Handel (6 page)

The effects of the master's music itself upon his own style are not so much heard as felt within the framework of the pieces Handel composed during this period, through the creation of structures immediately recalling those used in Corelli's concertos (which, though not published until 1714, may already have been known in manuscript). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the setting of Psalm 110,
Dixit Dominus domino meo
, which Handel completed in the April of 1707. The Corellian lyricism and suppleness of the string writing determine the character of the entire work, essentially a series of vocal concerto movements, relentless in its momentum and dazzling in its grandeur of design.

The stylistic synthesis is not only between Handel and Corelli but draws together elements from the composer's German church training of Halle days and features which suggest that he must have begun to study the work of earlier Italian masters, Antonio Stradella, Giacomo Carissimi, Giovanni Paolo Colonna (in whom Boyce was later to detect an obvious Handelian model) and maybe even works by Monteverdi and his accomplished assistant at St Mark's, Alessandro Grandi, whose own strikingly idiosyncratic
Dixit Dominus
was published in 1629. The sturdy
cantus firmus
of ‘
donec ponam inimicos tuos
' in the first movement could pass as easily for a Latin psalm tone as for a Lutheran chorale (it is not unlike
Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme
) but the pattern of contrasts between soli and five-part chorus, and the double fugue setting
‘Tu es sacerdos in aeternum'
marching against the rushing semi-quavers of ‘
secundum ordinem Melchisedech
' are quintessentially Italian in idiom. This very movement Handel was to use again, more than thirty years later, in
Israel in Egypt
, a work that achieves the same sort of fusion, albeit on a far grander scale, through the remarkable diversity of its allusions.

There is no record of a first performance for the
Dixit Dominus
, but since it forms part of the Vesper Offices,
the ingenious suggestion has been made that Handel intended it as part of a far larger service, at which his settings of two other vesper psalms,
Laudate Pueri
and
Nisi Dominus
, would also be given. A Handelian Vespers, to place beside Monteverdi's set of 1610 and Mozart's
Vesperae Solennes de Confessore
is an attractive idea, though nearly three months divide the composition
of Dixit Dominus
and
Laudate Pueri
, finished on 8 July. The theory is that together with the motet
Saeviat tellus inter rigores
they may all have been given at the Carmelite church of Santa Maria di Monte Santo, in special commemoration of deliverance from the recent earthquakes. The only piece of Handel's, however, which has a definite link with such a commemoration is the motet
Donna che in ciel
for soprano, chorus and orchestra.

A more recent theory suggests that the
Dixit Dominus
was written as a
psalmus in tempore belli
, to be sung in the presence of the Spanish ambassador Don Pedro Tellez, Duke of Uceda, at the hill town of Frascati north of Rome. On 20 April 1707, fearing the advance of an imperial army against Rome itself, the Duke, inviting fifty guests to join him, had fled the city. Once safely ensconced at Frascati, he offered his friends a banquet to celebrate the feast of St Philip and St James on 1 May, a red-letter day in the Spanish calendar. The turbulence at the heart of Handel's
Dixit
setting, whether in the swooping string arpeggios of its opening movement or the jaggedly dramatic setting of ‘
Conquassabit caput in terra multorum
' (he shall wound the heads of many upon earth), suggests a context of war rather than the earthquakes for the psalm's first performance, though once again no documentary evidence supports the idea of such a première.

Whatever their purpose the two other psalms show us that the Roman Handel had begun as he meant to go on. The
Laudate Pueri
uses the same technique of contrasted textures (a florid solo soprano opening, for example, balanced by rich choral writing) and explores a bewildering selection of keys (including a doom-laden switch from F to F sharp in the sixteen-bar
Quis sicut Dominus
) before homing to the original D major in the Gloria. This final movement repeats the traditional ‘As it was in the beginning' device, more deftly used in the
Dixit Dominus
, in which the sense of the words is mirrored in a reprise of the opening material. A similar ploy marks the close of the
Nisi Dominus
, whose ostinato string figure is used again to thrilling effect at the beginning of
Zadok the Priest
.
The psalm is a tiny capsule of perfectly staged
coups de théâtre
(note the miraculous stillness, for example, of
Cum dederit delectis suis somnum
, in which the voice floats above the ghostly accompaniment like a winter sun) ideally Roman, ideally Baroque, in form and idiom.

During the spring of 1707 Handel was busy in other directions. As well as his entrée to the Ottoboni household he had gained an introduction to an equally rich and influential amateur who very soon became a devoted admirer of his music. Like Ottoboni, Benedetto Pamphilj was both a cardinal and the great-nephew of a pope. Innocent X raised him to the purple in 1681 and his musical patronage embraced several of those who performed at the Cancelleria, including Corelli and Scarlatti, for whom he wrote libretti. As a poet he was not without talent. Handel clearly appreciated the musicality of his verses and various cantata texts are certainly his. On a much larger scale Pamphilj produced a work in the genre identified as ‘moral cantata', to be set by Handel possibly for one of Ottoboni's concerts.
Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno nella Bellezza ravveduta
(The Triumph of Time and Truth over Beauty repentant) has never really received the attention it deserves from Handel enthusiasts. The fact that he returned to it on two subsequent occasions, thirty and fifty years respectively after the first version, suggests that he maintained some sort of special interest or involvement in the work. At any rate the libretto is certainly no worse than many others he came to set, and in overall smoothness and elegance often a good deal better.

The underlying idea is the kind of moral abstract cherished by the Baroque imagination. Cantatas in this style
^*(d)
were based on the notion of ‘The world's wicked vanities' and had titles like ‘How Deceitful Are Our Pleasures!', ‘Teach Me How To Die' or ‘The Contest Between Wisdom And Holiness'. In
Il Trionfo
Time and Truth oppose Pleasure in a combat for the allegiance of Beauty, who eventually yields to them after being offered visions of what will happen if she chooses the alternative. Pleasure is finally sent packing, in a burst of resentment, when Beauty casts her away after another look in the faithful glass, which she has invoked in the opening aria. As dramatic material there is nothing especially promising in all this,
but it gave Handel the chance to develop a distinctive aria style which, though it absorbs material from the Hamburg years, is very different from anything he had evolved earlier. Something of the sweep and exuberance of his mature operatic manner is here already, underpinned by a rich scoring, which includes paired recorders, plentiful work for solo oboe and violin, and a sinfonia with an organ solo, whisking a somewhat bewildered Beauty into the Domain of Pleasure. Several of the numbers have, besides, a genuine distinction, which transcends the imaginative limits of Pamphilj's text. There is an extended quartet, in which Handel plays with the word ‘tempo' as Beauty pleads for time to consider her choice, while Time, Truth and Pleasure throw in their arguments. Among the arias ‘Urne voi', Time's exclamation of dignified outrage at frail Beauty's sheer insolence, is justly admired for its harmonic boldness. A sequence of jagged chords in F minor (one of Handel's favourite ‘special effect' keys) forms the starting point for what ultimately becomes a shattering vision of anarchic gloom, as the urns of dead beauties are commanded to yield up their grisly treasures.

The overture to
Il Trionfo
may well have been the source of a famously contentious moment between the young composer and Corelli. As leader of the Ottoboni band, Corelli had some difficulty in satisfying Handel's demands as to style and execution; impetuous as ever, Handel snatched the violin from the master's hand and the Hamburg second fiddle tried to show one of Europe's finest instrumentalists how to play. Corelli, whose typical modesty hid a sly sense of humour, answered: ‘But my dear Saxon, this music is in the French style, and I don't understand that sort of thing at all.' In fact, as his own compositions show, he understood it very well, and if the remark was intended to put Handel gently in his place it probably succeeded.

Under the name of Arcomelo, Corelli was a member of the prestigious Accademia Arcadiana, founded in 1690 and including Ottoboni, Pamphilj and the bizarre figure of Queen Maria Casimira of Poland, a disappointing substitute for the lamented Queen Christina of Sweden, whose patronage had been so valuable to seventeenth-century Roman musicians. The Arcadians, led by influential critics such as Giovanni Maria Crescimbeni and Carlo Gravina, set out to refine literary expression among contemporary Italian writers: as apostles of order and dignity in art they represent a significant element in a more general trend,
which was to carry opera along with it and which inevitably had its effect upon Handel. The whole cast of the Accademia Arcadiana was emphatically pastoral. Its members were all pseudonymous classical shepherds and the annals of the society were written up in a quaintly rustic fashion – for example, Ottoboni's enormous palace becomes ‘the hut of the famed Crateo'. Membership was open to musicians. Arcangelo Corelli became an Arcadian, and in 1706 Alessandro Scarlatti and the harpsichordist Bernardo Pasquini joined the exalted swains, as Terpandro and Protico respectively.

Handel was too young to be a member, but was undoubtedly a welcome guest. The Roman climate was then agreeable enough for meetings often to take place out of doors, in an attractive amphitheatre, the Bosco Parrasio, which can still be seen within its garden on the Janiculum. The grounds belonged to Marchese Francesco Maria Ruspoli, who had joined the Arcadiana in 1691 under the name of Olinto Arsenio, soon followed by his wife Maria Isabella Cesi and their two children.

Ruspoli became Handel's most important Italian patron, but their relationship was scarcely that of master and servant. The son of the Bolognese Count Alessandro Marescotti, he had inherited the title and considerable fortune of his uncle Bartolomeo, whose father had married a Ruspoli heiress in 1616. The family now lived in some splendour at Palazzo Bonelli, on the south side of Piazza SS. Apostoli, where the Marchese's willingness to spend money on music rivalled that of the Roman cardinals. He commissioned over fifty oratorios, some of them from composers as eminent as Alessandro Scarlatti and Antonio Caldara (his
maestro di cappella
for seven years) and gave musical
conversazioni
on Sundays, celebrated for gathering together some of Rome's finest performers and for launching new compositions.

Handel's instinct for going straight to the top wherever artistic and social contacts were concerned is a notable feature of his career. He was almost certainly Ruspoli's house guest from his arrival in 1706, and his presence in the Marchese's entourage during the early months of 1707 is confirmed by documents now in the Vatican archives. The composer's role, if not officially that of a domestic musician, was that of furnishing a series of chamber cantatas to Italian texts, works exemplifying the form at its most polished, and sometimes related to specific events or festivities.

The cantata was very much a Roman musical form, developed in the mid-seventeenth century by composers such as Luigi Rossi,
Giacomo Carissimi and Antonio Cesti, using aria and recitative to create small scenes or depictions of the singer's alternating moods. There was an obvious link with opera, but the two genres always remained distinct from one another. Though certain cantatas might seem to invite staged performance, they were not intended for theatrical performance and there is no contemporary record of Handel's cantatas ever having been presented in this fashion. Given the prevailing ban on opera in Rome, this would hardly have been possible in any case.

A quick learner, Handel immediately grasped the form's expressive potential, especially in the hands of a versatile contemporary practitioner such as Alessandro Scarlatti, whose mastery led to the composition of over 500 cantatas, many of them commissioned by the more musically inclined Arcadians. During his stay in Italy Handel himself produced nearly a hundred works of this type. The existence of several manuscript copies of selected cantatas in various Italian libraries suggests that it was precisely these works for which he first became famous (a collection of twenty-three of them in the Biblioteca Marciana at Venice features two portrait caricatures, developed from the initial ‘C' of ‘cantata', one of which may even be of the composer himself ). Respect for his handling of the genre is shown in the number of contemporary copies of individual examples, such as
Sento là che ristretto
and
Se pari è la tua fe.
Admiration was well founded. The cantatas are an extensive sampler of Handel's skill in capturing a range of different moods, besides underlining that essentially human dimension which never failed to stimulate his musical imagination.

Many of them are carefully observed character portraits, by turns passionate, ironically humorous or tenderly pathetic, but tinged with a characteristically broad sympathy. Some exploit that favourite feature of Italian lyricists, the simile aria, in which the lover's state of mind is paralleled with a ship in a storm or a swallow seeking her nest. Others take us through the various phases of an emotional drama.
Tu fedel, tu costante
, for instance, shows an integration of numbers so absolute as to make the mocking simplicity of the final aria a logical counterpoise to the hysterical turbulence of the opening sinfonia. Handel was to use pieces of identical form (abrupt staccato chords followed by volleying semiquaver sequences) in
Partenope
and
Alcina
for the obviously similar purpose of precipitating crises of feeling.
In the cantata we watch the jilted girl's sense of injustice at her Fileno's sexual effrontery turn to a frank cynicism as Handel progressively lightens the music's intensity.