Handel (10 page)

Handel must already have settled on a destination and a job to go with it. On his first trip to Venice he had been presented to Prince Ernst August of Hanover,
visiting for the carnival season. The introduction was doubtless made by the Hanoverian envoy to the Serene Republic, Baron Johann Adolf von Kielmansegg, an ardent music lover married to the Prince's half-sister. It was probably their recommendations rather than Ferdinando's which he made up his mind to use, since both were Protestants, while the Medici family's German links were with Catholic dynasties. The issue of faith was not unimportant to Handel, as the grandson of a Lutheran pastor and the descendant of refugees from religious persecution. Mainwaring tells us that the Roman cardinals had tried persuading him to convert to Catholicism. ‘Being pressed very closely on this article by one of these exalted Ecclesiastics, he replied that he was neither qualified nor disposed to enter into enquiries of this sort, but was resolved to die a member of that communion, whether true or false, in which he was born and bred.' Efforts at winning him over to ‘outward conformity' had no greater success, ‘unless it were that of confirming him still more in the principles of protestantism'. Hanover's Lutheran court was a tolerant one, however, and its cosmopolitan climate tolerated not just those of other faiths but those, like the Irish Deist John Toland who spent some time there as a British government agent, with very little religion of any kind. Handel arrived there some time during the spring of 1710, and though the Elector officially appointed him kapellmeister, with a salary of 1,000 thaler, on 16 June, we find the old Electress Sophia writing to the Queen of Prussia two days earlier: ‘Here there is no news save that the Elector has taken into his service a kapellmeister named Handel, who plays the harpsichord marvellously to the enjoyment of the Electoral Prince and Princess. He is a good-looking man and the talk is that he was the lover of Victoria [
sic
].' Both these last comments are worth noting. The first bears out the impression conveyed by the earlier portraits and underlined by George III's German manuscript comment that ‘Handel was extremely well built and lacked nothing of manly charm'; the second makes rather more convincing the allusion to Vittoria Tarquini by Mainwaring.

In four years' time the Elector Georg Ludwig of Hanover would succeed to the English throne as King George I. His son and daughter-in-law, the Electoral Prince and Princess, as George II and Queen Caroline, would become two of Handel's staunchest supporters. Few royal figures of the period have been so deliberately misunderstood as these three,
and we are even now moving only very gradually towards a proper appreciation of them as rational, cultivated individuals. George I especially has suffered from the propagandistic Victorian view of him, substantially created by William Makepeace Thackeray in his ‘Four Georges' lecture series and indestructible thereafter, as callous, self-seeking, brutal to his wife, overfond of hunting and memorable solely for the odd habit of dressing his salads with whale oil. The twentieth-century English prejudice against the Germans, fostered by two world wars, has not helped to dispel this image.

The truth is that George, whether as Elector or King, was a far more complex figure than such dubious traditions have been ready to allow. Remote and charmless as he may have seemed in public, he was also refined, astute and politically adept, earning loyalty and admiration from his English ministers and universal respect among the various ruling princes of Europe. More significantly where Handel was concerned, he was a man of considerable culture, born into a family passionate for music and au fait, in this respect, with the latest French and Italian styles in opera and instrumental writing.

Hanover itself, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, was Germany's most sophisticated princely court. The Elector's parents had patronized the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz and created a miniature Versailles at Schloss Herrenhausen, designed by the Italian architect Giacomo Querini. French was the preferred language among the electoral family and French too was the idiom of the orchestral suites composed for the court band by its directors Jean-Baptiste Farinel and Francesco Venturini. At the opera, however, the bias was towards Italian composers. It was the Elector's brother Ernst August who, in 1688, had invited Agostino Steffani, one of the leading contemporary operatic masters, to Hanover. A choirboy at St Mark's in Venice, Steffani, aged thirteen, had been taken into the Elector of Bavaria's service as a pupil of the Munich court kapellmeister Johann Kaspar Kerll. He visited Paris, where he heard Lully's operas, and in 1681 his own debut took place with the Munich première of
Marco Aurelio
. Steffani's skills were not merely musical. When he arrived in Hanover it was in the double capacity of composer and diplomat. By now he had assumed the status of an
abbate
(a priest in minor orders) enhancing his credit as the Protestant Duke's envoy to Catholic courts. He became an important negotiator in the duke's ultimately successful efforts to secure himself an electorate and was later made responsible,
as Pope Clement's Vicar Apostolic, for overseeing the welfare of Catholics in the various Protestant states and for sterling attempts to convert various wavering heretic royalties. Despite a handful of illustrious proselytes, he was doomed to almost constant failure in his drive to re-establish a Catholic presence in solidly Lutheran and Calvinist communities.

As a musician Steffani has justifiably been termed ‘the greatest Italian master between Carissimi and Scarlatti' and his stylistic cosmopolitanism significantly foreshadows Handel's. There is no doubt that he used his enormous musical gifts as a diplomatic passport to places that might otherwise have been more impervious to him. The two composers may have met in Rome during the autumn of 1708, when Steffani, by now a fully ordained priest and engaged in mediation between Emperor Joseph I and Pope Clement XI, found time to sing at one of Cardinal Ottoboni's concerts. ‘Such an acquaintance', says Mainwaring, ‘[Handel] was glad to renew: for Steffani's compositions were excellent; his temper was exceedingly amiable; and his behaviour polite and genteel.' The mingled Franco-Italian idiom of Steffani's operas written for Hanover during the 1690s had its impact on Handel's style, but the older composer's best-loved works were his chamber duets, abundantly expressive settings of Arcadian love poetry, demonstrating his contrapuntal skill. Handel, having acquired a collection of these during his stay in Hamburg, began making his own experiments in the genre while travelling through Italy and returned to it, presumably in emulation of the master craftsman, once established in Hanover. His poet here was Ortensio Mauro, a Venetian diplomat resident at the court, whose witty and graceful texts had already proved pleasing to Steffani. In Handel's duets – he was to write several more during the 1740s – the combination of engaging conversational directness in the vocal exchanges, some effortlessly skilful counterpoint and an overall seasoning of ironic humour is irresistible.

Apart from these pieces and a handful of keyboard works, Handel composed nothing of major importance during his stay in Hanover. The Spanish Succession War had made cost-cutting necessary and the Elector had been forced to reduce his musical establishment, so that there was no opportunity for large-scale performances, either at the opera house or in the Lutheran court chapel. We know nothing of Handel's other duties as kapellmeister or of his execution of them.
The more we examine the circumstantial details surrounding it the more the appointment comes to seem like an inspired stopgap on the part of the Elector, probably assisted by the enthusiasm of his son and daughter-in-law, with whom he was still on good terms. This is borne out by his readiness to allow Handel to leave the court almost as soon as he had taken up his position, with the apparent intention of visiting England.

It may have been during his first Venetian trip in 1708 that the idea of working in London was suggested to him. Mainwaring tells us that the invitation came from Charles Montagu, Duke of Manchester, then Britain's ambassador to Venice, a noted enthusiast for the theatre. The Duke was currently corresponding with the architect and dramatist John Vanbrugh who, having designed and opened the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket, was now on the lookout for singers and musicians. Further encouragement may have been given Handel by Pietro Grimani, Cardinal Vincenzo's kinsman, whom the Serene Republic named in 1710 as its envoy to England. On either of his Venetian visits the composer could also have been presented to other music-loving English noblemen enjoying the city's pleasures on the Grand Tour.

The Elector's readiness to give his admired young kapellmeister a year's leave of absence suggests that there may have been other agenda behind Handel's projected visit to England. Relations between Hanover and the court of St James's were now closer than ever, albeit on an unofficial level, as Queen Anne, after a dozen unsuccessful pregnancies and the deaths of the hydrocephalic Duke of Gloucester in 1700 and of her husband Prince George eight years later, was now seriously concerned with the impending succession crisis. There was, it is true, no love lost between her and the Hanoverians, and the collapse of the Whig ascendancy following the fall from favour of the Marlboroughs easily exacerbated this, but already shrewder politicians were looking towards Hanover with a view to feathering their nests, while at the same time keeping an eye cocked in the direction of Saint Germain and the Pretender. Georg Ludwig was a shrewd enough operator to see how advantageous the presence in London of a talented young German composer might be, especially one with the necessary savoir faire to make himself agreeable to persons of influence in court and government circles. Agostino Steffani's example proved that the careers of musician and diplomat might be successfully combined.
Handel, while neither an ambassador nor a spy, could keep his ear to the ground, passing on whatever information might be useful to the Elector as English politics entered one of its most volatile phases and the issue of Queen Anne's likely successor remained questionable. Politics may thus have swept Handel to London: in one form or another they were to colour his English enterprises for the next thirty years.

Before leaving Germany in the autumn of 1710 he went south to Halle to visit his mother. ‘Her extreme old age . . . tho it promised him but a melancholy interview, rendered this instance of his duty and regard the more necessary,' says Mainwaring. Dorothea Handel was then fifty-nine, even by eighteenth-century standards not excessively old. He visited friends and relatives, ‘among whom his old Master
ZACKAW
was by no means forgot', and then set off for Dusseldorf, where he had been invited some months before by the Elector Palatine Johann Wilhelm. The ubiquitous Steffani had for a time acted as Johann Wilhelm's chief minister and had managed to carry the Palatinate successfully through the toils of the war, now in its ultimate phase. A further recommendation had been made by Ferdinando de' Medici, whose sister Anna Maria was married to the Elector Palatine. Delighted with the young composer, the latter wrote to Florence: ‘I have found in the
virtuoso
Georg Friedrich Handel all those singular talents for which he enjoyed a justified place in Y.R.H.'s favour, whose kind letter he has given me. I am, moreover, Y.R.H.'s debtor for the satisfaction I have received from his several weeks' stay here,' signing himself ‘Your Brother and Servant even in the Grave'. Though Johann Wilhelm was disappointed not to secure Handel's services, ‘he made him a present of a fine set of wrought plate for a desert, and in such a manner as added greatly to its value'. Doubtless this trophy, along with the similar gift made earlier by Prince Ferdinando, was eventually shipped to England with the rest of Handel's baggage, but there is no mention of all this handsome tableware in either his will or the household inventory made after his death.

The years before Handel's arrival in England had seen startling changes in the nature of London's flourishing theatrical life. At the start of the century there were two playhouses open in the city, the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane and the house in Lincoln's Inn Fields. In 1705 a new theatre was built at the bottom of the Haymarket to designs by Sir John Vanbrugh,
on a site now partly occupied by New Zealand House and Her Majesty's Theatre. ‘Van's tott'ring dome', as the contemporary poet Nicholas Rowe called it, was an ambitious affair and the acoustics were generally inadequate: ‘the Tone of a Trumpet, or the Swell of an Eunuch's holding Note, 'tis true, might be sweeten'd by it; but the articulate Sounds of a speaking Voice were drown'd, by the hollow Reverberations of one Word upon another.' This was corrected some four years later, by which time audiences had had ample opportunity to judge both sorts of entertainment in their new setting. Meanwhile opera, for better or worse, had arrived in England and altered the entire spectrum of stage entertainment in the capital.

Its appearance was not altogether a surprise. London audiences had grown increasingly accustomed to musical interpolations in comedy and tragedy performances, and all plays were in any case given with ‘act music' designed to cover scene changes, quieten the spectators and introduce the forthcoming stages of the drama. During the 1690s Purcell had brought out his
ambigus
or ‘semi-operas', plays heavily larded with dramatic music of the highest calibre, though not all the speaking roles were expected to sing as well. The growing number of young noblemen spending long periods on the Continent to complete their education inevitably made for a greater sophistication in the taste of at least one important sector of the metropolitan public. Thus Italian singers and instrumentalists started by degrees to figure in theatrical programmes, and operatic arias were inserted at appropriate moments.