David Kimbell
Discussions of the music of Tamerlano commonly mention three features: (i) the ‘claustrophobic’ restraint of the orchestration, which is felt somehow to match the oppressive stage-sets, all prison-like interiors in the tyrant’s palace; (ii) the gloomy final chorus, in which neither Bajazet (who is dead) nor Asteria (who has gone out to mourn him) play any part; and (iii) the various ways in which Handel shows a more than common seriousness about the recitatives (some simple recitatives are extraordinarily long; there are unusually many accompanied recitatives; in Act III finally the opera comes to its dramatic climax in Bajazet’s great death-scene, it too chiefly composed in varieties of recitative). A sombre piece, then; and these oddities clearly have something to do with the fact that Tamerlano is, of all Handel’s Royal Academy operas, the only one for which the librettist, Nicola Haym, used the term ‘tragedy’.1
In what follows I essay a preliminary investigation of my hunch that this Tamerlano bleakness is inherent in many of the arias too. For all their expressive intensity and the poignancy of the human dilemmas they explore so vividly, one cannot but wonder, comparing them with those in the contemporary Giulio Cesare or Rodelinda, whether they have the same sheer overflowing of generous musical inventiveness that we can so commonly depend on in Handel, ‘the “plein air” composer with the most open of horizons, the inexhaustible and generous melodist’, as Alfred Brendel calls him.2 Has Handel, in Tamerlano, found a ‘tragic’ way of directing this musical inventiveness, beyond the relatively external matters of orchestral austerity and the strategic balancing of recitative and aria?
My starting-point is Handel’s use of coloratura which, far from being one of the frills, is actually one of the principal sources of his power as a composer. When Handel sets an aria text to music (let us envisage one of six lines, of which the first three (a b c) are used in the principal A section of the aria), he commonly begins by setting it in such a way that every syllable of the text of a b c is clearly audible. There may be a few ornamenting notes, there may be a limited amount of coloratura on some important word, one or two words may be repeated; but none of this is enough to break the close link between poetic metre and musical rhythm. Once that phase has been completed, the music’s continuation is likely to become freer and more florid, usually in connection with the modulation to the dominant key and the intermediate ritornello, and often that modulation is clinched with a cadence phrase in which at least part of the text is uttered clearly and emphatically. It is that free ‘continuation’ between the (quasi-)syllabic opening phrase and the vigorous cadence (also often quasi-syllabic) where Handel’s energy, his command of musical architecture and the sheer variousness of his musical imagination, as he heads for the ‘plein air’ and open horizons of Brendel’s metaphor, are best to be enjoyed.
Much of the music of Tamerlano shows exactly this pattern. To cite one example, Irene’s aria No.10, ‘Dal crudel che m’ha tradito’, shows it again and again: after the syllabic presentation of the text in bars 6-10, the complete standard pattern of syllabic opening, florid continuation, and vigorous cadence can be heard in 11-18, 19-26 and 27-32. The more substantial of Andronico’s arias show the same feature, and something of the variety of its possibilities: in Aria No.12, ‘Benché mi sprezzi’, for example, as in so many arias in triple time, broad hemiola cadence phrases – magnificently broad at 61-64 – replace merely emphatic ones. But when we turn to the characters who contribute most vitally to the opera’s tragic vein – Bajazet, Asteria, Tamerlano – the situation is rather different.
One cannot expect a tenor to sing coloratura with the same scintillating verve that a high voice, soprano or castrato, brings to it. Nevertheless, if one compares the coloratura in Bajazet’s role with that sung by Grimoaldo in Rodelinda, a part written for the same singer a few months later, it is clear that the slowness and weightiness of the coloratura in Tamerlano is a deliberately chosen element of style. Much of it might be loosely described as instrumental in character: in No.3, ‘Forte e lieto’, it is poignantly stretched out as he agonises over the dilemma his love for Asteria causes him; in No.8, ‘Ciel e terra armi di sdegno’, it punches the air with the force of a trumpet call; in No.19, ‘A suoi piedi’, after long stretches of syllabically-set music, a few phrases are drawn out with slow-moving, widely spaced coloratura in which every note can be given expressive weight, screwing home the sense of anguish. Rather different, because more rhetorical (by which I mean ‘speech-derived’ rather than ‘instrumental’), is the coloratura in No.35, ‘Empio, per farti guerra’. The idioms of accompanied recitative are much in evidence here: reiterated chords in the orchestra; broken declamatory phrases in the voice, punctuated by orchestral unisoni flourishes; and the style of the coloratura arises from that. It is slow-moving, like all Bajazet’s coloratura 3, but angular too, making extravagant gestures with the voice so-to-speak, as if he were conjuring up the ombra of which he sings.
In Asteria’s music one observes exceptional restraint in the coloratura. In her first aria, No.7, ‘S’ei non mi vuol amar’, there is none. And to give the music the expressive breadth it demands, the undecorated melody is borne on an unusually wide range of modulation. In the principal section of No.9, ‘Deh, lasciatemi’, any ornamental exuberance in the ‘continuation’ is largely due to a florid instrumental descant, which breaks in where we might expect the singer to break out (especially at 54-59). In No.27, ‘Cor di padre’, too, it is the relationship between voice and violins that is critical. During bars 7-12 the whole text of A is sung syllabically, in detached phrases punctuated by jagged instrumental figures, a dialogue of contrasting voices. When it comes to the broadening climax of this phase of the aria, the two voices (Asteria and the violins) entwine, their gently florid lines intensified in expression by the dissonant suspensions (12-14). As in aria No.9, at one point where climactic coloratura might be anticipated (27-28), it is the orchestra that supplies the animating detail while the voice sustains a long note.
As one might anticipate, several of these arias have concordances with other Handel works. The most thought-provoking of them is the first: the concordance between Bajazet’s aria No.3, ‘Forte e lieto’ and the German aria ‘Die ihr aus dunklen Grüften’. 4 In the texts there is an oblique poetic echo: Brockes’s poem contrasts the blindness of those who dig treasure out of dark mines and lock it up in boxes, with the good sense of those who step out into God’s fresh air and rejoice in the treasures he has scattered so generously in Nature. In the darker mood of Tamerlano, the man stepping into the light is only prepared to accept liberty at all – let alone take pleasure in it – because of the love of his daughter. Without that he would rather stride fearlessly to his death, and it is that fearless stride that transforms the incipit of the ritornello, launching into it with a determined, accented falling octave extra to the melodic idea in ‘Die ihr’, and going on to give a teeth-setting grittiness to the rest of the phrase by virtue of the dotted rhythm and tight trills. In the continuation of the ritornello, over a reiterated pedal note, the two arias diverge strikingly again: ‘Die ihr’ rocks easily between dominant and tonic harmonies; ‘Forte e lieto’ at the same juncture quivers with syncopations before plunging into sustained chromatic dissonance.
We see that coloratura in these arias is rarely employed as an expression of ‘purely musical’ energy. It is sometimes avoided altogether, sometimes delegated to the accompanying instruments, often slowed down, broadened out, twisted into unfamiliar shapes to become the principal vehicle of the arias’ expressiveness. Is that an aspect of Handel’s tragic vein?
Notes
1 ‘To the reader’, in the printed libretto (London, 1724). See Hallische Händel-Ausgabe, II, 15, Tamerlano (ed. Terence Best), p. XXXV. All references are to that edition.
2 Brendel, A. (2017). Music, Sense and Nonsense: Collected Essays and Lectures, p.418. London.
3 The exception is No.23, ‘No, no, il tuo sdegno’, where the unexpected turn of events momentarily enables Bajazet to escape from his tragic obsession.
4 We do not know which preceded which. I have written this paragraph as if the Tamerlano aria ‘borrowed’ from the German aria, but the point of the comparision will not be lost if at some time the German aria should prove to be the later composition.
David Kimbell is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh.