Handel (27 page)

In the Haymarket, meanwhile,
Admeto
's success blinded nobody to the realities of the situation created by Faustina's presence. Cuzzoni, archetypally the Italian prima donna in her fretful, vulgar insecurity, resented the challenge from the outset and Faustina, for all her common sense, was thoroughly conscious of her talents, requiring others to be so as well. Meanwhile, among the King's Theatre patrons the battle lines began drawing up. The rage for opera had now turned into that favourite eighteenth-century aristocratic pastime, backing winners, and when one of Handel's most judicious admirers, the poet Henry Carey, published his ‘Discontented Virgin' in the
British Journal
of 25 March he expressed the situation neatly:

At
Leicester Fields
I give my Vote

For the fine-piped Cuzzoni;

At
Burlington's
I change my Note,

Faustina
for my Money.

Attilio
's Musick I despise

For none can please but
Handel
;

But the Disputes that hence arise,

I wish and hope may end well.

Pious but ineffectual. A collision course was inevitable, if only because the noble patrons so obviously flaunted their colours. As the gossiping courtier Lord Hervey told his friend Stephen Fox, ‘No Cuzzonist will go to a tavern with a Faustinian; and the ladies of one party have scratched those of the other out of their list of visits . . . these transient deities, like the Egyptian ones, are alternately sacrificed to one another.' Leader of the Cuzzoni faction was Mary, Countess of Pembroke, whose ardent partisanship was not of a type to cast lustre on her husband's position as a pillar of the Whig establishment. A letter to Charlotte Clayton, later Lady Sundon, favourite of the Princess of Wales, written towards the end of the 1727 season, indicates the extent to which Lady Pembroke and others were already committed. Cuzzoni had apparently received a warning that she was to be hissed off the stage at a forthcoming performance. ‘She was in such concern at this', says the Countess,
‘that she had a great mind not to sing, but I . . . positively ordered her not to quit the stage, but let them do what they would: though not heard, to sing on, and not to go off till it was proper.' Backed by her patroness and the applause of her supporters, Cuzzoni hung on, though one of her arias was drowned by catcalling from the Faustina claque. Matters were made worse by the appearance of the King's granddaughter, Princess Amelia, an ardent Handelian but an embarrassing presence at such a time.

A further lack of respect towards royalty by the heavily engaged Haymarket audience was shown when the directors presumed to dispute George's caution to them that if Cuzzoni were dismissed he would give up his attendance. Faustina, however, was a decided favourite, whose roster of distinguished backers included Burlington's wife Dorothy (Lord Hervey called her ‘Dame Palladio'), Lady Cowper, who wrote opposite the siren's name in her
Admeto
wordbook ‘she is the devil of a singer' and Catherine, Lady Walpole, who engineered a social coup by inviting both divas to her house for a concert ‘at which were all the first people of the kingdom'. As neither of the two stars would deign to sing in the other's presence, the hostess, with admirable aplomb, had each of them taken to another part of the house ‘under the pretence of shewing her some curious china' while her rival obliged with an aria or two.

Matters finally came to a head in a dramatic and, so far as can be known, unique fashion during the run of a new opera, which had been coaxed from Bononcini for performance as the season's last novelty. Adapted by Haym from a Salvi text originally set by the composer's brother Marc Antonio,
Astianatte
had a respectable pedigree in Racine's
Andromaque
, and was dedicated to Bononcini's lavish patroness Henrietta Marlborough. It was his last London opera, but was to be remembered for reasons that have little to do with music.

Patrons who attended the performance on 6 June 1727 can scarcely have been surprised by what took place, but the occasion was hot news for London journalists and pamphleteers. The
British Journal
noted gleefully: ‘On Tuesday-night last, a great Disturbance happened at the Opera, occasioned by the Partisans of the Two Celebrated Rival Ladies, Cuzzoni and Faustina. The Contention at first was only carried on by Hissing on one Side, and Clapping on the other; but proceeded at length to Catcalls, and other great Indecencies: And notwithstanding the Princess Caroline was present,
no Regards were of Force to restrain the Rudenesses of the Opponents.' The
London Journal
, in customary style, observed that the quarrel was sustained ‘by the delightful Exercise of Catcalls, and other Decencies, which demonstrated the inimitable Zeal and Politeness of that Illustrious Assembly . . . Neither her Royal Highness's presence, nor the laws of decorum, could restrain the glorious ardour of the combatants.' The central fact, however, was that Cuzzoni and Faustina had finally resorted to a scuffle, egged on by their partisans and perhaps even by their fellow performers.

The flavour of the event is admirably conveyed in a burlesque playlet,
The Contre Temps or Rival Queans, A Small Farce
, issued the following month. The epigraph, Virgil's ‘
Et cantare pares, et respondere paratae
', is slily rendered as ‘Both young Italians, both alike inspir'd/To sing, or scold; just as the time requir'd. Modern Translation.' The cast, besides the three principal singers, includes Heidegger ‘High-priest to the Academy of Discord', Handel himself, and the leaders of the respective claques.

Heidegger's opening speech effectively satirizes the public's preoccupation with opera in hinting at the comparative triviality of contemporary events such as the squabble over Minorca or the death of the Czarina Elizabeth. Faustina calls Cuzzoni ‘that mushroom songstress of the other day', Cuzzoni tells her to ‘resign the charge, you're past it now and old' and the sexual innuendo reaches a peak when the former advises:

to which the latter ripostes:

The height of coarseness is reached in Faustina's reference to Sandoni's difficulty in making love to Cuzzoni owing to her excessively large vagina. The two women box and tear one another's headdresses, to an excited chorus of peers and tupees (beaux in smart wigs).
‘The Queen and The Princess again engage; Both Factions play all their warlike Instruments; Cat-calls, Serpents and Cuckoos make a dreadful din; F-s-na lays flat C-z-ni's nose with a Sceptre; C-z-ni breaks her head with a gilt-leather crown: H-l, desirous to see an end of the battle, animates them with a kettle-drum; a globe thrown at random hits the high-priest in the temples, he staggers off the Stage . . .'

While the state tottered at the Haymarket, England received the news of King George I's death at Osnabrück on 11 June 1727. The coronation of his heir the Prince of Wales as King George II and of the Princess as Queen Caroline was to be a well-publicized and elaborate ceremonial, with no expense spared. Handel had every reason to expect that his music, in whatever form, would be incorporated in the service. The new King and Queen were unstinting in their support for him and he had recently been engaged as music master to their daughters, with an annual salary of £195. Some of his later harpsichord pieces were written as lessons for the youngest of the princesses, Louisa, while her sister Anne received a generous tribute from the master himself, when he told the organist Jacob Wilhelm Lustig that after he left Hamburg for Italy ‘no power on earth could have moved me to take up teaching again – except Anne, the flower of Princesses'.

A note by King George III in Mainwaring's biography makes it clear that Handel was indeed the royal family's composer of choice, as opposed to ‘that wretched little crooked illnatured insignificant Writer Player and Musician . . . Dr Green', Maurice Greene, on whom the commission should properly have been bestowed. The King adds that Handel ‘had but four Weeks for doing this wonderful work'.
Parker's Penny Post
told its readers a week before the ceremony, ‘Mr Hendle has composed the Musick for the Abbey at the Coronation, and the Italian Voices, with above a Hundred of the best Musicians will perform; and the Whole is allowed by those Judges in Musick who have already heard it, to exceed any Thing heretofore of the same Kind: it will be rehearsed this Week, but the Time will be kept private, lest the Crowd of People should be an Obstruction to the Performers.' The secret, of course, got out and the rehearsal at the Abbey was attended by ‘the greatest Concourse of People that has been known'. Forces included a choir of about forty voices and an enormous band of 160 or so players.
If the
Parker's
correspondent is to be credited, the thirty-six Chapel Royal singers, including Handel's erstwhile soloists Gates, Hughes and Weeley, were joined by singers from the opera.

The success of the anthems was unconnected with their original performance at the Coronation Service, whose order, devised by Archbishop Wake, conflated Tenison's crowning of George I in 1714 and the ceremony used by Sancroft at the accession of James II in 1685. Lord Hervey waspishly notes that ‘the Coronation was performed with all the pomp and magnificence that could be contrived; the present King differing so much from the last, that all the pageantry and splendour, badges and trappings of royalty, were as pleasing to the son as they were irksome to the father'. Forecast of a spring tide and dangers of flooding in Westminster Hall had put off the ceremony by a week, from the 4th to the 11th, but the extra time thus allowed for rehearsal did little to straighten out the confusions inevitable among the vast musical forces in the Abbey. Wake's notes in his copy of the service order tell the story succinctly enough. Against the first anthem, Purcell's
I was glad
, he writes: ‘This was omitted and no Anthem at all Sung . . . by the Negligence of the Choir of Westminster.' At the Recognition the choir should have launched into
The King shall rejoice
, but according to another source they embarked on
Let thy hand be strengthened
. What probably happened was that the Chapel Royal singers got going in one gallery while the remaining voices set off on a different tack in the other. Wake laconically observes, ‘The Anthems in Confusion: All irregular in the Music' and goes on to note that at the Anointing, through yet another blunder,
Zadok the Priest
knocked the hymn out of the way.

Despite this we can appreciate the evident enthusiasm of the performers. Handel's confidence in approaching his task was absolute, as indeed was his certainty as to the choice of texts which, apart from
Zadok the Priest
, were left to his discretion by the King. When the bishops presumed to suggest appropriate passages, Handel ‘murmured and took offence, as he thought it implied his ignorance of Holy Scriptures: “I have read my Bible very well, and shall chuse for myself.”'

The absolute sureness of aim and perfectly calculated control of effect throughout the
Coronation Anthems
gave them an immediate popularity and they were given regularly in English choral concerts during Handel's lifetime. At least one,
Zadok the Priest
, that gloriously simple burst of D major acclamation,
with a glance towards Italy in its opening allusion to the string arpeggiando in the 1707
Nisi Dominus
, became an established element in all subsequent British coronation ritual. Varying his choral and orchestral layers (no trumpets or drums in
Let thy hand be strengthened
and a scrupulous husbanding of these resources elsewhere) Handel is equally careful to shift the tonality so as to avoid too much D major tub-thumping.
Let thy hand
, for example, is in G, with a meditative E minor larghetto in ‘Let justice and judgment', strangely mournful in its suggestion of the vanity of admonishing the King to ‘let mercy and truth go before thy face'. Finest and most expansive of all four is the sumptuous
My heart is inditing
, into whose opening section the various components are worked one by one, the individual voices singing over a light
Trommelbass
string accompaniment and the brass and timpani saved up for a thrilling arrival to round off the movement in grand style. A germ for this movement is a borrowing from Telemann's
Harmonischer Gottesdienst
. The anthem expands, via the stately progress of ‘Kings' daughters were among thy honourable women', into a garland for Queen Caroline, for whose coronation it was intended, and whose attire, Hervey tells us, ‘was as fine as the accumulated riches of the City and suburbs could make it'.

A Coronation opera was now in order and by a singular coincidence Handel had already composed just such a piece some six months earlier. The new season had opened with an
Admeto
revival and the last of Ariosti's London operas,
Teuzzone
, a Zeno drama set in ‘Peckin, one of the Principal Cities of China'; the Handel novelty was
Riccardo Primo, Re d'Inghilterra
, first performed on 11 November 1727.

Handel's reasons for withholding the piece are further complicated by the revisions made to the last two acts, which imply an attempt to adapt it to the new situation created by George I's death. The suggestion has been made that the heroic figure of Richard the Lionheart was in any case supposed to represent George II as Prince of Wales, but there is no evidence to support this. Whatever the truth, the autograph (or, to use Burney's habitual expression, ‘the foul score') is one of the most confusing ever left to us by Handel, and a fascinating display of the composer's working methods. The entire manuscript has passage after passage of text crossed out and new words substituted for no apparent reason. Cancelled music includes several arias, one of them an enchanting birdsong number with flauto piccolo,
and a closing duet for Costanza and Riccardo, as well as scenes containing a character called Corrado who disappears in the final version.