome the composer Giovanni Battista Bononcini, possibly not dreaming that he was introducing a dangerous rival to Handel. In his little way Bononcini had talent and charm, as well as a conceit out of all proportion to his pleasant gifts. An opera of his was produced at the Academy with Senesino in the cast and enjoyed a good run, while a composite work, called “Muzio Scevola”, with one act by Handel, another by Bononcini and a third by a mediocrity, Filippo Mattei, followed. The results of the increasingly complicated situation were to precipitate a contest that split London’s high society into factions. The cynical John Byrom compressed it into an epigram, part of which has entered the English language:
“_Some say, compared to Bononcini,_ _That Mynherr Handel’s but a ninny;_ _Others aver that he to Handel_ _Is scarcely fit to hold a candle._ _Strange, all this difference should be_ _’Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee._”
Be all of which as it may, Handel presently had the mortification of seeing his own new “Floridante” fail while Bononcini’s pretty “Griselda” packed the theatre like nothing since “Radamisto!”
But Handel resembled the mythical Antaeus, who whenever he fell renewed his own powers by contact with Mother Earth. Before long he was turning out masterpieces in bewildering continuity. In 1723 he composed the superb “Ottone”, in 1724 “Tamerlano” and “Giulio Cesare” and the following season the sumptuous “Rodelinda”; in 1726 “Scipione”, and “Alessandro”, in 1727 “Admeto” and “Riccardo I”, in 1728 “Siroe” and “Tolomeo.” This period, incidentally, brings us to those excesses of singer worship and rivalry which stirred the public to white heat and turned the opera house into something between a wild prize fight and a three ring circus. Then, in 1722-23, the species _prima donna_ suddenly invaded the scene, in the person of Francesca Cuzzoni, who was squat and ungainly, but had an astounding voice and an art of song that made high society overlook her bad temper and her worse style in dress. Handel had occasion to experience her tantrums at the rehearsals of “Ottone”, when she refused to sing an aria as the composer wanted it; whereupon he had recourse to real “Taming of the Shrew” tactics, seized her bodily and threatened to throw her out of the window, at the same time shouting to her in French: “Oh, Madame, I know full well that you are a real she-devil; but I intend to teach you that I am Beelzebub, the Chief of Devils!” Whereupon the humbled Cuzzoni sang her “Falsa imagine” exactly as Handel wanted. Possibly the incident did not end Handel’s difficulties with her but in her relations with him she became more tractable and if she could not subdue the insensitive master she did subdue her audiences. “Damme, she has a nest of nightingales in her belly!”, yelled one of the gallery gods on a certain occasion and the plebeian indelicacy seems to have won the approval of the boxes. Soon Anastasia Robinson, revolted by the turmoil over Cuzzoni, retired from stage life and married the Earl of Peterborough.
Cuzzoni, however, was only one obstacle of her kind. Soon afterwards the management, on the lookout for another sensation, secured the soprano’s most hated Continental rival, Faustina Bordoni, who was to become the wife of the composer Hasse. Handel brought the pair on the stage together in his opera “Alessandro”. Lady Pembroke was “protectress” of Cuzzoni, Lady Burlington of Faustina. Finally, in May, 1727, things culminated when the two jealous creatures came to blows during a performance of Bononcini’s “Astyanax”, tore each others hair and pummeled one another in full view of the spectators, who took sides and shrieked with delight as the coiffures of the combatants were ruined and faces scratched. The “fighting cats”, as the pair were called, later were made the subject of Colley Cibber’s farce, “The Rival Queens”.
In time Cuzzoni despite her lack of taste in dressing was to set fashions; and a brown and silver attire in which she appeared in “Rodelinda” so captivated the ladies that, with modish variations, it was to be the rage for years. The various castrati (notably the great Senesino) were in many ways as capricious and difficult to manage as the prima donnas. Senesino, having irritated the Earl of Peterborough by reason of some reflection on Anastasia Robinson was flogged by her husband. The scandal enchanted the drawing rooms and Society was even more delighted when the singer, appearing in “Giulio Cesare” was frightened out of his wits and burst into tears because a piece of scenery fell at his feet at the very moment when, as Julius Caesar, he had to sing words to the effect that “Caesar knows no fear!”
In time came the greatest castrato of them all, the incredible Farinelli, who earned so much in London that when he retired to Italy he built himself a palace there which he sarcastically named “English Folly”. People used to shout at the Opera that there was only “One God and one Farinelli!” And describing a London birthday party where this divinity was among the guests the Duchess of Portland wrote: “There were about forty gentlemen that had an entertainment, and Farinelli wore a magnificent suit of clothes, and charmed the company with his voice as Orpheus did (and so kept them from drinking).” On the other hand when this god was once so imprudent as to walk uninvited into a party at the Duke of Modena’s in St. James’s Street the infuriated host showed him the door with the words: “Get out, fellow! None but gentlemen come here!”
All these scandals, spectacular squabbles and silly exhibitions did not, in the long run, enhance the credit of the Academy. Handel, who had been naturalized on February 13, 1726 and at the same time been appointed Composer to the Court and to the Chapel Royal, was together with the rest of London, shocked in the early summer of 1727, to learn of the death of George I on a trip to Germany. On October 11 of the same year George II was crowned and, though less favorably disposed to the composer than his father, continued the pensions Handel held from the late sovereign and from Queen Anne and contributed to them another large sum for music lessons to the young princesses. Handel, for his part, wrote for the new King four Coronation Anthems which added to his glory. The Academy, after losing an appalling amount of money presently received its death blow, the production at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields of “The Beggar’s Opera”, by the clever satirist, John Gay, with music compiled by Dr. Pepusch, Handel’s predecessor in the employ of the Duke of Chandos. This “ballad opera”, that “made Gay rich and Rich, the manager, gay”, which still leads a lusty existence, and has been at various times a landmark in English and American theatrical history, proved an earthy and bawdy entertainment, against the barbed shafts of whose ridicule the artifices of Italian opera could not prevail for long.
Yet Handel remained incorrigible. Once again he entered into partnership with Heidegger, planned another opera season, secured Senesino again and went abroad to engage other singers. On that occasion he traveled again to Italy, went to Hamburg and made a last visit to his aged mother in Halle. She was now paralyzed, and shortly afterwards she died. The new London opera season got off to a bad start, one failure succeeding another. Politics aggravated the situation, the more so as George II and the Prince of Wales were at odds and the supporters of the latter, determined to set up a rival opera company to ruin Handel.
But the story of Handel’s pertinacious efforts to float new operatic enterprises for almost another ten years is too long, involved and too honeycombed with intrigue, contending influences and low tactics of one sort or another to be examined here. The composer’s Hanoverian origin stirred many parties against him. Moreover, he was a self-willed, imperious person, who, like Richard Wagner more than a century later, had the gift of stimulating antagonism. He was, wrote W. McNaught, “a pervading presence, a busybody forever intruding upon public affairs. He had taken to ordering the amusements of the town in his own interests; and he belonged to the wrong party.” One almost fancies oneself confronted with a chapter from the life of the creator of “Die Meistersinger!”
Yet what a treasury of glorious music Handel was pouring out with incalculable lavishness during these agitated years! Let us mention in passing a few of the new operas as they came and went: “Ezio”, “Orlando”, “Il Pastor Fido”, “Ariodante”, “Alcina”, “Arminio”, “Berenice”, “Faramondo”, “Serse”. The last-named calls for a word by itself. “Xerxes” has nothing to do with the Persian ruler of antiquity. It is a comic opera, Handel’s first and only one, which stands up extraordinarily well under modern stylized conditions of revival, apart from which it contains possibly one of the most universally beloved melodies that Handel ever wrote. This melody, heard at the very opening of the piece, appears in the score as a _larghetto_ to the words “Ombra mai fu”, a song of gratitude to a plane tree for its beneficent shade. But for generations it has been slowed from the pace originally prescribed to a solemn, swelling hymn known to uncounted millions as “Handel’s Largo.” And far more know it as a churchly canticle than its lightly moving operatic context. Almost every one of this mass of operas, furthermore, is charged with grand arias of all the emotional varieties common to its epoch—gems enshrined in practically every one of the great anthologies of the 18th Century song.
It was not till 1741 that Handel concluded his period of operatic creativity with “Deidamia”, written to a libretto by Paolo Rolli. London’s taste for opera had, during more than a decade shown continued fluctuation. But in 1731 a new situation brought about an event that was to provoke a development of capital importance for Handel’s future. The children of the Chapel Royal presented in a private performance his masque, “Esther”, on the composer’s birthday. The success of the performance was such that it resulted in others, one of which was given without Handel’s consent by one of his rivals. The master was equal to the occasion. He added some numbers to the score and gave half a dozen representations at the King’s Theatre; but as a Biblical subject could not be acted on the stage the masque was given in concert form, in the presence of the royal family and of High Society. The Handelian oratorio had more or less come into being!
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In the summer of 1733 Handel went to Oxford. The University authorities had offered him a degree of Doctor of Music. Oxford is said to have known little of his music at that time. Yet his arrival there might, according to Newman Flower, “have been the triumphant entry of a king. The town was overcrowded; even accommodations at the hostels ran out and people slept in the streets.” The composer brought with him a new oratorio, “Athalia”, composed to a text which Samuel Humphreys had adapted from Racine. Hugo Leichtentritt claims that the Rector, Dr. Holmes, aimed to bring about a rapprochement between the Hanoverians and the Jacobites. A whole week of Handelian works was offered, with hearings of “Esther”, “Deborah”, “Athalia”, the Utrecht Te Deum, “Acis and Galatea” and other creations. In the end the master did _not_ receive the honorary degree. Some have believed that he turned it down when he was told it would cost 100 Pounds. Like Haydn half a century after, he found the academic honors of Oxford expensive; and later a story gained currency that Handel had shouted in his particular brand of English: “Vat de dyfil I trow away my money for what de Blockhead wish; I no vant!”
Had it been practical he might have brought a whole opera production to Oxford. In place of such a luxury he compromised on oratorios, the more so because the dividing line between such entertainment and the opera of the period was not so sharply drawn as it was eventually to become. The chief differences between the two forms lay in the preponderance of choruses, such as, in opera, were regarded as hardly more than side issues.
Meanwhile, he seemed unable to resist the lure of the theatre. Again and again he returned to Italian opera. He continued his earlier partnership with Heidegger; he made trips to Italy and elsewhere and secured new singers (the castrato, Carestini, the prima donna, Strada). His enemies increased in number and power and resorted to the basest tactics imaginable to discredit and injure him. The so-called Opera of the Nobility opened at a playhouse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, lured his singers away from him by fair means or foul, and by securing the great Farinelli obtained a trump card. Handel (who in time parted company with Heidegger) would burn his fingers the moment his fortunes seemed on the upgrade. Even the weather was against him, what with the Thames freezing over in one of the years that he obstinately returned to opera and cutting down his audiences. He lost money ruinously, he went into bankruptcy, he wore himself out to such a degree that he had a mental and physical breakdown and had to go to the Continent, to Aix-la-Chapelle, for a cure. His amazing resilience of spirit and body helped him back to health and actually encouraged him to make another attempt at an operatic season with his egregious associate, Heidegger, at the King’s Theatre early in 1738, for which he composed his comedy, “Serse.”
A few months earlier his royal friend, Queen Caroline, had died and Handel gave voice to his genuine grief in the great Funeral Anthem, “The Ways of Zion do Mourn.” And despite his misfortunes he busied himself with a charitable enterprise, the promotion of a Society for the Support of Decayed Musicians, which enlisted his active sympathies for the rest of his life. Not even benefactions of the sort could mollify the legions of his implacable enemies. His aristocratic foes, to hasten his complete downfall, actually hired hoodlums to tear down his posters and precipitate noisy disturbances whenever they thought trouble-making could in some way or other harm him. Yet a few friends stood unshakably by his side, none more faithfully than the loyal Mrs. Delany.
Just when his creditors had seized him and threatened him with imprisonment the news of his tribulations gave rise to a popular movement of sympathy. In 1735 he had delighted the English public by his “Alexander’s Feast”, composed on Dryden’s “Ode to St. Cecilia”, produced triumphantly at the Covent Garden Theatre. It had been written in twenty days. As the years passed, Handel’s composing activity seemed incredibly accelerated. In the freezing winter of 1739 he wrote, “to keep himself warm” (as Rolland says) the “little” Cecilia cantata in a week, the version of Milton’s poem (under the title “L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il Moderato”) in just under a fortnight, and the glorious Concerti Grossi, Opus 6, in a month distracted by his last operatic cares! Incidentally, Handel had received about this time a testimonial of public admiration in the form of a marble statue by the sculptor, Roubiliac, which a manager of musical entertainments named Tyers had caused to be erected in Vauxhall Gardens, a meeting place of London Society, where Handel’s works made up the best liked musical features.
“THUS SAITH THE LORD,” FROM THE “MESSIAH.”
Still, by the spring of 1741, Handel in a moment of profoundest disheartenment prepared to throw up the sponge and leave for good and all his home for the past thirty years. At long last he was fed up on the struggle and announced one last concert for April 8, 1741. And then, when the darkness before dawn seemed blackest, he sat down to create his masterpiece, the most universally beloved choral work ever composed!
That summer Charles Jennens gave Handel a compilation of Scriptural texts which he called “Messiah.” Jennens was a literary amateur, born at Gopsall Hall, Leicestershire and educated at Balliol College, Oxford. Rich and bizarre, he was vastly conceited and especially proud of the manner in which he had assembled the various Biblical texts used in this case. Handel had been associated with him before—in the oratorio, “Saul” (1739), and in “L’Allegro ed Il Penseroso” a year later, as a supplement to which he had added some poor verses of his own to the lines of Milton and called the product “Il Moderato.” Robert Manson Myers thinks it “extraordinary that Handel turned to this eccentric millionaire for his libretto of ‘Messiah’.” Jennens was of another mind and even later wrote to an acquaintance: “I shall show you a collection I gave Handel, called ‘Messiah’ which I value highly; he has made a fine entertainment of it, though not near so good as he might and ought to have done.... There are some passages far unworthy of Handel, but even more unworthy of ‘Messiah’”; and deploring Handel’s “maggots” he added that he had “with greatest difficulty made him correct some of the grossest faults in the composition.” Doubtless Handel, had he so chosen, could have picked his texts himself; he compiled the book of “Israel in Egypt” unaided in 1738 and when, a good deal earlier, the Bishop of London wanted to help him with the words for the “Coronation Anthems” he retorted: “I have read my Bible very well, and I shall choose for myself!” Mr. Myers, in his encyclopedic study of “Messiah” feels certain that Handel must have controlled the choice of passages selected.