Handel (23 page)

Some of the music of the
Suites de Pie`ces pour le Clavecin
(First Set) was probably composed during the period spent in Hanover after Handel's return from Italy,
some of it may belong to the Burlington years and one or two movements can be stylistically related to his spell of teaching in Hamburg during the early months of 1706. The form of these works is the familiar assemblage of dance movements, allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue, best known to modern keyboard players in Bach's French and English suites, alternated with extended fugues, toccata-like preludes, themes with variations and in one case a full-scale French overture. Their characteristically diversified styles reflect the same mélange of national traditions we noted in Handel's lost childhood commonplace book: echoes of Fischer and Kerll in the shorter movements are answered by those of Pachelbel in variation sequences like the famous ‘Harmonious Blacksmith' set of no. 5 in E or the Frobergerish introspection of the F minor prelude to no. 8, and contrasted with the jolly Italian sinfonia offered as the second movement of no. 2. It is going a little too far to detect the beginnings of Handel's Englishness in gigues that may have been written in Italy, but that which ends the F sharp minor suite has suggestions of that most English of moments in
Acis and Galatea
, the duet ‘Happy we'.

Handel's keyboard music has never succeeded in gaining the sort of popular regard enjoyed by that of Bach or Scarlatti, and labels like ‘easy' and ‘conventional' are all too readily applied. If he was such a phenomenal improviser as Burney, Hawkins and others would have us believe, where is the proof of his virtuosity, or is it a case of his having jealously carried his secrets with him to the grave? The attraction of these pieces lies rather in their melodic and rhythmic affinities with the musical medium that interested him most, the world of lyric drama. The decorations opening the second suite are like the warbling divisions of a Nicolini or a Senesino, and the frowning grandeur of the G minor's overture raises the curtain on what is, in design if not in conscious intention, a dramatic sequence of alternating mood pictures, culminating in a superb though wholly traditional passacaglia.

6

‘It seems to me that he is a little mad,' Count Flemming had written to Melusine von der Schulenburg. To Handel's contemporaries there was always something remote and awe-inspiring about the way in which his genius worked, and his career is marked by moments of torrential creative energy, which produce a spate of stupendous achievement. One of the most extraordinary examples of this occurred during the period between February 1724, and February 1725, the twelve months that saw the composition of
Giulio Cesare
,
Tamerlano
and
Rodelinda
. Several factors must have assisted the process, including the potentially competitive nature of Handel's work at the Haymarket alongside Bononcini and Ariosti, the sense of his having formed a genuinely appreciative public for himself and an awareness of the fund of professional experience upon which he could now draw. Something may also have been due to his working relationship with Haym, who was prepared to respect the composer's demands and whose adaptations, if they did not always overcome the technical problems posed by the original texts, for the most part made good dramatic sense.

Bononcini, after his period of exclusion, had rejoined the Academy towards the close of the 1723 season with his pastoral opera
Erminia
, a new version of a work presented in Rome four years previously. His
Farnace
was chosen to open the autumn opera programme, beginning in November after the theatre had been substantially refurbished, but the piece failed to please, as indeed did Ariosti's
Vespasiano
, an ill-advised attempt at assimilating the Bononcinian lyric style. By the end of February 1724, following an
Ottone
revival, Handel presented his newest offering, a work which in our own day has become one of the most admired and frequently performed of all his operas, the tragicomic masterpiece
Giulio Cesare in Egitto
.

Its compositional process,
beginning the previous summer, had involved several major revisions and reassignments, partly owing to the changing availability of singers for the forthcoming season. Working with two or possibly three versions of a text by Francesco Bussani, first set by the Venetian composer Antonio Sartorio in 1677, Nicola Haym, doubtless at Handel's bidding, developed the characters of Pompey's widow and son, Cornelia and Sextus, and played down the typical Venetian cast of extras, cutting out the comic nurse Rodisbe and reducing Curio and Nireno to mere loyal feeds (they disappeared entirely in later revivals). From Bussani's already complex plot, centred on Cleopatra's love for Caesar and her acquisition of the throne from her preposterous brother Ptolemy, he retained the poignant and dramatically arresting scene before Pompey's tomb, and introduced the historical incident of Caesar's swim across Alexandria harbour.

The result, as modern performances (however musically and visually questionable) have shown, is one of those works which, whatever is done to it, refuses to lie down. Most producers make the mistake of assuming that because the story demands the appearance of a crowd of Caesar's followers as he crosses the Nile, the spectacle of Ptolemy anachronistically surrounded by his harem and the apotheosis of Cleopatra amid the nine muses in a vision of Parnassus, the stage in
Giulio Cesare
must be crowded in best MGM fashion. Yet, as in Verdi's
Don Carlos
and
Aida
, the great public moments are there precisely in order to imply an ironical contrast with the central intimacy of the private drama a handful of characters is playing out in the foreground. If Handel's operas, like those of almost every other eighteenth-century composer, are primarily focused on the singer as vocal artist, they are also concerned with the credible presentation of human feeling. The merit of
Giulio Cesare
lies in the subtlety with which the composer is able to vary his presentation of those emotions and shape vital, intensely fallible human figures from the posturing creations dreamed up in a Baroque fantasy version of Roman history, a mixture of Plutarch, Corneille, Venetian romance and the crotchets of Cuzzoni, Robinson, Senesino and the rest.

Cleopatra herself is a prime example. Though English audiences knew her best as the dignified heroine of Dryden's popular tragedy
All for Love
, Handel and Haym are somewhat closer to Shakespeare in their portrait of an ambitious and undaunted woman guided unerringly by the truth of her feelings and devoted to love.
The proof that Handel the man was far from being ‘sexless and safe' is here in the music, with its acute psychological penetration and glowing sensuality. Cleopatra is worked lightly enough into the drama, after most of the other principals have already appeared, with a flippant E major aria full of teasing trills and mordents, as she tells her effete brother: ‘Don't despair! who knows, if you're unlucky with the kingdom, perhaps you'll be lucky in love.' After exulting in the power of her beauty (disguised as Lidia, a court lady, she was wooed and won by Caesar) – ‘a pretty woman can do anything,' she cries – Cleopatra next figures in an invocation to hope based on ‘Let flocks and herds' from the 1713 Birthday Ode, exuberant but tinged with languorous expectation.

It is in Act II that Handel achieves his master stroke. Cleopatra's seduction of Caesar is not, after all, quite complete. Now she presents him with a carefully stage-managed erotic vision of herself as Virtue ‘assisted by the nine Muses' on Parnassus. Handel's orchestration of this, to a leisurely sarabande melody, is incomparably seductive: on stage the band comprises oboe, bassoons, strings (including a viola da gamba arpeggiando), harp and theorbo, in the pit the basic orchestra supplies the gentlest of comments, as Cleopatra takes up the theme, with the full accompaniment, as sensuous as anything contrived by Mahler or Strauss, in ‘V'adoro, pupille'. As Caesar rushes to embrace her, the scene shuts and she disappears.

The Queen's tragic dignity of utterance when, later in the opera, she believes her hero to be dead, offers a direct contrast to the ravaged matriarchal grandeur of Cornelia. If Anastasia Robinson had ever felt hard done by in earlier works, she had no reason to complain here, in a role Handel endowed with a Roman nobility surely designed to counterpoint Cleopatra's Egyptian guile (though the two women, far from being rivals, are allies against Ptolemy from the outset). The shift in mood throughout Cornelia's four arias mirrors the movement of the opera itself from crisis to resolution. Her initial misery leads to a baffled suicide attempt, following an air accompanied by a jagged string figure of dotted semiquavers, broken off at the end of the first section by her determination to do away with herself. Though her plangency finds a further outlet in the expressive E minor siciliano duet with Sextus,
it is significantly cut into by Ptolemy's general, Achillas, in Act II, at a point when this vein has been sufficiently emphasized, and her subsequent arias are cheerfully optimistic.

The dazzling vocal and orchestral textures of
Giulio Cesare
won the opera an instant acclaim – though interestingly it was later noted that ‘both the composer and the performers seem to have acquired even more reputation from the recitatives than the airs'. Besides handing out plums to Senesino, Cuzzoni and Robinson, Handel saw to it that Boschi, as Achillas, got a rather more substantial share in the drama than some of his earlier roles had allowed him and provided in Ptolemy a study in cynical villainy for Berenstadt. Making a farewell appearance, as Sextus, was Margherita Durastanti, who was to quit the London musical world later that year with a benefit concert at which her song of adieux, to words attributed to Pope, ended:

But let old charmers yield to new;
Happy soil, adieu, adieu!

Retiring £1,000 the richer from this one evening, she would nevertheless return some years later, as a proof of Handel's enduring confidence in her dependable musicianship.

It is difficult for us nowadays, in an age which can reproduce a carefully processed performance several thousand times, to appreciate the effect on English audiences of the outstanding professional artistry the King's Theatre could now offer its patrons. Not only the singers but the band as well, featuring the kind of internationally renowned orchestral player whose services Handel, a stickler for the highest standards, could always obtain, represented a consistent level of excellence any European company would have envied. The response from some of the more sensitive spectators was not confined to hailing Cuzzoni with a ‘
Brava, brava!
' or a ‘
Cara, cara!
' but found an outlet in poetry. The
Post-Boy
of 7 March 1723, for example, advertised an anonymous
Epistle to Mr Handel, Upon His Operas of Flavius and Julius Caesar
. If, with its moments of bathos and a line or two cribbed from Dryden, it was not especially good poetry, the effusion tried at any rate to express a widespread sensation. The unknown poet suggests that Handel can reconcile political factions and bring the nation together:

Though of course there are dissenters, followers of Bononcini and Ariosti, but look at the result:

To suggest that Handel's effect on the Academy audience was to make it more harmonious fell distinctly wide of the mark. Partisanship was too much of a fashionable novelty to be smoothed away merely by a single theatrical success and the Lancashire Jacobite John Byrom, among the less enthusiastic spectators at the first run of
Giulio Cesare
, put the case succinctly:

Some say, compared to Bononcini,

That Mynheer Handel's but a Ninny;

Others aver that he to Handel

Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle;

Strange all this difference should be

'Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee.

Other sources bear witness to the squabbles among the directors, to the intense public interest in the factionalism on behalf of singers and composers, and to the rising mania for anything to do with the opera.

It was not only Durastanti, however, who bowed out. Anastasia Robinson now left the company as well and, significantly for Handel, Bononcini mounted his penultimate Haymarket opera
Calfurnia.
According to Giuseppe Riva he had already made up his mind to leave after the coming season, for which the Academy did not in any case re-engage him. Departing for Paris with Cuzzoni in the early summer, he was tempted back to London with the offer of a £500 a year pension by the wayward and more than slightly disreputable Henrietta Spencer, Duchess of Marlborough. In return for such a handsome fee she demanded, according to one contemporary source, that he should ‘not
compose any more for the ungrateful Academy, who do not deserve he should entertain them, since they don't know how to value his works as they ought'. This salaried sulk on Bononcini's part may have seemed an unwise career move, but the Italians had already been convinced that some sort of intrigue was afoot to topple their Boncio. ‘According to all appearances', wrote Riva's friend Zamboni, ‘there will be a violent party against him and not one among those in the Academy can be called his friend.' For those who patriotically deplored the fuss being made over a parcel of squalling foreigners, these changes must have suggested an encouraging likelihood that the town would come to its senses soon enough. Ambrose Philips, under the impression that Cuzzoni's trip to Paris meant that she was going for good, felt emboldened to address her as though she were somehow responsible for tampering with the national character: