Handel (51 page)

Some indication that the concerts had been fairly lucrative is given by the record of Handel's purchase, on 10 April, of £1,300 worth of three per cent annuities. Any momentary complacency, however, must have been alloyed by yet another of those cabals that sprang up against the wretched composer throughout his London career. It might have been thought that at fifty-nine, an international celebrity with a devoted English following, he could have been left alone to enjoy a discreet triumph or two. After all, he had earned it. The 1743–44 season had nevertheless brought in its wake a quarrel with the Prince of Wales (its details are obscure) and implacable hostility from Margaret, Lady Brown, wife of the Paymaster of the King's Works.
A well-known concert hostess and patroness of ‘foreign musicians in general, of the new Italian style', she was in danger, Burney tells us, of having her windows broken for holding her music parties on Sundays. Her anti-Handel campaign may have had something to do with his refusal to lend his talents to the Middlesex opera scheme, though the fact that the Browns had formerly lived in Venice suggests a possible connexion with Italian singers who had quarrelled with the composer (Senesino perhaps?). When Mrs Delany wrote that ‘Semele has a strong party against it, viz. the fine ladies, petit maitres and
ignoramus's
', and added that ‘all the opera people are enraged at Handel' she was pointing the way towards an unexpected opposition, which gathered ground throughout the year.

The storm broke in the early days of 1745, when Handel had already opened his new season. This time the oratorios were given not at Covent Garden but on his old battleground at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket, whose management was presumably encouraged by a decent box office at the rival establishment the previous spring. Twenty-four concerts were planned, starting with
Deborah
and
Semele
as runners-up to the first new work,
Hercules
, premièred on 5 January. Few first nights can have been more disastrous, if we are to judge from the nobly pathetic letter Handel sent to the
Daily Advertiser
twelve days later. ‘As I perceived that joining good Sense and significant Words to Musick', he wrote,

was the best Method of recommending this to an English Audience; I have directed my Studies that way, and endeavour'd to shew, that the English Language, which is so expressive of the sublimest Sentiments is the best adapted of any to the full and solemn Kind of Musick . . . I am assur'd that a Nation, whose Characteristick is Good Nature, would be affected with the Ruin of any Man, which was owing to his Endeavours to entertain them. I am likewise persuaded, that I shall have the Forgiveness of those noble Persons, who have honour'd me with their Patronage, and their Subscription this Winter, if I beg their Permission to stop short, before my Losses are too great to support . . . and I intreat them to withdraw three Fourths of their Subscription, one Fourth Part only of my Proposal having been perform'd.

Judging from its style, the letter was presumably drafted by one of Handel's friends,
with his signature appended, but the effect was a wave of sympathy towards him, which did honour to his subscribers. The very next day an anonymous declaration of loyalty from some of them was published in the
Daily Advertiser
, touchingly rounded off with the words: ‘I would lament the Loss of the Publick in Mr Handel, in Strains equal to his if I was able, but our Concern will be best express'd by our Generosity . . . Your obedient Servants, Subscribers.' On the 21st the
Advertiser
issued an admiring address to the composer by an unnamed but tolerably competent satirist, comparing him to Orpheus savaged by the Thracian maenads, and making explicit reference to Lady Brown:

but promising that national honour would ultimately be vindicated in the favours yet to be shown the composer. The gratifying upshot of such reactions was a general refusal to withdraw subscription money, for which Handel thanked his patrons in a further letter to the paper on the 25th, adding that he would ‘in some Time proceed with the Oratorios, let the
Risque
which I may run be what it will'.

The ‘Risque' was not sufficient to ensure the success of
Hercules
, aptly described in the advertisements as ‘a new Musical Drama' and as such never destined to capture public favour during Handel's lifetime. To be fair to Lady Brown and her coterie it was not only they who kept away the audiences. Mrs Cibber, in the newly expanded role of Lichas, fell ill on the first night and those bemused by
Semele
, angry at what may have seemed like yet another attempt to steal a march on the opera managers or disgusted by the presentation of such blatantly secular fare amid musical treatments of holy Scripture, were no doubt unwilling to be persuaded.

It was their loss, for
Hercules
, though its libretto lacks the distinction of
Semele
, stands beside it as one of the peaks of Handel's dramatic achievement, among those very few operatic works in the half-century before Gluck and Mozart which, by overwhelming the limitations of a traditional style, create a discourse of their own.
Fusing several of Handel's favourite plot interests, the violence of wifely jealousy, the relationships of parents and children, the collapse of the individual beneath a weight of personal folly and obsession, and the tension between private agony and public performance, its classical world mingles nervous radiance and anguished darkness like some canvas of the Italian Baroque. The union of Hyllus and Iole, the young prince and princess, which concludes the piece possesses a sort of exhausted determination to retain whatever order is left after the tragedy of their doomed elders, Hercules and Dejanira, has hewn out its course. The effect recalls
Tamerlano
and
Alcina
: we are less interested in those who survive than those who have departed from view.

Based on Sophocles's
Trachiniae
, with touches from Ovid, the drama, most capably managed by Thomas Broughton, a Salisbury clergyman, tells the story of Hercules's return from war in Oechalia with the captive Iole and the groundless suspicions of Dejanira, whose use of the poisoned shirt of Nessus in a misguided effort at winning back the love she believes lost leads to the hero's death and her own insanity. The recipe, as far as Handel was concerned, was the one perfected in
Semele
, a concentration not simply upon exhibiting voices and characters, but on a clear relationship between musical form and dramatic episode, on the validity of aria and recitative as vehicles of expression and, most interesting of all, on the essential function of the chorus.

The musical language of
Hercules
is, quite deliberately, more restrained, less elastic than we mostly find in the oratorios. Yet this only strengthens the work. Hyllus's ‘Where congeal'd the northern streams' or Dejanira's ‘The world, when day's career is run', both in Act I, ideally fulfil the terms of Baroque aria in expanding thoughts and desires which the formalities of recitative have kept constricted. Too heavily conditioned by the type of opera that celebrates complete emotional indulgence, we easily forget that much of the real power of opera seria at its best (and
Hercules
is a sophisticated variant on the form) lies in what its characters are forced to suppress and in the struggle between anarchic personal conflict and a dignified orthodoxy in outward behaviour: Iole's grief-stricken re-enactment of her father's death becomes, by the very nature of its tortured harmonic structure, a protest against the complacency of her captors and a harbinger of the ensuing debacle. By the close of the drama the ceremonious declamatory frameworks of the eighteenth-century lyric stage have dissolved into the dying gasps of the ravaged Hercules and for Dejanira a mad scene without parallel in the music of the age.

‘It seems to me that he is a little mad,' said Count Flemming years before: now Handel's eccentricities were distinctly pronounced, and friends occasionally feared for his reason. Lunacy was a more immediate and accessible phenomenon to his period than to ours, as Hogarth's
Rake's Progress
cycle famously demonstrates, and like many an imaginative genius Handel may now and then have contemplated the thin defences of his own sanity. His handling of Dejanira's madness, with its alternations of snarling rage and delusively wistful calm, buoyed up by a free manipulation of tempo and key, has an eerie authenticity about it which makes the episode more deeply disturbing than the mad scenes of Italian opera, such as that of his own
Orlando
.

The chorus lend weight and solemnity to the piece, as well as a note of rejoicing to lighten the gathering gloom. In the tremendous rhythmic swirl of ‘Crown with festal pomp the day', with its trumpets and drums and Slavonic hints from Telemann's
Musique de Table
, Handel gave them one of his most infectiously breezy numbers. He also rewarded them with the piece which, more than any other, encapsulates the essence of the tragedy. Like its counterpart ‘Envy, eldest born of hell' in
Saul
, ‘Jealousy, infernal pest' occupies a focal point in the drama, casting a prophetic shadow over events to come. In order to focus concentration, Handel paid special attention to the form of the piece, casting it as a rondo introduced by a series of unison string figures climbing down through the bass in diminished sevenths and thence battered into nothingness by the savagely discordant entry of the voices.

Once again it is tempting to suppose that a score of
Hercules
may ultimately have found its way to Vienna, for there are premonitory echoes of late Mozart and Beethoven in this chorus. However much informed musical opinion may have admired the work, it was another in the array of brilliant commercial failures that punctuated Handel's 1744 and 1745 seasons. His London audience, still fairly unsophisticated and conventional in its musical tastes, was simply not prepared to accept an English opera without the bonus of star singers and the usual trimmings of handsome sets and costumes, as Jennens sensibly pointed out to Holdsworth. Renting the opera house at £400 and buying a new organ for the concerts must have set Handel back,
but to give ‘an English Opera call'd Hercules . . . on Saturdays, during the run of Plays, Concerts, Assemblys, Drums, Routs, Hurricanes, & all the madness of Town Diversions' was to court disaster. He would have done better, said Jennens, to stick to his Covent Garden Wednesday and Friday series, where a mere dozen evenings in each case had brought him in £2,100 and £1,600 respectively.

Handel and Jennens had been in collaboration again, despite their differences over
Messiah
, during the summer and autumn of 1744, and the composer's letters to his librettist are precious to us not only because so little of his correspondence, private or professional, actually survives, but because they give us an invaluable insight into his working methods and prove, if proof is needed, how seriously he took the whole business of setting words to music. The last of Jennens's three fine ‘scripture collections' for Handel (possibly four if he provided the text for
Israel in Egypt
) was a dramatic oratorio on the story of Belshazzar's feast, the prophecies of Daniel and the siege of Babylon by King Cyrus of Persia. It shares with
Saul
and
Messiah
an overall sense of a refined literary taste at work, allied to an intelligent awareness of Handel's own priorities as a musical dramatist. However meanly Jennens may sometimes have felt towards Handel, he was never lacking in appreciation of his true gifts, and in
Belshazzar
he furnished precisely the sort of stirring and colourful narrative line the composer's fancy most readily seized upon.

Though his English summers by now often included visits to country friends and admiring aristocratic amateurs, Handel was still in London when, on 9 June 1744, he wrote to Jennens saying that he should be ‘extreamly glad to receive the first Act, or what is ready of the new Oratorio with which you intend to favour me'. Ten days later he was eagerly reading the first instalment: ‘Your reasons for the Length of the first act are intirely Satisfactory to me, and it is likewise my Opinion to have the following Act short.' He settled down in the meantime to composing
Hercules
, and Jennens's second act had arrived by 21 August.
Belshazzar
itself was started two days afterwards and on 13 September he was writing: ‘Your most excellent Oratorio has given me great Delight in setting it to Musick and still engages me warmly. It is indeed a Noble Piece, very grand and uncommon; it has furnished me with Expressions, and has given me Opportunity to some particular Ideas, besides so many great Chorus's.' By 2 October the last act was ready, but Handel was having doubts about the oratorio's length: ‘ . . . if I should extend the Musick, it would last 4 hours and more,' he wrote, ‘I retrench'd already a great deal of the musick, that I might preserve the Poetry as much as I could, yet still it may be shortened,' subsequently going into detail as to the layout of the final movement.

This last letter offers valuable supporting evidence to that presented by the manuscripts that Handel nearly always composed with a specific group of singers in mind. The parts in
Belshazzar
were cast long before the work's first performance, on 27 March 1745. Under the circumstances it is needless to add that it was a total failure. The loyalty of Handel's partisans had not helped to fill the King's Theatre and one of his most impressive artistic achievements was favoured with a beggarly three performances. ‘This proved a very bad season, and he performed with considerable loss,' noted Lord Shaftesbury. The bluestocking Elizabeth Carter wrote at greater length to her friend Catherine Talbot, with some meaningful italics: ‘Handel, once so crowded, plays to empty walls in that opera house, where there used to be a constant
audience
as long as there were any dancers to be
seen
. Unfashionable as I am, I was I own highly delighted the other night at his last oratorio. 'Tis called Belshazzar, the story the taking of Babylon by Cyrus; and the music, in spite of all that very bad performers could do to spoil it, equal to any thing I ever heard. There is a chorus of Babylonians deriding Cyrus from their walls, that has the best expression of scornful laughter imaginable.'