Handel (13 page)

Handel's only essay in five-act structure,
Teseo
is archetypally the work of a young experimenter. Despite the intrinsic delights of individual arias, an uneven concentration of plot and character interests and the overall lack of unity created by the very nature of the libretto hardly make for effective balance. Burney, however, rightly emphasizes the ‘bold and piquant' quality of the overture, ‘which must have been very new at this time to all ears but those accustomed to the cantatas of the elder Scarlatti'. Such novelty is further reflected in a sort of French accent which transcends the opera's origins, with aria and arioso here and there integrated with recitative to form scenes whose continuity recalls Lully and Charpentier.

The opera's outcome is resolved by the comparatively rare appearance in Handel's work of a
dea ex machina
in the shape of the goddess Minerva. Much of the glory of the first night, however, must have been reaped by the orchestra, for whom the score provides a real feast. For most of the instruments (though not, interestingly, the violin) it is a sustained technical display. Nine arias have oboe solos, Agilea's ‘Deh! v'aprite' has exquisitely sensuous writing for flutes over a drone, there are divided violas in Medea's quarrel duet with Egeo and the strings throughout are handled with consummate delicacy and verve.

‘A New Opera, Heroick, all ye Habits new & richer than ye former with 4 New Scenes, & other Decorations & Machines' is Colman's description of
Teseo.
It was plainly Owen Swiney's last desperate shift as theatre manager,
but his attempt to secure the tottering Haymarket finances with a subscription scheme foundered and he had to be content with tickets at half a guinea each. ‘After these Two Nights' (the première was on 10 January) ‘Mr Swiny Brakes & runs away & leaves ye Singers unpaid ye Scenes & Habits also unpaid for. The Singers were in Some confusion but at last concluded to go on with ye operas on their own accounts, & divided ye Gain amongst them.' Swiney's panic is entirely forgivable. He was not a bad fellow, as Handel must have known since they kept in touch after he had absconded to Italy, becoming an entrepreneur in deals with such painters as Canaletto and submitting useful reports to London on the merits of various singers and opera libretti. In 1735 he was allowed to return to England, having changed his name to the more obviously Hibernian MacSwiney, was given a couple of sinecures to keep him going and became the patron of the actress Peg Woffington.

The gallant musicians' collective advertised further performances of ‘the Opera of Theseus composed by Mr Handel' in the
Daily Courant
: ‘the Performers are much concerned that they did not give the Nobility and Gentry all the Satisfaction they could have wished, when they represented it on Wednesday last, having been hindered by some unforeseen Accidents at that time insurmountable.' It is at this point that a far more efficient and determined figure takes centre stage in the running of the Queen's Theatre. Johann Jakob Heidegger had arrived in England from Zurich in 1707 and busied himself in various capacities at the Haymarket, either seeking subscribers for the opera or else acting as a singers' agent. A posthumous biography published in 1779 notes ‘the judicious remarks he made of several defects in the conduct of operas at that time', which ‘established his character as a good critick', and mentions ‘some very magnificent and elegant decorations introduced upon the stage in consequence of his advice'. Owen Swiney had thought well enough of Heidegger to take him into partnership. ‘The Swiss Count', as he became known, may have been a byword for ugliness – one of Handel's librettists later called him ‘the Alpine faun' – but he had built up useful contacts both among ‘persons of quality & Gentry' and with musicians ‘to be had from Italy and other parts'.

When Swiney hotfooted it to the Continent, it was Heidegger who stepped in as manager to check the accounts and detail the payments, but the company's state of affairs was made clear in his dedication to Lord Lonsdale of the libretto of the pasticcio
Ernelinda
given during February,
where he speaks of ‘a time when we labour under so many unhappy circumstances . . . By these means, we may retrieve the reputation of our affairs, and in a short time rival the stage of Italy.' There were revivals of
Rinaldo
and
Teseo
was brought back in May with the bonus of ‘an Entertainment for the Harpsichord, Compos'd by Mr Hendel on purpose for that Day'. Handel got a benefit on the season's last evening, from which, as Heidegger's accounts show, he made £73 10s. During the previous two seasons he had received a total payment of £811 and his overall gains in 1713 were £430. There was nothing specially disappointing about this, but Swiney's absconding and ‘the poor proceedings at the Haymarket' in general offered a bleak prospect for any further operatic ventures in London under the existing system.

It was in this dubious professional climate that Handel's next opera
Lucio Cornelio Silla
received what may have been its only performance. A unique copy of the libretto offers several clues as to the circumstances. The work of Giacomo Rossi, this is dated 2 June 1713 and dedicated, with some effusiveness, to Louis Marie, Duc d'Aumont Rochebaron, the ambassador sent by King Louis XIV of France to begin the peace negotiations. The embassy was essentially a publicity exercise, intended to show Louis's goodwill to England while the process of hammering out the essential details of a projected treaty was going ahead in Paris, Vienna and The Hague. D'Aumont occupied himself with schmoozing fellow diplomats and hosting ‘frequent Entertainments and Balls . . . where a great Concourse of Persons resorting in Masks, he had an Opportunity to sound the Sentiments of many about the Chevalier de St Georges'. The Chevalier was Queen Anne's half-brother James Edward Stuart, currently living outside Paris and hoping to inherit the British throne at her death. Faced with the hostility of London mobs crying ‘No Papist, no Pretender!', the ambassador needed to tread carefully in his meetings with prominent Tories sympathetic to the exiled Prince's interests. When, during a dinner for foreign diplomats, d'Aumont's house caught fire and burned to the ground, he blamed a cabal of Whigs and Huguenots for the blaze, but according to the period's most venomously brilliant memorialist the Duc de Saint-Simon, the ambassador himself organized the conflagration so as to collect insurance.

The suggestion that
Silla
might have been given as part of the Tory–Jacobite propaganda campaign assisted by d'Aumont seems entirely plausible. By now the hate figure for the Tories was John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, whose enterprise as a military strategist was matched by ambition and political unscrupulousness. The fact that his wife Sarah, after being Queen Anne's adored confidante for so many years, had spectacularly fallen from favour made him an easier target for satire. Parallels were offered between the overweening generalissimo and tyrannical opportunists from Roman history such as Sejanus and Julius Caesar. The latter figured as an offstage nemesis for the freedom-loving hero of
Cato
, the hugely successful tragedy by the Whig Joseph Addison, loudly acclaimed by Tories in the audience during its first performances at Drury Lane in April 1713.

Another Roman, the tyrannical dictator Lucius Cornelius Silla, must have seemed a perfect satirical analogue for Marlborough in the eyes of Tory satirists. Handel himself had reason to be grateful to the conquering Duke, who had asked the Hanoverian Elector's permission for him to return to London in 1712, since ‘the ladies had taken so great a fancy to the aforesaid Capellmeister's compositions'. An alertness to the fluctuating political situation, however, and the importance of establishing a network of useful contacts in England meant that Handel was not going to pass up any opportunity to ingratiate himself with a key sector of the political establishment, whatever its apparent hostility to the Elector as potential heir to Queen Anne. Thus
Silla
was probably intended for private performance at the Queen's Theatre, using existing scenery and costumes, to entertain a group of Tory aristocrats, their friends and supporters, with Ambassador d'Aumont among them. Handel's autograph score survives in fragments and he evidently worked at speed, ignoring opportunities for spectacle offered by Rossi's text and hurrying the work, short enough already, towards a breathless close.

The drama, based on incidents in the life of Silla, is, to say the least, unsatisfactory. Much of the dictator's time is spent in making inept sexual assaults on Celia, during which he is intercepted by his wife Metella, and on Flavia, who is temporarily saved by the intervention of four ghosts who replace Silla's statue with a cypress tree, only to be groped at once again and rescued finally by Lepido with a drawn sword (though Silla promptly has him arrested). None of the dramatis personae is given time in which to develop,
though Handel shows his unrivalled ability to display complete empathy with his characters in numbers such as Claudio's tiny eighteen-bar aria as he is about to be thrown into a cage full of wild beasts or in the central duet in which Flavia and Lepido declare their love for one another. The music for the opening triumph scene, with Silla being drawn in a chariot by black slaves to the sound of
stromenti militari
, has disappeared (if it ever existed) and a storm at sea, during which the eponymous hero swims to safety, exists merely as a stage direction between two bars of recitative.

The audience for
Silla
almost certainly included an ardent young Handel enthusiast in the shape of Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington. Having succeeded at the age of nine to his father's title and considerable wealth, he was now, at eighteen, establishing himself as a precocious arbiter of taste and sophistication in London society. It was as Burlington's guest that Handel now lived for the next three or four years. The Earl's anxiety to shine as a ‘virtuoso' – the name given in Augustan England to anyone with wide aesthetic and scientific interests – made him lavish of hospitality to artists and men of letters. The latter included Alexander Pope, who addressed one of his ‘Moral Essays' to Burlington, and John Arbuthnot, Queen Anne's doctor, as well as the feckless but charming John Gay who, having overstayed his welcome and fallen ill into the bargain, was once discovered by Arbuthnot, on a visit to the Earl, gnawing his poultice for sustenance.

In happier times Gay brought Burlington House into his
Trivia: or the Art of Walking the Streets of London
:

Though Burlington, after an Italian tour the following year, was instrumental in cultivating a taste for Bononcini, Handel's competitor at the Haymarket, his support for the composer remained constant. Even though he later patronized a rival opera initiative, he continued to buy boxes for himself, his family and friends at successive Handel oratorio performances throughout the 1740s.

Their relationship during this period seems not to have been the traditional one of patron and house musician, and Handel was evidently under no obligation to supply the Earl with new compositions. The move to Piccadilly was doubtless a step up from the town residence of Mr Andrews of Barn Elms, Surrey, where he stayed during his first London visit. Burlington House, in which, according to an unsubstantiated tradition, he occupied a room looking out on to grounds soon to be laid out as Cork Street, Old Burlington Street and Burlington Gardens, offered a congenial atmosphere in which to complete his next opera,
Amadigi di Gaula
, brought out on 25 May 1715 (Heidegger's dedication to the Earl notes that ‘this Opera more immediately claims Your Protection, as it is compos'd in Your own Family').

The author of the actual Italian text remains unknown, but since the source is yet another French
tragédie lyrique
, Houdar de la Motte's
Amadis de Grèce
, originally set by André Destouches and first performed in 1699, the adaptation was probably the work of Nicola Haym. Once again magic, romance and the figure of a jealous sorceress play their part, and Heidegger was evidently looking to the trusted formulas of
Rinaldo
and
Teseo
to shore up the uncertain fortunes of the King's Theatre. Leading the cast (with five characters, the smallest of any Handel opera) was Elisabetta Pilotti, repeating her triumphs as Armida and Medea in the role of the enchantress Melissa, but the work met with an unexpected check to success in the outbreak of the Jacobite rising in Scotland during the summer of 1715. ‘No Opera performed since ye 23 July, ye Rebellion of ye Tories and Papists being ye cause,' noted
Colman's Opera Register
, ‘– ye King and Court not liking to go into such Crowds these troublesom times.' Engaged in quelling the Old Pretender's ill-starred attempt to recover his father's kingdom were soldiers such as John, Duke of Argyle and Generals Wade and Dormer, who were later to be associated with Handel's musical ventures, while at Hamburg Mattheson, in his capacity as secretary to the English Resident, was busy searching Scottish ships for suspect cargo.
Amadigi
was thus not revived until the following year and given further performances in 1717, after which it was not heard again until the present century and remained among comparatively few Handel operas whose ‘favourite songs' were never published.

Such neglect is unjust,
for though
Amadigi
is no masterpiece it represents a more cohesive attempt than
Teseo
to reconcile French and Italian styles in its dramatic layout, and the pronounced Gallic accents of Handel's music often have a more than simply coincidental appropriateness. The plot, based on the sort of old Spanish knightly romance beloved of Don Quixote, involving the machinations of Dardano and Melissa to frustrate the union of Amadigi with Princess Oriana, offers little chance for subtle characterization but plenty of occasion for colourful alternations of mood. Handel was again able to flourish his orchestral palette to powerful effect in numbers featuring solo trumpet, oboe, recorders and bassoons. The work is tonally dominated by flat keys, to the extent that from the overture to the end of the first act only two out of thirteen numbers break with this, and C minor, G minor, B flat and E flat major continue preponderant in Acts II and III.