Handel (8 page)

Scarlatti, meanwhile, had retreated to Venice, whose vibrant theatrical life would surely offer some profitable operatic commissions. Handel seems to have followed him there as soon as his Florence engagement ended, and by January 1708 we find the two composers meeting at a carnival party. As Mainwaring tells us, ‘while [Handel] was playing on a harpsichord in his visor [mask] Scarlatti happened to be there, and affirmed that it could be no one but the famous Saxon, or the devil. Being thus detected, he was strongly importuned to compose an Opera. But there was so little prospect of either honour or advantage from such an undertaking that he was very unwilling to engage in it.'

This reluctance is somewhat puzzling. Venice at that time had the most active and influential operatic culture in Europe and most composers would have jumped at the chance to write for one of the city's many theatres.
Honour and advantage alike were there for the taking. Handel seems to have restricted himself on this occasion to absorbing what the carnival season had to offer in the way of musical entertainment. Among the operas being presented, Handel almost certainly heard
La Partenope
by Antonio Caldara, whose move to Rome the following year brought him the patronage of Marchese Ruspoli. On the text used by Caldara, an abridgment of Silvio Stampiglia's libretto originally written in Naples in 1690, Handel would later base his own
Partenope
, a sparkling and sophisticated erotic comedy. Elsewhere among the Venetian theatres, the opera which probably interested Handel most and made a decided impact on his own style was Alessandro Scarlatti's
Mitridate Eupatore
, whose grandeur of outline and boldness of design – the story dispenses with the happy ending customary in Baroque opera – evoked a hostile reception from Venetian opera-goers.

There was a chance as well to meet other composers in the bustling, competitive world of the four opera houses at San Cassiano, San Fantin, Sant' Angelo and San Giovanni Grisostomo, of the pious orphanages, each with its orchestra of teenage pupils, of private concerts in patrician palaces and of the great basilica of St Mark's. Yet it was not to the works of the nowadays better-known Venetian masters such as Vivaldi, Albinoni and the Marcello brothers that Handel most eagerly responded, but to the music of Antonio Lotti, organist at St Mark's, and Francesco Gasparini, Vivaldi's predecessor as director of the redoubtable band of girl instrumentalists at the Pietà foundling hospital. The former not only became a friend and supporter of Handel's music (he and his wife were among the most vociferous partisans
of Agrippina
, written for Venice two years later) but left a mark on the young man's aria style and even on his choral writing: the latter, already well known in Roman and Florentine circles which had welcomed Handel, was to furnish a significant source for his later borrowings.

The spring of 1708 found Handel returning to Rome and the Ruspoli palace, where an exciting and ambitious new commission was awaiting him. For Easter Sunday and Monday of that year the Marquis was planning to present a large-scale oratorio on the theme of Christ rising from the dead, to a text by his fellow Arcadian Carlo Sigismondo Capeci. Extensive preparations were begun in the palace itself,
where a special stage was set up in the largest of the
saloni
. Its principal decoration was a large painting of the Resurrection by Ceruti, framed by the Ruspoli arms, with an ornate frontispiece showing the work's full title,
Oratorio per la resurrezione di Nostro Signor Gesu Cristo
in letters cut out of transparent paper and lit from behind by seventy lanterns. Crimson, yellow and scarlet hangings in damask and velvet adorned the hall, where light from sixteen candelabra allowed the immense audiences to read their wordbooks (1,500 of them, suggesting packed houses on each day).

For the orchestra special music stands were made, their legs shaped like fluted cornucopiae, painted with the arms of Ruspoli and his wife Isabella, and a platform was devised for the concertino strings, led by Corelli. The full band consisted of thirty-eight string players, two trumpets and four oboes, who could presumably double on flute and recorder. Handel himself was taken good care of by the Marchese, as the household accounts reveal in their details of a bed and bedcovers hired from the Jews of the ghetto, whose chief line of business this was, and of the substantial bills for his food – a healthy indulgence in the pleasures of the table would stay with him till the end of his life.

The first of the sumptuously stage-managed performances (nondramatic, of course) went off successfully in a fashion typical of Ruspoli concerts, but news that Margherita Durastanti had taken one of the solo roles was quick to reach the ears of the Pope, who issued a scandalized admonishment to the Marchese for employing a female singer in an Easter oratorio and threatened the wretched soprano with a flogging. She was promptly replaced by a castrato called Filippo. Otherwise Ruspoli's satisfaction expressed itself in the customary lavish gifts to the performers of diamond, emerald and ruby rings.

As the grandest work Handel had so far attempted in Italy,
La Resurrezione
reflected even more powerfully than the Latin psalms those qualities of opulence and sensuality pervading the religious atmosphere of late-Baroque Rome. The oratorio form itself had been evolved in the city during the preceding century and brought to maturity in the works of composers like Carissimi and Stradella, whose sacred dramas reached out to embrace the language of the theatre without abandoning an essentially devout aim. Once again, therefore, the young Saxon master was being called upon to provide music in a genre of which his audience would have considered itself the best judge in the world,
and to strike a perfect balance between orthodox religious posture and the tastes of those to whom secular lyric drama was currently forbidden.

Thus we should not expect to find in Handel's first oratorio qualities similar to those we look for in the great English works of his maturity. The two choruses were sung by the soloists and there is nothing especially dramatic in the outline of the text. An angel champions Christ's harrowing of hell against the braggadocio of the arrogant Lucifer, while on earth Mary Cleophas and Mary Magdalene, lamenting their lost Saviour, are consoled by St John with the assurance that He will rise again on the third day. Lucifer and the angel try conclusions once more and the last scenes of the work elaborate on the women's discovery of the empty sepulchre and the joyful news brought to the Apostles.

If there is little in all this to recall the sublimities of
Messiah
,
Saul
or
Israel in Egypt
, Capeci's excellent poetry is transfigured by a score of unabashed richness, in which Handel concentrates on arias that are effectively a series of detailed emotional studies, designed to heighten our awareness of individual moods, as opposed to adding anything to a composite character portrait or to illuminating a central theme. Even by the standards of the Ruspoli–Ottoboni–Pamphilj world there is an exceptional reliance here on the varying strands of orchestral sound. In Maria Maddalena's ‘Ferma l'ali' we are invited to admire the suppleness of the vocal line while simultaneously being wooed by a pair of recorders, muted violins and viola da gamba. Trumpets add lustre to Cleofe's ‘Vedo il ciel', but the rising sun evoked by Giovanni in ‘Ecco il sol' is portrayed with an elegant economy through simple use of an ornate continuo line – in the end Handel's trust was founded upon his basses.

With the success of
La Resurrezione
still reverberating, Handel left Rome for Naples in May 1708. His departure was doubtless hastened by the unexpected intensity with which the war in Italy now gathered momentum. Encouraged by a gradual weakening in political support for England's share in the conflict, the French had stepped up their military effort in Flanders and Spain, and the Austrians were now constrained to follow suit. The fall of Mantua to the imperial troops the previous year had not simply served to enrich the cast of
Vincer se stesso è la maggior vittoria
with the singers of its dethroned duke.
Pope Clement's wavering neutrality was now severely threatened and an army under Marshal Count Daun actually appeared at the gates of Rome itself en route to Naples. The point has been very well made that the situation in Italy during these years was bad enough to undermine the traditional sources of local patronage towards musicians of all kinds and to create the
diaspora artistica
which sent many composers and instrumentalists of the highest quality wandering through Europe in search of secure employment.

Naples was hardly the safest of places. A strong Austrian military presence under the command of Prince Philip of Hesse Darmstadt upheld viceregal rule in the name of Archduke Charles as King of Spain. Just before Handel arrived the rough and ready Count Daun was superseded as viceroy by a man of very different stamp, to whom the composer was probably recommended by Cardinal Pamphilj. One of the most powerful figures in the whole of Italy, Vincenzo Grimani came of a Venetian noble family, several of whose members had held high offices of state and two of whom were actually doges. Related to the Mantuan Gonzagas through his mother, he had used his connexions in tireless political activity on Austria's behalf. The cardinal's hat he had gained from Innocent XII in 1697 was probably a good deal less important to him than the gift of abbeys in Lombardy and Hungary from the Emperor Leopold, for whom, as ambassador to Turin, he had secured the alliance of the Duke of Savoy. Promptly banished from Venice for his pro-Austrian activities, Grimani went on further imperial missions to London and The Hague, and began to intrigue from a distance against the Spanish government in Naples. His involvement in the Congiura di Macchia, a conspiracy of Neapolitan nobles in 1701 to assassinate the Spanish viceroy, was widely suspected. Seven years later he himself assumed viceregal powers, winning popularity among the Neapolitans for his efficiency and fairness in sorting out civic finances, consolidating the administration of justice and reducing the burden of church taxes on ordinary citizens, a measure that earned criticism from an already hostile Pope Clement. No wonder the great Neapolitan savant Giambattista Vico praised him as ‘energetic in temperament, rich in resources, determined in action'.

His path and Handel's were shortly and significantly to cross. The Cardinal, to whose attention the composer was probably recommended by Cardinal Pamphilj,
may have helped to secure him his one important Neapolitan commission, the serenata
Aci, Galatea e Polifemo
, probably written for the wedding of the Duke of Alvito to Donna Beatrice di Sanseverino, daughter of the Prince of Monte Mileto, in June. The Duke was markedly pro-Austrian, having sent his servants to do homage to the imperial authority when the troops first arrived in Naples, and was to celebrate the Archduke's conquest of Sardinia that September with a serenata by Domenico Sarro, but the natural urge to find political allusions in everything Handel wrote at this time can be carried to excess.
Aci, Galatea e Polifemo
is neither more nor less than what it pretends to be, a dramatic cantata with instruments to adorn an aristocratic wedding feast.

Its interest for us, of course, lies partly in the fact that one of Handel's best-known works was written on the same subject, drawn from Ovid and Theocritus, exactly ten years later. The outline of the libretto, by the Neapolitan poet Nicola Giuvo, is similar to that
of Acis and Galatea
itself, save that here there is none of the jubilation which rounds off the later work after Galatea has turned Acis into a river god, with the chorus telling her to dry her tears. She simply runs off to indulge her sorrows on the seashore and the work closes with a trio, scored for two trumpets, oboes and strings, in which all three characters, directing their words presumably at the newly wed duke and duchess, declare that ‘he who loves best has truth and constancy as his objects'.

However modestly proportioned, the piece attracts by virtue of its musical characterization and diversity of orchestral shadings. Galatea, even if she lacks the strength of will with which her English avatar so wonderfully triumphs, is a figure fully rounded in her two simile arias and the languishing ‘Se m'ami, o caro', an affecting miniature with a tiny middle section, in which two cellos paint her passionate sighs in quavers punctuated by rests. Polifemo is the Polyphemus of ‘O ruddier than the cherry' but both more grotesque and more menacing through the versatility demanded of him by the enormous compass of ‘Fra l'ombre e gli orrori', for instance: it is noteworthy that Handel refurbished this aria many years later to give to his ablest Italian bass, Antonio Montagnana, in
Sosarme
. None of the airs, in any case, exactly reproduces the orchestral balance of another, so that the ear is continually engaged by shifting sonorities.

The Alvito wedding serenata apart, Handel's Neapolitan visit was more of a prolonged summer holiday than anything else. He composed comparatively little during these months, but despite the background of political unrest there was plenty to interest him on the city's musical scene. The famous conservatories, such as that nursery of great castrati, the Poveri di Gesù Cristo, were already acquiring the reputation for fine teachers and performers, which so allured travellers of later decades; there was the Royal Chapel, of which Scarlatti himself became master, there were churches humming with every sort of sacred music, and a notable operatic tradition, incorporating those touches of popular comedy so characteristic of the true Neapolitan spirit.

In August, however, it was time for him to return to Rome, where Ruspoli and the cardinal patrons awaited him. Refreshed by his southern jaunt Handel turned, with the energy that never left him, to cantata composing, producing almost a third of his entire output in the medium during this busy autumn of 1708. There were pieces of all kinds for the copyist Angelini, nicknamed ‘Panstufato' (literally ‘stewed bread') to write out from the composer's vigorously sketched manuscripts – amorous remonstrances like
Se pari è la tua fe
and
Dite mie pianti
, cantatas with instruments, such as
Amarilli vezzosa
, and one oddity, a work in praise of the master himself,
Hendel, non può mia musa
, by no less than the admiring Pamphilj. The words and music were apparently improvised at an Arcadian assembly, as the opening makes clear. ‘Handel, my muse cannot in an instant make verses worthy of your lyre,' says the Cardinal, comparing the composer to Orpheus, as he was to be compared ad nauseam in England, and celebrating his ability to draw poetry from ‘a plectrum which has lain so long unused upon an aged tree'. Thanks to a marginal jotting made decades later by his friend Charles Jennens on a copy of Mainwaring's biography we know exactly what Handel thought of such fal-lal. ‘“An old Fool!” I ask'd “Why Fool? because he wrote an Oratorio? perhaps you will call
me
fool for the same reason!” He answer'd “So I would, if you flatter'd me, as He did.”' But that did not stop him from setting Pamphilj's little
jeu d'esprit
to music.