afar it is probably unlikely that the prospect of conflict would have
troubled over much a nature as powerful and combative as Handel’s.
Indeed, difficulties were what this prodigious vitality and ever
renewing creative inspiration best throve upon. As so often happens in
lands where opera is fundamentally an exotic people again wanted opera.
It was a logical time to end the Cannons interlude. The psychology of
the moment, to which Handel was sensitive, came just when
company-promoting took on almost the aspect of a hobby. There was money
aplenty and the South Sea Bubble, which was indeed swelling, had not yet
burst. So Lord Burlington and other peers raised capital for a new
season of Italian opera, appointed Handel director-in-chief, made the
ugly but efficient Heidegger stage manager, rounded up librettists and
sent Handel to the Continent to engage singers for what was to be known
as “The Royal Academy of Music”—an English duplication of the official
name of the Paris Opéra. And the _Weekly Journal_ soon announced that
“Mr. Handel, a famous Master of Musick, is gone beyond the sea, by order
of His Majesty, to collect a company of the choicest singers for the
Opera in the Haymarket.”
“Mr. Handel” visited Hanover, Düsseldorf, Dresden and Halle, where he
went to his birthplace “Am Schlamm”, saw his old mother, who was going
blind, and her aging spinster sister. And at this point occurred one of
the most poignant incidents of musical history—that meeting of Handel
and Bach, thwarted by an inscrutable destiny. Bach learned that his
contemporary was in Halle, went there on foot from Coethen to seek him
out and—missed him by a day! Even Bach’s subsequent dispatch of his son,
Wilhelm Friedemann, to invite Handel to visit him misfired and the two
were destined forever to remain personal strangers.
Handel secured some extraordinary singers in Dresden, where the Italian
opera was blooming. In addition to Boschi, the bass, who had sung in
“Rinaldo”, he bagged the great Signora Durastanti and the castrato
Senesino, who until the subsequent coming of the mighty Farinelli, was
perhaps the artificial soprano whom London most worshipped at a time
when castrati were completely the rage. Senesino played incredible havoc
with the hearts of deluded women. Handel, in addition to the countless
duties of a music-director had also operas to compose, and in due season
he was somehow turning out three a year. Nicola Francesco Haym supplied
him with a libretto adapted from Tacitus, “Radamisto”, and this work,
produced on April 27, 1720, was a triumph such as even Handel had never
experienced. It ran till the season ended late in June; “crowds flocked
to ‘Radamisto’ like a modern mob to a notorious prize-fight.” (Newman
Flower)
The first season of the Royal Academy finished in a flourish, aided by
the circumstance that the metropolis was in the throes of an orgy of
financial speculation. We can read of incredible schemes and “bubbles”
with the help of which money was to be lured from private pocket-books.
Newman Flower tells of “one for trading in hair, another for the
universal supply of funerals in Great Britain, one for a wheel of
perpetual motion, one ‘for carrying on an undertaking of great
advantage, but nobody to know what it is’.” Still another project
contemplated “breeding silkworms in Chelsea Park.” By the time things
were ready for the opening of the Academy’s second season Lord
Burlington imported from Rome the composer Giovanni Battista Bononcini,
possibly not dreaming that he was introducing a dangerous rival to
Handel. In his little way Bononcini had talent and charm, as well as a
conceit out of all proportion to his pleasant gifts. An opera of his was
produced at the Academy with Senesino in the cast and enjoyed a good
run, while a composite work, called “Muzio Scevola”, with one act by
Handel, another by Bononcini and a third by a mediocrity, Filippo
Mattei, followed. The results of the increasingly complicated situation
were to precipitate a contest that split London’s high society into
factions. The cynical John Byrom compressed it into an epigram, part of
which has entered the English language:
“_Some say, compared to Bononcini,_
_That Mynherr Handel’s but a ninny;_
_Others aver that he to Handel_
_Is scarcely fit to hold a candle._
_Strange, all this difference should be_
_’Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee._”
Be all of which as it may, Handel presently had the mortification of
seeing his own new “Floridante” fail while Bononcini’s pretty “Griselda”
packed the theatre like nothing since “Radamisto!”
But Handel resembled the mythical Antaeus, who whenever he fell renewed
his own powers by contact with Mother Earth. Before long he was turning
out masterpieces in bewildering continuity. In 1723 he composed the
superb “Ottone”, in 1724 “Tamerlano” and “Giulio Cesare” and the
following season the sumptuous “Rodelinda”; in 1726 “Scipione”, and
“Alessandro”, in 1727 “Admeto” and “Riccardo I”, in 1728 “Siroe” and
“Tolomeo.” This period, incidentally, brings us to those excesses of
singer worship and rivalry which stirred the public to white heat and
turned the opera house into something between a wild prize fight and a
three ring circus. Then, in 1722-23, the species _prima donna_ suddenly
invaded the scene, in the person of Francesca Cuzzoni, who was squat and
ungainly, but had an astounding voice and an art of song that made high
society overlook her bad temper and her worse style in dress. Handel had
occasion to experience her tantrums at the rehearsals of “Ottone”, when
she refused to sing an aria as the composer wanted it; whereupon he had
recourse to real “Taming of the Shrew” tactics, seized her bodily and
threatened to throw her out of the window, at the same time shouting to
her in French: “Oh, Madame, I know full well that you are a real
she-devil; but I intend to teach you that I am Beelzebub, the Chief of
Devils!” Whereupon the humbled Cuzzoni sang her “Falsa imagine” exactly
as Handel wanted. Possibly the incident did not end Handel’s
difficulties with her but in her relations with him she became more
tractable and if she could not subdue the insensitive master she did
subdue her audiences. “Damme, she has a nest of nightingales in her
belly!”, yelled one of the gallery gods on a certain occasion and the
plebeian indelicacy seems to have won the approval of the boxes. Soon
Anastasia Robinson, revolted by the turmoil over Cuzzoni, retired from
stage life and married the Earl of Peterborough.
Cuzzoni, however, was only one obstacle of her kind. Soon afterwards the
management, on the lookout for another sensation, secured the soprano’s
most hated Continental rival, Faustina Bordoni, who was to become the
wife of the composer Hasse. Handel brought the pair on the stage
together in his opera “Alessandro”. Lady Pembroke was “protectress” of
Cuzzoni, Lady Burlington of Faustina. Finally, in May, 1727, things
culminated when the two jealous creatures came to blows during a
performance of Bononcini’s “Astyanax”, tore each others hair and
pummeled one another in full view of the spectators, who took sides and
shrieked with delight as the coiffures of the combatants were ruined and
faces scratched. The “fighting cats”, as the pair were called, later
were made the subject of Colley Cibber’s farce, “The Rival Queens”.
In time Cuzzoni despite her lack of taste in dressing was to set
fashions; and a brown and silver attire in which she appeared in
“Rodelinda” so captivated the ladies that, with modish variations, it
was to be the rage for years. The various castrati (notably the great
Senesino) were in many ways as capricious and difficult to manage as the
prima donnas. Senesino, having irritated the Earl of Peterborough by
reason of some reflection on Anastasia Robinson was flogged by her
husband. The scandal enchanted the drawing rooms and Society was even
more delighted when the singer, appearing in “Giulio Cesare” was
frightened out of his wits and burst into tears because a piece of
scenery fell at his feet at the very moment when, as Julius Caesar, he
had to sing words to the effect that “Caesar knows no fear!”
In time came the greatest castrato of them all, the incredible
Farinelli, who earned so much in London that when he retired to Italy he
built himself a palace there which he sarcastically named “English
Folly”. People used to shout at the Opera that there was only “One God
and one Farinelli!” And describing a London birthday party where this
divinity was among the guests the Duchess of Portland wrote: “There were
about forty gentlemen that had an entertainment, and Farinelli wore a
magnificent suit of clothes, and charmed the company with his voice as
Orpheus did (and so kept them from drinking).” On the other hand when
this god was once so imprudent as to walk uninvited into a party at the
Duke of Modena’s in St. James’s Street the infuriated host showed him
the door with the words: “Get out, fellow! None but gentlemen come
here!”
All these scandals, spectacular squabbles and silly exhibitions did not,
in the long run, enhance the credit of the Academy. Handel, who had been
naturalized on February 13, 1726 and at the same time been appointed
Composer to the Court and to the Chapel Royal, was together with the
rest of London, shocked in the early summer of 1727, to learn of the
death of George I on a trip to Germany. On October 11 of the same year
George II was crowned and, though less favorably disposed to the
composer than his father, continued the pensions Handel held from the
late sovereign and from Queen Anne and contributed to them another large
sum for music lessons to the young princesses. Handel, for his part,
wrote for the new King four Coronation Anthems which added to his glory.
The Academy, after losing an appalling amount of money presently
received its death blow, the production at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn
Fields of “The Beggar’s Opera”, by the clever satirist, John Gay, with
music compiled by Dr. Pepusch, Handel’s predecessor in the employ of the
Duke of Chandos. This “ballad opera”, that “made Gay rich and Rich, the
manager, gay”, which still leads a lusty existence, and has been at
various times a landmark in English and American theatrical history,
proved an earthy and bawdy entertainment, against the barbed shafts of
whose ridicule the artifices of Italian opera could not prevail for
long.
Yet Handel remained incorrigible. Once again he entered into partnership
with Heidegger, planned another opera season, secured Senesino again and
went abroad to engage other singers. On that occasion he traveled again
to Italy, went to Hamburg and made a last visit to his aged mother in
Halle. She was now paralyzed, and shortly afterwards she died. The new
London opera season got off to a bad start, one failure succeeding
another. Politics aggravated the situation, the more so as George II and
the Prince of Wales were at odds and the supporters of the latter,
determined to set up a rival opera company to ruin Handel.
But the story of Handel’s pertinacious efforts to float new operatic
enterprises for almost another ten years is too long, involved and too
honeycombed with intrigue, contending influences and low tactics of one
sort or another to be examined here. The composer’s Hanoverian origin
stirred many parties against him. Moreover, he was a self-willed,
imperious person, who, like Richard Wagner more than a century later,
had the gift of stimulating antagonism. He was, wrote W. McNaught, “a
pervading presence, a busybody forever intruding upon public affairs. He
had taken to ordering the amusements of the town in his own interests;
and he belonged to the wrong party.” One almost fancies oneself
confronted with a chapter from the life of the creator of “Die
Meistersinger!”
Yet what a treasury of glorious music Handel was pouring out with
incalculable lavishness during these agitated years! Let us mention in
passing a few of the new operas as they came and went: “Ezio”,
“Orlando”, “Il Pastor Fido”, “Ariodante”, “Alcina”, “Arminio”,
“Berenice”, “Faramondo”, “Serse”. The last-named calls for a word by
itself. “Xerxes” has nothing to do with the Persian ruler of antiquity.
It is a comic opera, Handel’s first and only one, which stands up
extraordinarily well under modern stylized conditions of revival, apart
from which it contains possibly one of the most universally beloved
melodies that Handel ever wrote. This melody, heard at the very opening
of the piece, appears in the score as a _larghetto_ to the words “Ombra
mai fu”, a song of gratitude to a plane tree for its beneficent shade.
But for generations it has been slowed from the pace originally
prescribed to a solemn, swelling hymn known to uncounted millions as
“Handel’s Largo.” And far more know it as a churchly canticle than its
lightly moving operatic context. Almost every one of this mass of
operas, furthermore, is charged with grand arias of all the emotional
varieties common to its epoch—gems enshrined in practically every one of
the great anthologies of the 18th Century song.
It was not till 1741 that Handel concluded his period of operatic
creativity with “Deidamia”, written to a libretto by Paolo Rolli.
London’s taste for opera had, during more than a decade shown continued
fluctuation. But in 1731 a new situation brought about an event that was
to provoke a development of capital importance for Handel’s future. The
children of the Chapel Royal presented in a private performance his
masque, “Esther”, on the composer’s birthday. The success of the
performance was such that it resulted in others, one of which was given
without Handel’s consent by one of his rivals. The master was equal to
the occasion. He added some numbers to the score and gave half a dozen
representations at the King’s Theatre; but as a Biblical subject could
not be acted on the stage the masque was given in concert form, in the
presence of the royal family and of High Society. The Handelian oratorio
had more or less come into being!
* * *
In the summer of 1733 Handel went to Oxford. The University authorities
had offered him a degree of Doctor of Music. Oxford is said to have
known little of his music at that time. Yet his arrival there might,
according to Newman Flower, “have been the triumphant entry of a king.
The town was overcrowded; even accommodations at the hostels ran out and
people slept in the streets.” The composer brought with him a new
oratorio, “Athalia”, composed to a text which Samuel Humphreys had
adapted from Racine. Hugo Leichtentritt claims that the Rector, Dr.
Holmes, aimed to bring about a rapprochement between the Hanoverians and
the Jacobites. A whole week of Handelian works was offered, with
hearings of “Esther”, “Deborah”, “Athalia”, the Utrecht Te Deum, “Acis
and Galatea” and other creations. In the end the master did _not_
receive the honorary degree. Some have believed that he turned it down
when he was told it would cost 100 Pounds. Like Haydn half a century
after, he found the academic honors of Oxford expensive; and later a
story gained currency that Handel had shouted in his particular brand of
English: “Vat de dyfil I trow away my money for what de Blockhead wish;
I no vant!”
Had it been practical he might have brought a whole opera production to
Oxford. In place of such a luxury he compromised on oratorios, the more
so because the dividing line between such entertainment and the opera of
the period was not so sharply drawn as it was eventually to become. The
chief differences between the two forms lay in the preponderance of
choruses, such as, in opera, were regarded as hardly more than side
issues.
Meanwhile, he seemed unable to resist the lure of the theatre. Again and
again he returned to Italian opera. He continued his earlier partnership
with Heidegger; he made trips to Italy and elsewhere and secured new
singers (the castrato, Carestini, the prima donna, Strada). His enemies
increased in number and power and resorted to the basest tactics
imaginable to discredit and injure him. The so-called Opera of the
Nobility opened at a playhouse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, lured his
singers away from him by fair means or foul, and by securing the great
Farinelli obtained a trump card. Handel (who in time parted company with
Heidegger) would burn his fingers the moment his fortunes seemed on the
upgrade. Even the weather was against him, what with the Thames freezing
over in one of the years that he obstinately returned to opera and
cutting down his audiences. He lost money ruinously, he went into
bankruptcy, he wore himself out to such a degree that he had a mental
and physical breakdown and had to go to the Continent, to
Aix-la-Chapelle, for a cure. His amazing resilience of spirit and body
helped him back to health and actually encouraged him to make another
attempt at an operatic season with his egregious associate, Heidegger,
at the King’s Theatre early in 1738, for which he composed his comedy,
“Serse.”
A few months earlier his royal friend, Queen Caroline, had died and
Handel gave voice to his genuine grief in the great Funeral Anthem, “The
Ways of Zion do Mourn.” And despite his misfortunes he busied himself
with a charitable enterprise, the promotion of a Society for the Support
of Decayed Musicians, which enlisted his active sympathies for the rest
of his life. Not even benefactions of the sort could mollify the legions
of his implacable enemies. His aristocratic foes, to hasten his complete
downfall, actually hired hoodlums to tear down his posters and
precipitate noisy disturbances whenever they thought trouble-making
could in some way or other harm him. Yet a few friends stood unshakably
by his side, none more faithfully than the loyal Mrs. Delany.
Just when his creditors had seized him and threatened him with
imprisonment the news of his tribulations gave rise to a popular
movement of sympathy. In 1735 he had delighted the English public by his
“Alexander’s Feast”, composed on Dryden’s “Ode to St. Cecilia”, produced
triumphantly at the Covent Garden Theatre. It had been written in twenty
days. As the years passed, Handel’s composing activity seemed incredibly
accelerated. In the freezing winter of 1739 he wrote, “to keep himself
warm” (as Rolland says) the “little” Cecilia cantata in a week, the
version of Milton’s poem (under the title “L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il
Moderato”) in just under a fortnight, and the glorious Concerti Grossi,
Opus 6, in a month distracted by his last operatic cares! Incidentally,
Handel had received about this time a testimonial of public admiration
in the form of a marble statue by the sculptor, Roubiliac, which a
manager of musical entertainments named Tyers had caused to be erected
in Vauxhall Gardens, a meeting place of London Society, where Handel’s
works made up the best liked musical features.
“THUS SAITH THE LORD,” FROM THE “MESSIAH.”
[Illustration: As Handel wrote it, and—]
[Illustration: As Christopher Smith transcribed it.]
Still, by the spring of 1741, Handel in a moment of profoundest
disheartenment prepared to throw up the sponge and leave for good and
all his home for the past thirty years. At long last he was fed up on
the struggle and announced one last concert for April 8, 1741. And then,
when the darkness before dawn seemed blackest, he sat down to create his
masterpiece, the most universally beloved choral work ever composed!
That summer Charles Jennens gave Handel a compilation of Scriptural
texts which he called “Messiah.” Jennens was a literary amateur, born at
Gopsall Hall, Leicestershire and educated at Balliol College, Oxford.
Rich and bizarre, he was vastly conceited and especially proud of the
manner in which he had assembled the various Biblical texts used in this
case. Handel had been associated with him before—in the oratorio, “Saul”
(1739), and in “L’Allegro ed Il Penseroso” a year later, as a supplement
to which he had added some poor verses of his own to the lines of Milton
and called the product “Il Moderato.” Robert Manson Myers thinks it
“extraordinary that Handel turned to this eccentric millionaire for his
libretto of ‘Messiah’.” Jennens was of another mind and even later wrote
to an acquaintance: “I shall show you a collection I gave Handel, called
‘Messiah’ which I value highly; he has made a fine entertainment of it,
though not near so good as he might and ought to have done.... There are
some passages far unworthy of Handel, but even more unworthy of
‘Messiah’”; and deploring Handel’s “maggots” he added that he had “with
greatest difficulty made him correct some of the grossest faults in the
composition.” Doubtless Handel, had he so chosen, could have picked his
texts himself; he compiled the book of “Israel in Egypt” unaided in 1738
and when, a good deal earlier, the Bishop of London wanted to help him
with the words for the “Coronation Anthems” he retorted: “I have read my
Bible very well, and I shall choose for myself!” Mr. Myers, in his
encyclopedic study of “Messiah” feels certain that Handel must have
controlled the choice of passages selected.
Like Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and other supreme musicians Handel
could create with a rapidity which ignominiously shames composers of our
supposedly “speedy” age. Even bearing that fact in mind, the composition
of “Messiah” between Saturday, August 22, 1741, and Monday, September
14, following remains one of the miracles of music. Shut up in a little
room on the first floor of his home on Lower Brook Street, Hanover
Square, none can say exactly what went on. Handel is supposed to have
uttered afterwards the words of St. Paul: “Whether I was in my body or
out of my body as I wrote it I know not.” Nobody seems to have dared
intrude upon this mystic concentration. Food was left near him but
usually found untouched when the servant came to remove it. He sat at
his desk like a stone figure and stared into space. Sometimes his man
stood in awe to see his master’s tears drop on the music paper and
mingle with the ink. “When he was composing ‘He was despised’ a visitor
is reported to have found the trembling composer sobbing with intense
emotion.” And after the “Hallelujah Chorus” he uttered those historic
words: “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God
Himself!” The autograph score, with its blots, its angry erasures and
general untidiness, offers fierce evidence of his tumultuous feelings
and flaming ecstasies. Possibly between April and late August of 1741 he
was shut up in his four walls planning the work, for we have no clear
idea just what he did during this period. Sketches and fragments do not
clear up what mystery there may be, for the composer destroyed all but
some fugitive scraps.
Handel appears to have “been reluctant to submit such music to the
capricious taste of aristocratic London.” So when William Cavendish,
Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, invited him to visit Dublin and permit the
public of “that generous and polite Nation” hear his oratorios Handel
assented at once, the more so because it was a question of assisting
three benevolent institutions of Ireland (one of them the Charitable
Musical Society for the Relief of Imprisoned Debtors). With his usual
impulsiveness he even agreed to present “some special oratorio” solely
for the benefit of the unfortunates jailed for debt. And he was happy to
shake the dust of London from his feet for a while. Before starting on
his Irish journey, incidentally, he composed in a fortnight part of
another oratorio, “Samson”, based on Milton’s “Samson Agonistes” and
containing that noble air of lament, “Total Eclipse”, which was to
affect him so poignantly some years later. For his Dublin productions he
had two exceptional woman singers—Susannah Maria Cibber (also an
illustrious tragic actress) and Signora Avolio, a highly trained
Italian. The chorus was recruited from Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral
and Christchurch.