Handel (42 page)

It would be wrong, however, to assume that Londoners were growing tired of current operatic forms. Opera on the London stage did not die out after Handel stopped composing for it, neither was there any sign of a waning enthusiasm for the most sophisticated types of Metastasian melodrama, which were to predominate in the musical theatre almost until the end of the century. Great days were in any case to come, with the acceptance by English audiences of outstanding composers like Galuppi, Johann Christian Bach and Sacchini, and fine castrati such as Monticelli, Rauzzini and Pacchierotti. As for Handelian oratorio, whatever the incidental breaks with tradition,
its outlines are insistently operatic and show few signs of moving significantly in any other direction. Many of Handel's leading oratorio singers, what is more, had had valuable operatic experience, and some, such as Giulia Frasi, maintained a career in both fields during the 1740s.

There is little enough evidence to support the view that Handel gave up opera because he was dissatisfied with its artistic limitations. His German excursion in 1737 must have fuelled his interest in sacred dramatic works, and he no doubt chafed at opera's formal restrictions, at the financial exigencies of theatrical production and at the dictatorial habits of singers. But his remark, recorded by Hawkins, that oratorio composition was ‘better suited . . . to the circumstances of a man advancing in years, than' that of adapting music to such vain and trivial poetry as the musical drama is generally made to consist of, may well be simply wisdom after the event, on the part of a seasoned old entertainer making his peace with the shifts of taste and circumstance. Perhaps there really was a crisis of faith during this physically and mentally taxing period at the close of the decade, but the production of such secular works as
Semele
and
The Choice of Hercules
in the ten years that followed suggests that it cannot have had lasting effects. The most likely cause of his defection to oratorio lies in the economic realities of the situation. The close of the 1730s saw the collapse of both the Haymarket and the Covent Garden companies, and the dissolution of the Opera of the Nobility. Subsequent efforts during the early 1740s to recover the prestige and box office credibility of opera were spasmodic and variably successful, and it was another decade before a really consistent initiative was taken in promoting Italian lyric drama once more.

The successive failure of Handel's last four operas was thus due, not to a lack of faith in the validity of the genre as a whole, either from the public or from the composer, but to an overall disillusionment as to what the Haymarket and Lincoln's Inn Fields had to offer in the way of spectacle, stars and novelties. Unlike Bach or Telemann, Handel, during his London years, could never be wholly confident of his audience and the move to oratorio, like the journey to Ireland that clinched it, was dictated by the medium's apparent potential drawing power. Only later did Handel have to cope once more with the caprice of musical Londoners, when works such as
Hercules
,
Belshazzar
and
Theodora
foundered, and there is nothing to prove that he would not,
guaranteed materially and artistically favourable conditions, have returned to the operatic stage.

He and Heidegger between them had collected a dependable cast for the new season, most of them singers for whom Handel had never written before. Besides Montagnana and Merighi, there was Maria Antonia Marchesini, ‘La Lucchesina', a mezzo, and Elizabeth Duparc, known as ‘La Francesina', whose ‘natural warble, and agility of voice' clearly pleased the composer and who was destined to take Strada's place as his prima donna in the coming decade. The finest acquisition was another of those superb castrato stars whom Handel, presumably with the aid of local Italian contacts, was always able to select as the focus of his company. This year it was the great Gaetano Majorano,
detto il Caffarelli
, vain and quarrelsome both in his professional and his private life but a performer who made an unforgettable impression upon all who heard him and a worthy rival to Farinelli.

The season opened at the King's Theatre, Haymarket, on Tuesday, 3 January 1738, with the première of
Faramondo
, whose composition had originally been broken off for writing the Funeral Anthem the previous year. The new piece was a
succès d'estime
: eight performances was a modest run, but the first night played ‘to a splendid Audience, and met with general Applause. It being the first Time of Mr Handel's Appearance this Season, he was honour'd with extraordinary and repeated Signs of Approbation.' Newburgh Hamilton and the Wentworth children were loyally admiring. ‘Every body seems to like Pharamond the new opera vastly & they say Caffrielli is a much better person than Farinelli; but I do not hear any body likes his voice near so well . . .' wrote Lady Lucy to the Earl her father, ‘. . . tis mightily liked, twas so applauded that Mr Hamilton who would not doe less than another body, when Mr Handel was in ye Case, clap'd till his arms aked.'

So he should have done, for if
Faramondo
is scarcely a well-knit dramatic masterpiece, it has a forcefulness of concept and expression lacking in the operas of the preceding season, and certainly deserved to fare better. The libretto is a ruthlessly truncated version of a drama by the prolific Habsburg
poeta cesareo
Apostolo Zeno, originally set by Carlo Pollarolo for Venice in 1699. Reflecting Zeno's typical penchant for recherché barbarian backgrounds (witness, for example,
Ambleto
, his treatment of the Hamlet story,
Gianguir
, set in the India of the Moghul emperor Jehangir, or the Chinese
Teuzzone
) the story, shot through with passion and violence, concerns the fortunes of Faramondo, King of the Franks (the historical Pharamond) confronted with the implacable vindictiveness of Gustavo, ruler of the Cimbri, sworn to avenge his dead son Sveno. However ineptly reduced, such a drama, with its constant plot twists and powerfully sketched characters, is bound to have appealed to Handel and his response was suitably enthusiastic.

The overture, managing to make the traditional Lullian opening sound distinctly unorthodox and to carry this individuality over into the superbly wrought concerto movement that follows, is one of the best from these years and sets the tone of solid craftsmanship that prevails throughout the entire work. The six principals (there are two additional minor roles) share in a series of splendidly imaginative arias, often drawing upon the striking array of chromatic effects which forms such a marked feature of Handel's style in this opera. Caffarelli's music, as Faramondo, represents some of the most opulently expressive the composer ever produced for a castrato (his range appears to have been C to G) and such dramatic predominance identifies him as the star performer in a way denied to either of the female leads, Clotilde and Rosimonda. The variety among his airs, from ‘Si, tornerò a morir' and ‘Poi che pria di morire', in which Handel squeezes pathos from gently flowing rhythms and major tonalities, to the bouncing insouciance of ‘Se ben mi lusinga' and the nervous chromatic steps forming the centre-piece of ‘Voglio che sia l'indegno', enhances his right to round off the work with an extended festive envoi, coloured by a brace of horns, which leads directly to the ornate reprise making up the closing coro.

Nothing, however, can quite rescue the drama from the weakness of its text as set by Handel. Admirable in themselves as are numbers like Clotilde's ‘Combattuta da due venti', where the composer's piquant sense of humour uses the modulations of the vocal line to portray a ship tacking between the contrary winds described in the counterpoint of the string accompaniment, or ‘Caro, cara, tu mi accendi', her Act III duet with her ever-loyal swain Adolfo, their perfections of design overburden the superficiality of the libretto, and that ideal balance which in the best opera seria is achieved between the recitative and the arias is here never reached.

Faramondo
is thus a highly distinguished casualty among Handel's operas, transfused as it is with his customary alert, comprehensive intelligence. Such a quality is emphasized rather than diminished by the knowledge that the work is an elaboration of musical shapes and ideas found in an opera of the same name written for the Roman carnival season of 1720 by Francesco Gasparini. Handel's close attention to Gasparini's handling of rhythms had shown itself years before in
Tamerlano
, certain of whose airs use the earlier composer's work as a springboard, and in
Faramondo
the allusion is strengthened by similarities in the choice of various keys. He probably borrowed the Gasparini score from Charles Jennens, future librettist of
Saul
and
Belshazzar
, who was being supplied with contemporary Italian music by his friend Edward Holdsworth, ‘bear-leader' to young noblemen on the Grand Tour.

A return to the Italian fountainhead of his vocal style colours not only
Faramondo
but also its successor,
Serse
. For this Handel turned to a setting by his old Academy associate and rival Giovanni Bononcini, using both the text and whole sections of the music from his 1694 Roman version. The borrowings, as so often with Handel, are no mere plagiarisms, but inspired transformations and elaborations of the original. The libretto is a systematic revision by Silvio Stampiglia (Handel used a shortened version) of a typical Venetian romantic mishmash, loosely alluding to events in the life of King Xerxes (we get both the famous bridge of boats across the Hellespont and his ‘strange Lydian love, the platane tree') by Nicolò Minato for Cavalli in 1654. Stampiglia made an excellent job of adapting Minato's libretto to the altered conditions of eighteenth-century opera while retaining its fundamental buoyancy and wit. The characterization is of the very firmest, with a strong contrast offered from the outset between the tenderness and sensitivity of Romilda, pining for love of Serse's brother Arsamene, and the sexual ruthlessness of her sister Atalanta, calculating to the very last. In addition to Serse's rejected sweetheart Amastre,
en travesti
as a warrior, Stampiglia retains another Venetian stock figure, the comic servant Elviro, who acts as go-between and commentator in the comedy. As for Serse himself, he is throughout presented as a heroic blunderer, flamboyant and preposterous in his passionate gesticulations and only brought to his senses by threats of suicide from the long-suffering Amastre.

It was by no means a conventional drama, but Handel's eclecticism made him able to contrive splendidly appropriate solutions for its more recherché moments. In outline, structure and scoring it is the most unusual of all his operas and its blithe disregard of the rigid da capo and exit conventions observed elsewhere may have helped to win for it that acclaim which has made it the most often performed of all his operas in our own day. Several numbers recur either in the form of ironic quotations or else as repetitions for dramatic effect, and the coro employs the formula devised in
Faramondo
by resuming the serenities of Romilda's ‘Caro voi siete all'alma'. That delicacy of touch which evokes Mozartian associations whenever the opera is discussed gets to work from the start in the arresting opening to Act I. Alone in his Persian garden Serse apostrophizes the plane tree in the gentle larghetto ‘Ombra mai fu' better known to Victorian organists as ‘Handel's Largo': Arsamene appears, on the other side of the garden, with Elviro, and they listen enraptured to the music for recorders, muted strings and pizzicato bass which so memorably introduces Romilda, singing, like Wagner's Brangäne, from a belvedere. Snatches of her song and its ritornello are interrupted by the comments of the listeners, joined by Serse himself, who realizes that the singer is distantly mocking his ‘vegetable love', and the scene closes with a light-hearted cabaletta for Romilda.

Ultimately
Serse
's strength lies in the remarkable consistency of its aims. The balance between banter and seriousness is maintained through an insistence on the validity of human emotions, no matter how absurd the circumstances giving rise to them. Thus Serse's ‘Più che penso', springing though it does from erotic obsessions that are more than a little ridiculous, dignifies the release of feeling in one of Handel's most majestic outpourings, yet the very stateliness of its dotted rhythms and demisemiquaver flourishes hints at an ambiguous pomposity typical of Serse himself.

What audiences made of all this we do not know. It was not, as has sometimes been stated, Handel's only comic opera, but it was the first since
Atalanta
to lay so strong an emphasis on light-hearted amorous intrigue. It was also his only opera after
Almira
to feature an old-fashioned Spanish-style comedy servant, and Elviro's street cries, in his disguise as a flower seller in Act II, may have raised an eyebrow or two. Handel's sketchbooks contain a notation of at least one among London's innumerable cries,
from a man selling matches in Tyburn Road (now Oxford Street) and his friend Lady Luxborough later informed the poet William Shenstone that he ‘has told me that the hints of his very best songs have several of them been owing to the sounds in his ears of cries in the street', but the Haymarket audience, even if inured by now to ballad opera, can hardly have expected this sort of thing in a full-length Italian lyric drama.

Serse
flopped after only five performances and was never revived in Handel's lifetime. Lord Shaftesbury blamed the indifferent singing and the short-breathed airs, which ‘fall without any recitative intervening from one into another that tis difficult to understand', but praised it as ‘a capital opera notwithstanding that tis called a ballad one'. Not, in any case, that the season was a success. The biggest draws were Giovanni Battista Pescetti's
La Conquista del Vello d'Oro
and Veracini's
Partenio
, on eight and nine nights respectively.
Alessandro Severo
, a Handelian pasticcio with a new overture and five fresh arias, only had six performances and we can appreciate the spirit in which Heidegger, on 24 May, slipped into his notice to potential subscribers for next season the caveats ‘in case the Opera should not go on . . . provided I can agree with the Performers . . . in case the Money is not paid'. As it happened, none of the Haymarket soloists except Francesina and perhaps Lucchesina stayed on, since the impresario could not gather enough subscriptions to pay them. His ominous announcement to that effect in the
London Daily Post
of 26 July stated that ‘I could not agree with the singers, though I offered
ONE THOUSAND GUINEAS
to
one
of them.' Caffarelli maybe?