Handel (18 page)

All that was now to change. King George would guarantee an annual bounty, over a seven-year period, of £1,000, and each shareholder would receive one vote, with three going to those prepared to match the royal subscription. The company would be chaired by the Lord Chamberlain, Thomas, Duke of Newcastle, with an elected deputy governor and board of directors meeting once a month.
Calls on the subscribers, each of whom held a silver ticket, would pay the costs of performance, including those of singers, dancers, sets and costumes. The author of the proposal noted, with an optimism entirely justifiable at this stage, that ‘it is presumed among so many Gentlemen Lovers of Musick there will be Persons of Honour found who will have Leisure and Inclination enough to afford a little of their time for the Management or at least Supervising the Affairs of the Society'.

The list of ‘Persons of Honour' filled up almost too quickly. Seventeen dukes, six duchesses, twenty-eight earls and ten countesses headed the roster, together with their extended family members, mainly, if not exclusively, representing the cream of that Whig political ascendancy established by the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian succession. Given the King's punctiliousness over scrutinizing promotions in the army and the appointment of senior Anglican clergy, it is likely that he was allowed to vet the subscribers, though no evidence of deliberate weeding out on political grounds has yet emerged. Burlington and Chandos were of course prominent in the list (with the Duke of Newcastle they were the sole £1,000 subscribers) and so were Arbuthnot, Bothmer, George's Hanoverian aide, and the influential figure of James Craggs. Notable too is the preponderance of military men. Here are the veterans of Marlborough's campaigns, Charles Cadogan and James, Lord Limerick, together with several destined to later fame, General Guise, hero of Admiral Vernon's Cartagena expedition and, like Handel, an enthusiast for painting, George Wade, fresh from his successful assault on Vigo and soon to impose order on the fractious Highlanders, and Thomas Gage, soldier father of an even more illustrious son. These warriors, as much as the aristocratic grand tourists, may have had their share in the choice of subject matter for the operas presented. Of the fourteen Handel wrote for the 1721–8 Academy seasons, only one,
Flavio
, lacks a bellicose context for its plot, and even the intensely private dramatic situations at the heart of
Rodelinda
and
Tamerlano
have begun as the consequences of warfare.

News of the Academy's preparations seems to have got about in the first months of 1719, when the
Original Weekly Journal
prematurely announced that ‘Mr Hendel, a famous Master of Music, is gone beyond the Sea, by Order of his Majesty, to Collect a Company of the choicest Singers in Europe,
for the Opera in the Hay-Market'. Handel had in fact not yet set out, having written the day before to his brother-in-law Michael Dietrich Michaelsen at Halle, complaining of being ‘kept here by affairs of the greatest moment, on which (I venture to say) all my fortunes depend'. The letter, written in courtly French, reveals that he had intended to return to Halle, where his sister Dorothea had died in the July of the previous year. Someone who obviously enjoyed giving presents, he had sent some pewter to Michaelsen which had got held up at Magdeburg, and this detail, mingled with anxiety for news of his mother and the rest of the family, lends a note of glum impatience to the letter.

Three days afterwards he wrote to Mattheson, with whom he still kept in touch, on the subjects of solmization (the system of linking individual notes to a series of syllables, do re mi et cetera) and the Greek modes. His admirably concise statements on these two subjects (dear to the heart of Pepusch, incidentally) have an absence of stuffiness and a general practicality typical of Handel as a composer. ‘I do not mean to argue', he writes, ‘that solmization is of no practical use whatever, but as one can acquire the same knowledge in far less time by the method in use at present with such success, I see no point in not adopting the way which leads with greater ease and in less time to the proposed goal.' Of the Greek modes he says, ‘Knowledge of them is no doubt necessary for those who wish to study and execute ancient music composed according to these modes; but as we have been liberated from the narrow limits of ancient music, I cannot see of what use the Greek modes can be to modern music.' Handel was never so ignorant or improvident as to scorn assistance from the music of the past, as his oratorios make plain, but pedantic worship of the antique for its own sake was not for him.

At length, during May of that year, he was able to leave for the Continent to fulfil the special orders given in a warrant issued by Newcastle on the Academy's behalf, directing him ‘forthwith to repair to Italy Germany or such other Place or Places as you shall think proper, there to make Contracts with such Singer or Singers as you shall judge fit to perform on the English Stage'. He was bidden to keep in touch with the board and to tell them of any outstanding vocal discoveries and ‘upon what Terms he or She may be had'. And above all ‘Mr Hendel' was to ‘engage Senezino as soon as possible to Serve the said Company and for as many Years as may be'.

The Academy was resolved to begin in the grandest possible style. Senesino (‘the little Sienese' – this had no connexion with his stature) was the name given to Francesco Bernardi, the greatest castrato of the decade and destined to create many of Handel's most taxing operatic roles. Born in Siena about 1680, he made a name for himself in Venice, less, perhaps, as a stage presence (his features had that porcine effeminacy common to so many eunuchs) or for his musicianship than as the owner of a magnificently resonant voice, capable of a considerable expressive range. The Neapolitan impresario, Count Zambeccari, says of him: ‘Senesino continues to comport himself badly enough; he stands like a statue, and when occasionally he does make a gesture, he makes one directly the opposite of what is wanted,' but audiences in Venice and Vienna seem generally to have been delighted, and his appearance at the Saxon court opera at Dresden in 1719 was on the crest of a wave of recent Italian successes.

It was there that Handel went, by way of Dusseldorf and Halle for a visit to his family – narrowly missing, it is said, a meeting with Bach, one of the great ‘might-have-beens' of musical history. Dresden itself was
en fête
in celebration of the forthcoming marriage of the Electoral Prince of Saxony to Archduchess Maria Josepha of Austria. There were performances by troupes of French and Italian comedians, firework displays, balls, masquerades and hunting parties, and if Handel needed any further inducement to stay on, it was offered by the presence of his old San Giovanni Grisostomo associates, Antonio Lotti and his wife Santa Stella.

Teofane
, the opera commissioned by Lotti for the festivities, was to make enough of an impression for Handel to take home the libretto and use it for his fourth Academy opera,
Ottone
. Besides Senesino and the castrato Berselli, both to be engaged for London, the
Teofane
cast included another Italian friend, Margherita Durastanti. She was signed up for an eighteen-month contract at £1,600 and Senesino's price was £2,000. He and the other stars whom the Academy had in its sights proved harder to get hold of, possibly because someone at the Saxon court realized that Handel was not there purely for the sake of visiting the Lottis and enjoying the electoral wedding celebrations. It was not until the following year that the singers became available,
after a quarrel with the Elector resulted in their dismissal.

Lingering at Dresden, Handel entertained the court with his keyboard playing and was the subject of a slightly disgruntled letter from Count Jacob Heinrich Flemming, former Saxon minister to London, writing to King George's mistress, Melusine von der Schulenburg: ‘I hoped to see Mr Hendel, and intended to speak to him in laudatory terms of you, but there was no opportunity. I made use of your name to persuade him to call on me, but either he was not at his lodgings or else he was ill. It seems to me that he is a little mad; however, he should not behave to me in that way, as I am a musician – that is, by inclination . . .'

Flemming would not be the last to comment on the composer's strong dash of eccentricity. The Academy directors, nevertheless, were satisfied with the way things were going, and they had now been joined by the Duke of Montague, by the indispensable Heidegger, and by another musical soldier, Colonel John Blathwayt who, as a pupil of Pasquini and Corelli and a regular attender at Cardinal Ottoboni's Roman concerts, may have made Handel's acquaintance during the spring and summer of 1707. The only sticking point in the negotiations was Senesino, whose initial failure to reach an agreement with Handel augured badly for their subsequent rapport. At a meeting on 30 November the directors, determined to procure the castrato's services, asked the Modenese resident in London, Giuseppe Riva, Senesino's personal friend, to step in.

In constant touch with leading Italian cultural figures of the day, Riva was passionately concerned to promote an Italian interest at the Haymarket. As well as arranging with Senesino ‘to stay till the End of May on the most reasonable terms he can get him', he may have been influential in laying the ground for the arrival of the illustrious figure of Giovanni Bononcini, to whom, as ‘Seignr. Bona Cini', the Academy, at the same November meeting, resolved to apply. Meanwhile Johann Jakob Heidegger, as impresario of the King's Theatre, stood by to give practical advice on details of house management and was asked to contact the Venetian composer Giovanni Porta. Pope was commissioned to furnish ‘a Seal with a Suitable Motto to it' for the Academy's documents and Arbuthnot undertook to negotiate the terms of a three-year contract with the soprano Anastasia Robinson.
Handel himself was to be summoned home from Germany and made ‘Master of the Orchester with a Sallary'.

The orchestra he assembled during the early months of 1720 numbered around thirty-two performers, the best available in London at the time. Nicola Haym appears as a cellist alongside Filippo Amadei, who would soon figure as a composer for the academy. Violinists included the Castrucci brothers, Prospero and Pietro, whom Handel had met in Rome, and Johan Helmich Roman, a talented young Swede who subsequently put his London experience to good use as a court composer, very much under Handel's influence, in his native Stockholm. Among the oboists we find John Festing, member of a German musical family settled in England, and as principal trumpeter, John Baptist Grano, whose diary written during his spell in a debtors' prison throws interesting light on the contemporary musical world. The whole band was probably distributed as six first violins, five second violins, two violas, six cellos, one double bass, four oboes, four bassoons, one trumpet, two harpsichords and a theorbo.

Pope did not deliver his seal and motto, but Heidegger had more luck in securing the services of Giovanni Porta, already in London as a household musician to the Duke of Wharton. The première of his
Numitore
, scheduled for March 1720, took place in April owing to competition from a company of French comedians popular with the court. Though it only ran for five nights, the opera clearly impressed Handel, who did not disdain to quote from it in
Samson
and
Solomon
some twenty years later. Burney describes Porta as ‘one of the most able masters of his time; uniting learning with invention and fire', but
Numitore
was his sole composition for the Academy.

The opera's librettist was Paolo Antonio Rolli, who, with Nicola Francesco Haym, was one of the Haymarket's two theatre poets, and a word or two may be said here about each. Neither was known exclusively as a versifier, though Rolli's translation of
Paradise Lost
, adapted for Catholic readers, won him fame. In his own right, as the author of highly polished odes and epigrams, and as a brilliant metrist, he ranks as the best Italian poet in the generation immediately preceding Metastasio. Haym, infinitely the less troublesome of the pair (though ready to describe himself as ‘not of inferior merit to any of my Profession now in England, particularly of ye Foreigners') was born in Rome,
the son of a peripatetic German musician. He began his career as a cellist, employed on several occasions by Cardinal Ottoboni, and in 1699, aged twenty, he journeyed to London in the suite of Wriothesley Russell, Duke of Bedford, who had engaged him while on the Grand Tour. He was given a handsome apartment in Bedford's Bloomsbury house and in 1715, four years after the Duke died, ‘Mr Hyems that plays upon the Base viol' entered the service of Lord Carnarvon. When still in Rome he had developed a talent for composing oratorios and cantatas. Now, though a Catholic, he was ready to furnish anthems for Carnarvon's services at St Lawrence, Whitchurch, as well as writing chamber music for the Cannons players. In London Haym made himself a reputation as an antiquarian, giving advice on collecting and connoisseurship, and publishing editions of classic Italian poets.

Less eager to adapt to London society, Paolo Rolli was even more zealous than Nicola Haym in wanting to promote Italian culture in England. Among cultivated Italians in general during this period there was a powerful sense of patriotism, which interestingly anticipated the political nationalism of the Risorgimento during the following century. London's Italian community was expanding and a sizeable number of Rolli's compatriots were attached, whether as performers or simply as enthusiastic hangers-on, to the King's Theatre in the Haymarket. Rolli himself, with all his accomplishments, found it easy to mingle in metropolitan polite society, giving advice on matters of taste, while at the same time revelling in the atmosphere of backstage gossip and intrigue at the opera house.

His dislike of Handel has perhaps been exaggerated by writers on the composer, but it is hard to warm to Rolli's personality as it emerges from the composite picture formed by evidence from contemporary letters and diaries. Sly, mischief-making and determined to exploit the naïve Italophilia of his English patrons, whom he and his compatriots generally despised, he was not so much inimical to Handel as profoundly indifferent to his genius or his achievements. The circle of which he formed a part, which included Giuseppe Riva and Giovanni Giacomo Zamboni, a London agent for various German princes, concerned itself solely with the success or failure of Italian musicians and its correspondence during the 1720s is resoundingly empty of all but a handful of references to a composer who,
by the end of the decade, would dominate the London musical scene.