Handel (26 page)

The opening battle scene, describing the siege of Oxidraca, is the most elaborate in any Handel work, with its sixty-two-bar symphony taking life, as it were, from the crude heroics of Alexander's defiant:

(Proud Oxidraca, in vain you oppose the wrath of heaven:

I'm a descendant of Jove, and that's enough!)

The band which, with players like Geminiani, Dubourg and the Castrucci brothers, was now on topping form, was given its head throughout the work and Handel works a second French overture into the fabric of the drama by opening the scene in the temple of Jupiter Ammon with the initial flourishes and following up the subsequent recitative with the fast fugato section. Act II is introduced by a recitative and arioso scored for a brilliantly augmented orchestra of paired flutes, oboes, bassoons and divided strings. Horns colour the jolly six-part coro and appear in the unusual, not to say unique, ensemble movement, which accompanies the returning victors after the battle.

This is just one of many moments in the piece when Handel abandons the rigid sequence of aria and recitative, which forms the traditional basis of opera seria. Perhaps the best example of this unhampered treatment of formal resource occurs in Act II. After eight bars of orchestral introduction for wind and strings, Rossane invokes protective solitude to the accompaniment of two violins, viola and cello, and thence breaks into an arioso with added flutes, which she fails to finish, falling asleep instead. Alexander enters, finds her asleep, praises her face and bosom, and launches into a miniature aria as he intends to kiss her. But he has been overheard by Lisaura, whom he now has to pacify. Rossane, meanwhile, wakes up to find him dallying with her rival, to whom, in turn, he gives a little ditty. In reply, each lady mocks him by quoting the song he has sung to her rival. His subsequent full-scale aria, a Senesino showpiece, has the added interest of a 3/4 first section and a common-time middle section.

Handel's radiant sense of humour suffuses not only such Mozartian scenes as this, but his entire treatment of the two ladies. He must have foreseen the rivalry of the divas from the outset and the pair are treated with an even-handedness which is in itself richly farcical. Who can have avoided a wry smile at the mathematic formality with which Rossane and Lisaura, ‘each one emerging from her pavilion', survey the progress of the siege and later join in a duet whose solo passages are of exactly equal length? In fact, however, it was Faustina as Rossane who was given the edge over Cuzzoni as Lisaura. Her music demands a ferocious virtuosity, rising to a pitch in her Act III aria ‘Brilla nell'alma', one of the opera's conscious allusions to newer musical styles and a piece doubtless partly intended to make Faustina feel at home in the Italian operatic province, which now greeted her so enthusiastically.

Alessandro
is not a great opera. There is too much bustle and confusion, aided by an otiose sub-plot and a coarse-grained libretto, added to which the division of the spoils between the two ladies rapidly becomes jejune and irritating. Yet its brashness is the vulgarity of genius. It is one of those works whose gestures caution us against the validity of good taste in the criticism of art. Somehow the whole nature of the piece seems encapsulated in the fact that, at its first performance, the noise of the battle scene could be heard carrying from the Haymarket as far off as Charing Cross.

The singers answered all expectations. Senesino, indeed, seems to have carried his performance beyond the call of duty. In the opening attack on Oxidraca he ‘so far forgot himself in the heat of conquest as to stick a sword into one of the pasteboard stones of the wall of the town', according to Horace Walpole, ‘and bore it in triumph before him as he entered the breach'.
Alessandro
's popularity – eleven performances in May and two more before the season closed on 7 June, owing to Senesino's illness – was guaranteed by the starry cast. In a city small enough to thrive on gossip and scandal, the pleasure of opera-going was enhanced by the mutual animosity of Cuzzoni and Faustina, which promised to develop into something very juicy. A brief truce between the pair, ended by ‘an unhappy Breach occasioned by one of them making Mouths at the other while she was singing', was now resumed, but for how long? Matters were not helped by Senesino's subsequent absence abroad, on which John Rich, the buccaneering impresario of Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre, cashed in by staging a revival of
Camilla
, complete with Mrs Barbier and Richard Leveridge, veterans of the original run twenty years earlier:

said Mrs Younger in a specially written prologue. Meanwhile, Mrs Pendarves raved about Cuzzoni: ‘Oh how charming! how did I wish for all I love and like to be with me at that instant of time! my senses were ravished with harmony. They say we shall have operas in a fortnight, but I think Madam Sandoni (Cuzzoni) and the Faustina are not perfectly agreed about their parts.'

Senesino at length returned and the season got going at last with Arioso's
Lucio Vero
, but the
clou
was to be ‘Mr Handel's opera performed by Faustina, Cuzzoni & Senesino', based on
L'Antigona delusa da Alceste
, a respectably antique Venetian libretto originally written by Aurelio Aureli for Marcantonio Ziani at the S. Zanipolo theatre in 1660. Handel and his librettist (probably Haym once more, given the alterations that took place) used another of Mauro's Hanover versions and in its new form, as
Admeto
, the piece was premièred on 31 January. It was an immense success, with nineteen performances during the season, and remained popular during most of Handel's lifetime.

What its popularity had to do with the genuine artistic merits of the work is difficult to gauge. Though
Admeto
is better wrought dramatically than
Alessandro
, its libretto is almost as unsatisfactory, a mixture of classical tragedy with the footling intrigues of Spanish Baroque comedy. The usual accretions of divine and allegorical figures, and buffo servants, are cut away, but the central juxtaposition of the Alcestis legend with a romance for Admetus with a Princess Antigona obviously has to remain, along with several other features such as portraits, disguises, outbursts of female jealousy and the employment of Antigona as a gardener (a convention that found its most successful treatment some fifty years afterwards in Mozart's
La Finta Giardiniera
), which distance the work from classical myth and give it an inalienably modern flavour.
Haym, if it was he rather than Rolli, significantly altered the denouement: the original has Admetus regaining Alcestis at the last minute (‘Opportuno qui giungo' (Not before time) says Hercules) and thus having to hand Antigona (with whom, ironically, he has just sung the duet) to Prince Trasimede, the
secondo uomo
, but here Antigona simply cedes Admetus to Alcestis, who hails her as a
generoso rivale
, and Trasimede is left to comment vaguely that ‘hope begins to revive within me'. Was this switch-round owing to Cuzzoni's need to preserve the dignity of her role?

For all its moments of elegant nonsense,
Admeto
remains the only opera of the Faustina years really worthy of being placed alongside the earlier masterpieces. Whereas in
Alessandro
there is the continual sense of subservience to the demands of the performers, its successor maintains a far greater cohesion, and the self-propelling energy created by the drama and its characters gives a terse, powerfully inevitable quality to the successive musical numbers. Handel was obviously inspired by the story's more authentic sections, at such moments as the opening accompagnato ‘Orride Larve', in which Admeto rises from his sickbed tormented by Stygian shades with bleeding daggers, Alceste's subsequent lament in the composer's favourite pathetic F minor, punctuated by the sudden appearances of a single flute, and the exuberantly macabre second-act overture, whose spiky chromaticisms accompany Hercules's tour of Hades.

There is no evidence, however, that Handel knew Euripides any better than did his other lettered contemporaries. The Hellenic crazes of neoclassicism were far distant and if the spirit of Greek tragedy does emerge in Handel's work it is in the oratorios rather than the operas, where the protagonists show a much more obvious debt to Racine and Corneille. Nor are his sympathies confined to Admetus and Alcestis. Antigona and Trasimede emerge so forcefully in their music as to seem redolent of characters from a Richardson novel in the ups and downs of their sentimental adventuring. Each is clearly and expertly defined within a distinctive musical context: Antigona is presented via a delectable rustic symphony over a pastoral drone, leading, through a snatch of dialogue, to her ingratiating ‘Spera allor che in mar turbato', and Trasimede has a wonderful entrance with hunting horns, which are carried over into his spacious comparison of Antigona with the goddess Diana, ‘Se l'arco avessi e i strali'.

The imaginative drive that shapes such personalities is an equally strong determining factor in Handel's treatment of the Senesino and Faustina roles. Admeto is no mere languishing lover or posturing paladin, but a fully realized human figure caught in the toils of a dilemma for whose contrivance he is only partially responsible, as emphatically masculine a hero as Handel ever created for his temperamental
primo uomo
. The two women are differentiated not, as in the previous opera, by the quality of their music (Cuzzoni's numbers are pronouncedly modern in style, and it is Faustina who gets the melting siciliano normally associated with her rival) but by its subtlety of psychological insight. Nearly all Alceste's arias, for example, are vigorous outbursts resulting from the intolerable situations into which she is thrown: only at the close of the opera does the composer's sense of tender irony give her an affectionate minuet-style air, as she regains her husband, which sounds suspiciously like the sort of thing we have come to expect from Antigona. True, Cuzzoni has her siciliano in ‘Da tanti affanni oppressa' and very good it is too, but everything else of hers has hoydenish gaiety about it, which sets the young princess well apart from the loyal wife.

During the triumphant run of
Admeto
, during which, as Coleman noted in his register, ‘the House filled every night fuller than ever was known at any Opera for so long together – 16 times', Handel had other business in hand besides superintending the Haymarket music. It is not yet clear why, after some sixteen years as a foreigner resident in London, he should suddenly have thought to become a naturalized Englishman. In 1723 he had been appointed ‘Composer of Musick for His Majesty's Chappel Royal', with a consequent doubling of his £200 pension granted in the previous reign. The post, however, was not awarded him to the disadvantage of other royal household musicians and seems to have been more along the lines of a private arrangement, securing Handel's services for the chapel whenever the King should desire them. There is no evidence that the composer was looking to succeed William Croft at the head of the Chapel Royal, though a sermon preached by the Bishop of Hereford at the 1726 Three Choirs music meeting, urging the elderly Croft ‘not to continue too hard a student, that so the present age may long enjoy you in person, as posterity will in your works', suggested that his health was failing. Handel would surely not have wished, in any case, to be tied too closely to the Chapel,
at the expense of his other concerns as a composer for the King's Theatre.

His petition to the House of Lords for naturalization nevertheless went ahead, filed on 13 February and stating that ‘your petitioner was born at Hall in Saxony, out of his Majestie's Allegiance, but hath constantly professed the Protestant Religion, and hath given Testimony of his Loyalty and Fidelity to his Majesty and the good of this Kingdom', and asked that Handel's name should be added to the pending act ‘for Naturalizating L
OUIS
S
ECHEHAYE
'. Presumably, if proof of his fidelity were needed, their lordships had only to look at the dedication of
Radamisto
. Was it, besides, mere coincidence that among members of the reviewing committee was Lord Waldegrave, an erstwhile Academy director? After the appropriate amendments and readings the bill was carried down to the Commons with the noteworthy adjunct, in an age when the upper chamber was still one to be reckoned with, that ‘the Lords desire the Concurrence of this House'. Dutiful agreement from the members sent the bill back to the Lords, and the King pronounced his assent, using the words ‘
Soit fait comme il est désiré
'.

At forty-two Handel was now a Briton, yet how British did he want to be? His professional stance would always be semi-detached. Not quite a house musician or a kapellmeister but always reliant on the support and patronage of great ones, a loner, unmarried and likely to remain so (for reasons that seem not to have had any connexion with a deviant sexuality) yet a welcome guest in the houses and families of those who admired his music, he became English only as far as it suited his calculations. His music lost nothing of its cosmopolitan flavour, and to the very last he showed himself capable of absorbing and transmuting a whole range of musical styles. The ‘Englishness' detected in works such as
L'Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il Moderato
and
Susanna
is only a component element, never a dominant feature, and Hawkins's comment, already referred to, that it was necessary to know several languages in order to appreciate Handel's fund of good stories relates in a sense as much to the music as to the man. He never lost his German accent, though the German itself became distinctly vague, and he could write fluent, idiomatic English in his letters to friends. Anyone who has spent long periods abroad will know the social value of never quite mastering a foreign language and of the charm a linguistic combination of eagerness, intelligence and inexactitude always conveys.
Evidence abundantly suggests that Handel, nothing if not shrewd, understood this and exercised it to the full.