Handel (31 page)

Partenope
's sophistication and variety of comic nuance make it one of Handel's most enchanting operas. The masterly characterization and assured sense of pace and tone are sustained through a deliberate lightening of orchestral texture in the airs and an infusion of that Italianate sophistication which Handel could call up whenever it suited him.
It is not only the enchanting ‘Voglio amare' that bears the stamp of Venice and Naples. In the rhythms of Partenope's ‘Spera e godi', for example, Emilio's ‘La speme ti consoli' or the triplets of Armindo's ‘Nobil core' we catch at a kind of unquenchable optimism and high spirits which, like the melodies themselves, belong distinctively to that sunlit Parthenopean world, with its
lazzaroni
, its singers and comedians, at which Handel had taken his last look the previous summer. Was there perhaps some particular significance for him in the reverberations of the title and in the work as a whole? Certainly, like
Serse
,
Flavio
or
Ariodante
,
Partenope
is an opera that tells us more about its composer than others by Handel. Wit which is dry but never cynical, a readiness to appeal to our humane sympathies on behalf of their most unlikely recipients, an indulgent sense of the overriding effects of embarrassment, all these lend a subtler shading to figures like Arsace, pathetic in both ancient and contemporary senses, and the often infuriating Partenope herself, and contribute to the splendid theatricality of the quartet at the opening of Act III or the trio ‘Un cor infedele', where the unresolved amorous entanglement between the two, complicated as it is by the justifiable interference of Rosmira, forbids all three voices ever to blend together.

The new opera was followed by revivals of
Giulio Cesare
and
Tolomeo
, performances of the latter alternating with those of
Ormisda
, a pasticcio arranged by Handel from airs by the latest Italian masters. This proved to be the most popular of the season's new offerings, notching up thirteen evenings against
Partenope
's seven. Not everyone, however, was pleased with
Ormisda
's success. Mrs Pendarves declared that ‘Operas are dying, to my great mortification. Yesterday I was at the rehearsal of a new one; it is composed of several songs out of Italian operas; but it is very heavy to Mr Handel.' She would have been more pleased with the news that Senesino was returning to London. Apparently undeterred by gloomy communications from Rolli as to declining standards in the Haymarket, he had finally agreed a contract for a 1,400-guinea salary. The 1730 autumn programme opened with a
Scipione
revival, in which the castrato ‘charm'd much' and King George and Queen Caroline attended on four successive nights. They and their family were out in force for the sixteen performances of Handel's new opera,
Poro, re delle Indie
, first presented on 2 February 1731 and based, like
Siroe
,
on a text by Pietro Metastasio.

It was barely twelve months since the libretto, originally entitled
Alessandro nell' Indie
, had received the earliest of its many settings, by the much-admired Neapolitan composer Leonardo Vinci. Handel presumably altered the title to avoid confusion with the
Alessandro
of 1726, dramatizing earlier episodes in the conqueror's Indian campaign, and when given at Hamburg in 1732, a year after its English première,
Poro
was advertised as
Triumph der Grossmuth und Treue, oder Cleofida, Königin von Indien
, with recitatives in settings by Telemann.

The libretto is the usual Metastasian formula of heroism and gallantry among six characters distinguished by the polish of their poetic utterance, but the plot, turning on Queen Cleofide's exploitation of Alexander's love in order to further Porus's political cause, throws the opportunism and treachery of the central figures into unpleasant relief. Perhaps it was to modify this prevailing impression, and not simply because Riemschneider's replacement, Commano, was of little account, that Handel reduced the substantial role of the villainous Timagene to the only bass principal in any of the operas who is not awarded an aria. The text as it stood in any case disquieted the composer, and shows alterations were not limited to the customary excision and compression of recitative, but involved the cutting and the transplanting of arias in a revision that grew more radical as the drama progressed.

This does not, in fact, result in any startling improvement upon the original. Alessandro is an altogether feebler variation on his vigorous avatar of 1726 and the obligatory second pair of lovers, Erissena and Gandarte, become tiresome through superfluity. The interest of
Poro
is heavily weighted in favour of the music and there is hardly a dull number in the piece. Handel's selective attitude towards the newer styles is shown by his readiness to accommodate them alongside fashions of a distinctly elderly cut without any obvious sense of incongruity. Cleofide, for instance, is introduced in a number decidedly reminiscent of Vinci and Leo, ‘Se mai turbo il tuo riposo', especially in its continuing absorption of fresh material and plangent chromaticisms in the middle section: yet in the opera's penultimate scene, threatening suicide, she sings a tiny sixteen-bar aria making effective use of some hallowed Handelian clichés over a simple ground bass recalling Purcell to an English ear. Touches of Neapolitan intermezzo colour Erissena's ‘Chi vive amante' just as surely as Alessandro's ‘D'un barbaro scortese'
sounds continually ready to turn into the most traditional Baroque fugato while never quite succeeding.

Such stylistic freedom carries over into the composer's handling of formal operatic conventions. The overture, focusing on widely spaced intervals, ignores the usual concluding minuet and hurries us instead straight into the drama via a simple shift to the relative major, introducing an accompanied recitative as the defeated Porus rushes across the battlefield amid the scattered remnants of his army. Though several of the arias are extremely short and two at least are not cast in da capo form, Cleofide's ‘Se troppo crede al ciglio' has a gigantic thirty-six-bar middle section with divided strings. The most striking touch, however, was offered to Handel on a plate, as it were, by Metastasio. In Act I Poro and Cleofide have sworn a mutual fidelity in corresponding arias. A few scenes later, with the appearance of Alessandro, Cleofide, true to the spirit of the opera, flirts with the conqueror, well aware that she is making her lover jealous. Once Alexander has left, nobly implying that love is a passion unknown to him, the pair turn on each other and launch straight into a duet in which each ironically quotes the words and music of the earlier protestations of faith.

For this and much else
Poro
gained instant favour. ‘Porus K of the Indies – New by Mr Hendel: it took much son confusa Pastorella &c', notes
Colman's Opera Register
, referring to the hit of the show, Erissena's Act III air with its pastoral drone. Its composition, during December and January, had been overshadowed by the news from Halle of the death of Handel's mother Dorothea at the age of eighty. The eulogy pronounced at her funeral in the Liebfrauenkirche by pastor Johann Georg Francke praised her intelligence, steadfastness and Christian piety, while also finding space to mention her son ‘Georg Friedrich, born 23 February in the year 1685, who stands in especial grace, by reason of his exceptional knowledge of music'. Handel himself was not present at the service and would have been unable to pay even the shortest of visits to Germany at this time. Writing later to his brother-in-law Michael Dietrich Michaelsen, he spoke of his own sense of loss. ‘Here I cannot restrain my tears from flowing. Yet it has pleased the Almighty, to whose Holy Will I submit myself with Christian resignation. Her memory will never be extinguished for me until, after this life, we are again united, which may the beneficent God grant through his grace.' Handel it was who paid Dorothea's funeral expenses and had Francke's sermon and the customary memorial verses printed afterwards.

Such especial grace as Handel might be thought to possess did not necessarily include generosity to his rival composers for the stage. The ongoing 1731 season which kept him in London featured hardly any operas other than his own and the same principal governed the new schedule for the autumn, opening on 13 November with a revival of
Tamerlano.
During the summer he had begun a new work, its libretto apparently derived from Jean Racine's tragedy
Bérénice
which, presumably because he knew the French play, was provisionally entitled
Titus l'Empereur
. Only after writing the overture, one amply scored chorus and two airs did he set aside the project, turning instead to another of Metastasio's dramas,
Ezio
, originally written in 1728.

Interestingly, the libretto derives in part from a second Racine play,
Britannicus
, and is generally superior to those used by Handel for
Siroe
and
Poro
. With its tightly controlled interlocking of successive scenes, the plot, in this late imperial story of Aetius, Honoria and the Emperor Valentinian, goes through the familiar motions of love, duty and deception, using embarrassment as its principal source of dramatic momentum (interesting to note how often Metastasio makes one character put another on the spot). Once again Handel was busy with the scissors, snipping away the recitative passages, which London audiences must have found so tiresome, and rearranging the order of the arias so as to reduce the emphasis on certain soloists and throw others into fuller relief. Bertolli, as the
seconda donna
Onoria, had one of her numbers cut and another placed before instead of after an air for Varo the bass, presumably so as to ginger up the audience's expectations regarding an important new acquisition to the company, Antonio Montagnana, who had first appeared at the Haymarket in the
Tamerlano
revival that opened the 1731–2 season (though in fact his opening aria in
Ezio
is unremarkable).

Further reordering was made for Senesino's benefit as the hero, notably at the end of Act II. In the original Ezio's aria precedes one for Fulvia, his betrothed, followed in turn by arias for Valentiniano and the villainous Massimo. Probably as a sop to Senesino's vanity, since Strada had wound up the previous act with a fearsomely virtuoso piece full of modern triplet passages, Handel placed Strada first, dealt with Massimo and the Emperor in a little episode of recitative, and finished off with an affecting F minor siciliano for Senesino.
It is hard, nevertheless, to imagine that either he or the audience was exactly satisfied with Handel's musical treatment of him, as the role, despite its traditionally heroic cast, is presented almost wholly without frills and flourishes. Of his seven arias the first is a tiny effusion without opening ritornello, the second, relying on a series of repeated sections, harks back to the Italian cantatas, and the third has the vocal line moving in unison with the orchestra for seventeen bars. It is only in the siciliano ‘Ecco alle mie catene' that Ezio is allowed to dominate and his penultimate air, ‘Se la mia vita', a splendid compensation for earlier disappointments, is one of Handel's most ornately orchestrated vocal numbers, with paired horns, recorders and bassoons, and interjections from solo cello and violin (he had tried out a similar disposition in
Poro
).

Much of the best music in the work goes, not to Ezio or to the petulant, slightly ineffectual Valentiniano, or even to Fulvia, a virgin nightingale, but to Massimo, Onoria and Varo. Massimo's arias have a broad expressive range, from the foursquare simile piece with which he opens to his final remonstrance with his daughter, ‘Tergi l'ingiuste lagrime', in which the orchestral accompaniment is reduced to a smattering of angular staccato punctuations, as though the composer were reluctant to allow such a thorough-paced traitor to ingratiate himself with us. That Handel fully understood the type of political manipulator he represents is shown ideally in ‘Se povero il ruscello', in which his sly comparisons of Ezio's growing popularity with the movements of a stream are complemented in the first section by an insinuating statement of a typically Handelian ‘purling brooks' figure on the strings and in the second (describing the river in spate) by turbid flurries of descending scales. For her part Onoria gets one of the most attractive arias in all the operas, the radiantly pastoral ‘Quanto mai felici siete', an enchanting rustic dance reminiscent of Telemann in one of his Polish or Moravian moods, an idea taken up later on with equal freshness by Varo, dilating on the ups and downs in the fortunes of shepherds and monarchs.

If the audience wanted a full display of Montagnana's enormous technical command, which brought him (little though he was later to deserve it) the finest of the composer's operatic bass roles, they got it here, in the amazing cadential leap of a twelfth to bottom F, and in the glorious ‘Già risonar', with its trumpet solo, the first bass number in any Handel opera since
Rinaldo
to exploit vocal agility and a wide tonal range,
freeing the voice part from absolute dependence on the orchestral bass line. Yet
Ezio
flopped – ‘Clothes & all ye Scenes New – but did not draw much Company'. Fabri and Merighi had left for Italy, and their replacements, the husband and wife Giovanni Battista Pinacci and Anna Bagnolesi, were neither of them ideal. The opera enjoyed only five performances, but Handel quickly followed it with another new work, one which drew enthusiastic audiences.

‘I went to the Opera Sosarmis, made by Hendel, which takes with the town, and that justly, for it is one of the best I ever heard,' wrote Lord Percival in his diary. He was probably unaware that
Sosarme, re di Media
had started its career as
Fernando, re di Castiglia
, adapted anonymously for Handel from Antonio Salvi's
Dionisio, re di Portogallo
, written for the Pratolino stage in 1707. After composing the opera's first two acts, Handel had suddenly decided to shift the setting of its story of rebellion and dynastic intrigue from medieval Portugal to ancient Media. I am unconvinced by the theory put forward by modern Handel scholars that this had something to do with England's need to preserve its traditional alliance with the Portuguese. There is nothing in the original libretto which could possibly have caused offence: rather the contrary, since the Hispano-Portuguese union ending the opera felicitously recalls the recent marriage between King Jo
ā
o V and a Spanish infanta. A somewhat more convincing idea suggests that pushing the action even further into the past would help to muffle any potentially embarrassing resemblance to current political developments in Britain itself. In a plot featuring a son in opposition to his father and the machinations of an elderly politician, could not the audience have detected allusions to King George II's quarrel with his son Frederick, Prince of Wales, and sniffed out a parallel between the scheming counsellor Altomaro and that master parliamentary operator Sir Robert Walpole? For the time being, however, the reasons behind Handel's switch remain mysterious.