Handel (19 page)

It requires no great degree of cynical penetration to understand why the works based on texts supplied by Rolli, operas such as
Alessandro
and
Riccardo Primo
, should be manifestly less successful than Haym's. Excellent poet though he was, Rolli disdained to exercise his real gifts in devising the Academy libretti. As he later implied in one of his epigrams, the librettist's task wasn't really worth the effort: ‘I knock up old dramas in a new style and tack on dedications . . . if the directors lose out on them, it's the fault of the singers, since the libretto doesn't count. A good drama or a bad one, what does it matter so long as it's cheap?' Haym, though not noted for his poetic gifts, was much more alert than Rolli to the theatrical qualities of a lyric drama. His collaboration with Handel was sympathetic enough to suggest that the two men were friends as well as professional associates. Certainly Haym's adaptations for Handel, such as
Rodelinda
,
Tamerlano
and
Giulio Cesare
, are notably more successful artistically than those of Paolo Rolli.

None of the fourteen operas composed for the first phase of the Royal Academy's existence makes use of an original text. It is surprisingly difficult for our modern critical sensibility to adjust itself to the late Baroque notion of opera as an inherently elastic medium, capable of being reshaped according to the demands of singers, audiences and composers or adapted to the propagandistic requirements of a ruling dynasty. Libretti were not sacred texts, specifically prepared for setting by a single hand and the intellectual property of their authors. A lyric drama was a palimpsest, scored over by numerous pens and given a wide variety of musical treatments. In the process arias could be rewritten, substituted or allotted to other characters, recitatives might similarly be shuffled or cut, and whole scenes or plot interests jettisoned meanwhile.

Copies of these libretti (in London a parallel English verse translation was included) could be purchased by the audience and thus composers and poets built up their own supplies for future use. Hence some of the Academy texts were originally designed for operas by composers Handel is known to have encountered personally, such as Antonio Lotti and Domenico Scarlatti, while another possible acquaintance, Antonio Salvi, was the author of the dramas on which
Rodelinda
and
Scipione
were based.
With the exception of
Siroe
which, though only two years old when Handel wrote his setting of it, had already been given five operatic treatments (including versions by Vivaldi and Porpora) the others were old-fangled Venetian texts, needing a general overhaul before presentation to a 1720s London audience.

Siroe
's original poet was the brilliant young Pietro Trapassi, always known as Metastasio from his own Hellenized version of his surname. It was he who had furthered the process, begun in Venice by Apostolo Zeno, of giving opera seria an artistic integrity, which brought it more obviously into line with the ideals of French neoclassical tragedy in the Racinian manner, then the most widely admired dramatic form in Europe. Even before Zeno and Metastasio appeared on the scene, a move reflecting the current obsession with specific ‘kinds' or genres in art had started towards separating out the mixture of narrative elements in Italian opera. Widow Twankey nurses and waggish lackeys of the sort found in early Venetian musical theatre were either removed to the buffo interludes from which full-scale comedies would soon develop, or else disappeared altogether. The number of plot interests and scene changes was cut down, the proportion of arias was reduced, choral numbers vanished almost totally and the formal aspects of the genre became heavily conventional. In the first great age of the singer as vocal acrobat, the aria, an offloading of emotions produced by moments dramatized in recitative, became the perfect means of displaying colour and technical agility, and the exit convention, whereby a character quitted the stage at the end of the piece, inviting applause to bring him back, was a standard feature of opera seria, conditioning the layout of the drama. There were few ensembles (caprice and mutual resentment among Italian singing stars was, then as now, taken for granted) but the opera nearly always ended with a coro from all the characters left alive at the end.

The poetry of the lyric dramas is of an extreme artificiality, yet to those interested in this type of opera the high-flown clichés soon become like old friends. As scarcely anybody is below aristocratic rank, the discourse is invariably refined and a spade never gets called a spade. In essence the Italian is the same literary idiolect that went on being used until the mid-nineteenth century, and it is interesting to hear Violetta, Leonora or the Duke of Mantua resorting to the same tortured syntax and ballooning periphrasis as we hear from the lips of Cleopatra, Alceste or Grimoaldo.
In Baroque Opera simile is used frequently as an aid to the composer, and the images are nearly always extracted from the same limited stock, ships in a storm or arriving in harbour, swallows far from their nests, bewildered butterflies, benighted pilgrims and sturdy oak trees. Obvious attempts are made to vary mood, since singers expected to display their talents in expressing a wide range of emotions.

Like the French neo-classical tragedies on which they are so often based, the plots of opera seria are heavily involved with presenting stories and situations from the past in terms that would be immediately recognizable to the audience. However encrusted with the trappings of paganism and references to the ancient historians, the world of each opera is that of a Baroque court, and the conflicts presented smack as much of the Duc de Saint-Simon, Madame de Sévigné or the Comte de Grammont as they do of Tacitus and Livy. One of Antonio Salvi's texts, ultimately set by Handel as
Berenice
, was originally called ‘The Contests of Love and Politics', a title that effectively sums up the dilemma at the core of all such dramas. Though the audience may not always have followed the libretto closely throughout, we know that this kind of theatre, whether at Versailles or at Venice, was regarded as offering effective comment on contemporary society, and thus a visit to the opera was never (at any rate in theory) a mere escape to an idealized world. In London the noble subscribers to the Academy seem specifically to have demanded this kind of dynastic and historical drama, as opposed to the magic or pastoral operas popular during the previous decade.

The ultimate success of opera seria, however, depended upon the tension between the world of illusion created by the stage picture and the affective realism produced by the composer and the librettist. To this end the scenes were changed in full view of the audience, the smooth magic of transformation being assisted by the arrangement of flats in grooves on either side of the stage and backdrops that could be quickly drawn up to reveal the new scene in a trice. This enchantment was further emphasized by the whole nature of eighteenth-century scenic design with its stress on complexity and apparently unlimited perspective, intended to give the spectator something for his fancy continually to dwell upon. As Stefano Arteaga, among the most lucid of eighteenth-century commentators on the genre, described it: ‘The secret . . . is to present objects in such a way that the imagination does not end at the same point as the senses,
so that there is always something left for the audience to imagine beyond what the eye can see and the ear can hear.'

Handel remained constant to this type of opera throughout his career and touches of it permeate practically everything else he wrote (
Messiah
, for example, contained a number of operatic features, including a duet placed just before the closing numbers). The newer Venetian manner, in which heavily contrapuntal textures are abandoned in favour of lightly moving syncopated melodies over drumbeat bases, turns up in
Agrippina
and
Il Pastor Fido
, and Handel shows himself a past master of it throughout his subsequent operas. The most eclectic of all the great composers, he took what he wanted from an immense range of musical styles and made it his own, but his thirty-eight operas testify to his belief in the validity of opera seria as an art form.

His earliest Academy opera,
Radamisto
, receiving its first performance on 27 April 1720 at the King's Theatre, Haymarket, is an obvious statement of intent on the part of both the composer and the opera management. Its dramatic effectiveness and the consistency of its musical characterization and overall design make it one of the best operas he ever wrote. There is every indication that Handel had taken full advantage of his stay at Dresden to absorb newer Italian styles and the result is a work that establishes a standard hitherto undreamt of in English theatrical music, one which reflects most, if not all, of the features typifying his methods and ideas in the operas of the so-called ‘Academy' period.

The libretto is an adaptation, probably by Nicola Haym, of
L'amor tirannico
by the Neapolitan poet Sebastiano Bianciardi under his pen-name of Domenico Lalli, originally set by Francesco Gasparini in 1710 for Venice's Teatro Cassiano. Based on an episode from Tacitus's
Annals
, its ultimate source was a French tragedy, Georges de Scudery's
L'amour tyrannique
, produced in Paris in 1638. Haym, using a Florentine version of Lalli's text, replaced several of the arias and slightly diminished the contribution made by certain of the characters, creating in the process a drama of baffled intimacy and fatal misapprehension, which has one of the most gripping plots in any Handel opera. The composer would provide a radically altered edition of
Radamisto
for a revival at the end of the year, but the story in both versions remains fundamentally the same.
Radamisto, prince of Thrace,
^*(i)
is attacked by his brother-in-law Tiridate, King of Armenia, who desires Radamisto's wife Zenobia: Tiridate's queen, Polissena, long-suffering but ultimately provoked beyond endurance, begins with a hopeless yearning for her fickle husband, which finally turns to righteous fury when she sees Radamisto condemned to execution.

Like Verdi, whom as a creative personality he so frequently resembles, Handel was clearly drawn by certain types of story and seems to have had a special fondness for that favourite Baroque figure, the heroine
in extremis.
With such characters he could exercise his penchant for the tender-pathetic, that quality which relates him so strongly to the preromantic sentimentalism of the age of Ossian and Werther, the era immediately following his own. Zenobia and Radamisto, the sundered husband and wife, are portrayed, like Rodelinda and Bertarido five years later, with the mature awareness of a relationship intense enough to survive the gravest emotional shocks. From the stirring flourishes of the overture till the leisured close in Handel's longest vaudeville finale, there is hardly a dull moment in the piece. The musical characterization builds on the sturdiness of the text, its dramatis personae firmly outlined in moods and aspirations, and further established for us, in various cases, through their association with a particular key.

One of the most interesting of the principals is Polissena, who begins the opera with the majestic wretchedness of ‘Sommi Dei'. The librettist's treatment of her is noteworthy in that she makes the briefest of appearances in Act II in order, as it seems, to have something to sing (in this case an attractive G minor aria in triplet rhythms). Handel clearly felt that, notwithstanding the distinction of her music in the first version, there was not enough for her to do and gave Maddalena Salvai, who sang in the December revival, a scene to open Act III, transferring, in the process, one of Zenobia's most moving utterances. Tiridate's young brother Fraarte also has some engaging music, including ‘Mirerò quel vago volto' in Act I, with its ravishing flattened third in the vocal part's opening phrase and, even if not altogether necessary to the story, makes a character of real substance, foreshadowing Cherubino in his naïve ardour.
The summit of Handel's achievement in this masterly opening to the first phase of his operatic maturity is reached in Radamisto's anguished invocation to the wife he supposes dead, ‘Ombra cara', which remained a personal favourite among the composer's own works. Burney says of it: ‘. . . too much praise cannot be given to that song, in which, though the composition is so artful, an inverted chromatic imitation being carried on in the accompaniments, yet the cantilena is simply pathetic throughout. I remember hearing Reginelli sing this air at the opera in 1747, among some light Italian songs of that period, and it seems the language of philosophy and science, and the rest the frivolous jargon of fops and triflers.'

After the first night of
Radamisto
Lady Cowper, in the suite of the Princess of Wales, noted laconically in her diary: ‘At Night,
Radamistus
, a fine opera of Handel's Making. The
King
there with his Ladies. The
Prince
in his Stage-box. Great Crowd.' Handel had taken the uncommon step of dedicating the libretto in person to the King, and George's general enthusiasm for the Academy project is shown by Handel's implication, in his brief dedicatory epistle, that the King had already heard and approved the music. There was indeed a great crowd at the performance, which started at half past six. ‘In so splendid and fashionable an assembly of ladies (to the excellence of their taste we must impute it) there was no shadow of form, or ceremony, scarce indeed any appearance of order or regularity, politeness or decency. Many, who had forc'd their way into the house with an impetuosity but ill suited to their rank and sex, actually fainted through the excessive heat and closeness of it. Several gentlemen were turned back, who had offered forty shillings for a seat in the gallery, after having despaired of getting any in the pit or boxes.'

The cast was an English and Italian mixture, with Durastanti as Radamisto, Anastasia Robinson as Zenobia, the soprano Benedetto Baldassari as Fraarte, and that interesting figure Alexander Gordon as the tenor Tiridate. Gordon's remarkable career had begun in the theatres of southern Italy; he was later to abandon singing for connoisseurship and his final incarnation was as secretary to the governor of South Carolina, where he died a prosperous landowner. Known as ‘Singing Sandie', he was clearly well thought of by Handel, but his threat to jump on the harpsichord when irritated by the composer's accompaniments drew the stinging retort: ‘Oh, let me know when you will do that and I will advertise it;
for I am sure more people will come to see you jump than to hear you sing.'