Handel (20 page)

The first version of
Radamisto
featured ballet numbers, with danced entractes at the close of Acts I and II, and three further items after the opera's final coro. These were all dispensed with for the revival on 28 December. The sole remnant of the original casting was the bass Lagarde in the minor role of King Farasmane, the hero's father. By this time Senesino had arrived to take over as Radamisto, Durastanti became Zenobia, and Tiridate was given to Giuseppe Maria Boschi, Handel's bass of earlier days, now firmly instated as the roarer and blusterer of the Academy stage. No wonder the young Mary Pendarves, better known to us as the Mrs Delany she later became, could write to her sister Ann Granville that ‘the stage was never so well served as it is now, there is not one indifferent voice, they are all Italians'.

Things looked auspicious enough for Handel. The King granted him a fourteen-year copyright and on the strength of this Richard Meares published a finely engraved edition of
Radamisto
, personally supervised by the composer. But the artistic direction of the Haymarket, as he must already have guessed, was unlikely to offer a smooth ride. Almost at once the cultural chauvinism of the Italians began to declare itself. Giuseppe Riva disliked
Radamisto
for its failure, in his view, to touch the heart, attributing its success to English ignorance. ‘In the land of the blind, blessed are the one-eyed,' he sardonically observed in a letter to Agostino Steffani. Rolli meanwhile directed his scorn at Durastanti, of whom he had earlier remarked, ‘Oh, what a bad choice for England! I won't discuss her singing, but she is an elephant.' The singer herself, having arrived in London with her husband the impresario and connoisseur Casimiro Avelloni, was pregnant, to the annoyance of the directors, and Bononcini, run to ground in Rome by Lord Burlington, was taking his time to arrive, but in September Senesino at last set foot in England. ‘Signor Senesino, the famous eunuch, has arrived,' said
Applebee's Weekly Journal
, ‘and it is said that the company allows him two thousand guineas for the season.' Rolli, though he hurried to find him lodgings in a house near Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square) and judged him ‘well-mannered, well-read, extremely kind and endowed with the noblest sentiments', also thought him ‘a noisy busybody and certainly not the soul of discretion', but he had obviously marked Senesino down as a potential ally in backstage plots.

Senesino's relations with Handel began as they meant to go on.
Salvai, the new Polissena for the
Radamisto
revival, had brought with her Girolamo Polani whom, as composer for the San Fantin and Sant'Angelo theatres, Handel must already have known in Venice. Handel's idea was apparently to employ him as an assistant at the opera, working as conductor and adaptor of Orlandini's
Amore e Maesta
, a recent Florentine success. Rolli was set to tinker with the libretto, junking much of the recitative and adding fresh arias for Senesino, who naturally wanted new music for them. Heidegger and Senesino clashed over the professional involvement of Polani, a board meeting was held and the directors, particularly Blathwayt and Arbuthnot, were at pains to appease their newest star acquisition, while Rolli hovered in the background, mingling diplomacy with guile. The disputed opera eventually reached the stage the following February as
Arsace
, with additional music by the theatre's cellist Filippo Amadei, the discomfited Polani having quit the field.

The Academy's triumph seemed assured by the arrival that autumn of Giovanni Bononcini. This admired Italian master, a consummate operatic professional with a gift for agreeable melody, was hardly the
petit-maître
whom some of Handel's biographers have chosen to portray. From a family of musicians (his father Giovanni Maria was a distinguished composer) he quickly became popular throughout Italy as a master of both opera and oratorio. The fluency and tunefulness of his aria style adapted themselves easily to the changing taste of early eighteenth-century audiences, but success had made him conceited and arrogant. A native Modenese, he had trained in Bologna under Giovanni Paolo Colonna, an influential figure in the rich musical tradition centred on the Accademia Filarmonica and the basilica of San Petronio. After a spell as a cellist and composer at Rome he went to Vienna to furnish operas for the court for nearly sixteen years. It was during a second Roman period, beginning in 1713, that Bononcini made the acquaintance of Paolo Antonio Rolli, already well known as an Arcadian poet, and the pair collaborated on the opera
Astarto
for the newly reopened Teatro Capranica. When the work was revived in 1719 one of those present at rehearsals was the Earl of Burlington, then on his second Italian tour, and it was his invitation that brought Bononcini to London. Rolli made Burlington the dedicatee of his published libretto for a new version of
Astarto
, which opened the Academy's second season on 19 November 1720.

Astarto
was an instant success, with twenty performances in all, and the Academy audience took Bononcini to its heart. ‘In two words,' wrote Giuseppe Riva to Agostino Steffani, ‘this is music which goes directly to the heart, without too many twists and turns . . . Certain people, enchanted with Handel, would like to say something against it, but they find it hard to swim against the stream.' The presence of a genuinely talented composer of international repute, with the psychological advantage, among the singers, musicians and theatrical hangers-on, of being Italian, must have given Handel considerable pause. He was never one easily ‘to bear a kinsman near the throne'. Composers are scarcely more gracious than any other artists towards their peers and one of his less attractive characteristics was a resentment of anybody who threatened to challenge him on his own ground. Hardly a single instance exists of him having a kind word to say about any of the considerable native talents, Maurice Greene, John Stanley, William Boyce and others, flourishing in London during his lifetime. Even Thomas Augustine Arne, the most genuinely accomplished English musician of the mid-eighteenth century, elicited nothing from Handel in the way of articulate approbation. As for foreign-born masters, it was all very well to admire Telemann or Rameau from a distance, but the presence of Bononcini on his very doorstep was enough to raise the hackles of the habitually competitive Saxon, though there is no direct evidence of any open hostility on his part.

Perhaps some awareness of a potential rivalry between the two composers may have prompted one of the Academy's patrons to suggest that the next new opera on the seasonal programme should be set by the pair of them, with the cellist Filippo Amadei providing the remaining act of the three. There is a possibility that the directors, several of whom were racing men, may have fancied the notion of backing one musician against another, but the fondness of Baroque composers for competition (witness, for example, Bach and the wretched Louis Marchand) makes it more likely that either Handel or Bononcini or both first conceived the project, calling in Amadei to do the first act, whose beauties would easily be forgotten once the two giants took the field.

The subject chosen (with Rolli as librettist) was one on which Bononcini had already composed two operas, the story of Romans against Etruscans in the days of the early republic. Act I concerns ‘How Horatius Kept the Bridge', Act II Mutius Scevola's baffled assassination attempt on Lars Porsenna and Act III the flight of Cloelia and the female hostages.
It sounds almost too pious to say that Handel's setting of the final act is better than Amadei in the first and Bononcini in the second, but such indeed is the case. Amadei's music is short-breathed, naïve and rather old-fashioned, and Bononcini's act, while sensitive, idiomatic and vivid at such moments as Mutius's burning of his hand, demonstrates his incapacity to sustain melodic lines for long enough to give them an interesting shape. Gratifyingly placed for the singers though these arias are, and sensuously pretty though many of them may be, it is Handel's music that demands more serious attention.

Everything about Act III of
Muzio Scevola
suggests a determined effort by the composer to establish his supremacy and to leave the audience suitably impressed. The whole act is permeated by an attention to details of colour and balance which, since like the others it has its own overture, gives it a disproportionate grandeur of design. The shop window aspect of the work is sustained throughout by Handel's evident desire to contrast his various singers as sharply as possible. Thus Boschi's richly rewarding aria, as Porsenna enjoining the unpleasant moments to fly faster than the winds, with its turbulent cellos reinforced by bassoons (the middle section, coloured by the intrusion of a solitary oboe, is a restatement of the old
Octavia
motif ) is followed by an expressive adagio intended to show Senesino in his most ingratiatingly pathetic vein. The act, what is more, contains a pair of duets, one in a jubilant 12/8 and the other in a languishing 3/4, separated by an extensive recitative. The structure in each is carefully differentiated, with the voices in the first (for Berselli and Robinson) only coming together after twelve-bar solos, and those in the second (for Senesino and Durastanti) altogether more closely blended.

Muzio Scevola
's première took place on 15 April 1721, with a further nine performances during the season. Rolli addressed a fulsome dedication to the King, declaring that ‘liberty would have gone to ground in woods and cottages if she had not found a glorious refuge in Your Majesty's happy realms . . . Compare this kingdom to the Roman republic and see in how many respects both are alike, whether in the glory of their arms, the fabric of their laws or the honour given to learning',
and it is not difficult to catch the implied political analogies between the Romans who ejected Tarquin and the Whigs who chased out James II and suppressed the first Jacobite rising. Gay, less obsequious, penned an epigram:

Writing to Count Flemming at Dresden, the Hanoverian courtier Fabrice described the loud huzzas of the first-night audience at the announcement of the birth of a son to the Princess of Wales and added, detailing the three composers, that Handel ‘easily triumphed over the others'. To which Flemming later sent the patriotic rejoinder: ‘I am very glad also that the German has been victorious in composition over all the other musicians.'

‘Boncio', as his Italian friends nicknamed Bononcini, was nevertheless continuing to gain popularity, especially among an aristocratic caucus which, for reasons either political or personal, was resolutely alienated from the royal family. As a Catholic he was naturally favoured by Jacobite sympathizers with the cause of James Edward Stuart, exiled pretender to the English throne. Though James's effort to raise a rebellion in Scotland in 1715 had been successfully foiled, the Jacobite threat to Hanoverian security remained. A further attempt in 1719, supported by the bellicose King Charles XII of Sweden as part of a lingering territorial quarrel with Hanover over two German duchies, and by Spain, with whom Britain and France were currently at war, was seen off when government troops defeated a mingled force of Highlanders and Spaniards near Inverness. Such disturbances are well worth noting when we consider how concerned the Academy operas are with marching armies, unsettled kingdoms, ambitious usurpers and scheming nobility.

Bononcini's appeal was not merely to alienated Papists and Jacobites. There was a fluency and accessibility about his musical style, with its easy tunefulness and lack of anything too demanding in the way of contrapuntal design, which readily ingratiated him with audiences whether Italian, Austrian or English. His recitatives were almost as popular as his airs. The examples of
Astarto
and
Muzio Scevola
Act II were not lost on Handel, in whose next opera a distinctly Bononcinian cast has been detected.
Floridante
, begun in the October of 1721, was originally centred on the talents of Senesino and Durastanti as its principal stars. The latter was currently working in Italy, but when Handel had composed about half of the score news arrived that she was ill and could not fulfil her engagement for the forthcoming season. An immediate replacement seemed unavailable until the Academy management chose Anastasia Robinson, a contralto who had been one of the soloists in the 1713 birthday ode,
Eternal Source of Light Divine
, while making a career as a theatre singer. As a Catholic, she became something of a favourite with the Haymarket Italians, who called her ‘Stesi', furthered her interests and acted as go-betweens in her dealings with Handel and Heidegger.

Robinson's character, both as woman and artist, was ideally suited to roles demanding sweetness and pathos as opposed to boisterous vocal display. Having initially assigned her the part of second heroine in
Floridante
, the loyal and dependable Rossane, Handel was now expected to adjust the very different prima donna role of Elmira to her musical gifts, recasting for contralto the soprano airs written for Durastanti. Rossane, meanwhile, was to be sung by an attractive young Venetian soprano, Maddalena Salvai. In fact, whatever the vocal transposition, Handel made relatively few alterations to Elmira's music as sung by Robinson. She remains one of the most spirited and determined of his operatic heroines, whose courageous resolution brings a much-needed consistency to the drama as a whole.

For
Floridante
is scarcely a success theatrically. This is partly owing to the libretto provided by Paolo Antonio Rolli, an adaptation of a text originally set as
La Costanza in Trionfo
by the Venetian composer Pietro Ziani in 1707. The location is changed from ancient Norway to ancient Persia. Ancient Timbuctoo might have done as well, for all the difference such features make to the lamely managed story of Prince Floridante, returning victorious from a naval battle only to be deprived of his command and sent into exile by King Oronte, whose supposed daughter Elmira he is about to wed. This was Handel's first collaboration with Rolli, who was much more interested in providing mellifluous verse for the principals to sing than equipping them with strong characters or convincing motives.