By Robert Hugill
For anyone studying the operas of Handel, there are two prime collections, the composer’s autograph scores in the British Library and the conducting scores in the university library in Hamburg; carefully curated sets of the composer’s scores which descended to his assistant and copyist, John Christopher Smith. Not every Baroque composer was as careful as this, as those reviving Baroque opera know. But there is no similar collection of letters for the eager biographer. If we seek to elucidate Handel’s personal or interior life, then silence reigns.
Some letters survive, though few if any shed light on personal or emotional concerns. The lack seems significant, if someone could be that careful with manuscripts then the absence of letters is perhaps deliberate. We can elucidate a lot about the composer’s life, as Ellen T Harris did in her book George Frideric Handel: A Life with Friends, but to know that the composer was friendly enough with someone to leave them a legacy in his will says nothing about the quality of that friendship, whether it turned on a mutual love of philosophy, the sharing a jug of claret or indeed late-night intimacy. These details are largely lacking, what we have in Handel’s personal life is a great silence.
And into this silence floods the music.
The revival and interest in Handel’s opera, which has continued to develop during the last 30 years, has come about not just because he could write a rattling good tune, but because the characters in the operas offer us deep emotional experiences. When on form, the composer takes his characters (and us) on psychologically profound journeys.
Given the silence surrounding Handel’s personal life, you wonder where this knowledge of the human heart came from. In essence, did the young George Frideric get his heart broken?
Many historical figures indulged in orgies of letter burning, out of a desire not to reveal anything too personal to posterity. (This was not necessarily out of a need to hide, even a figure like the novelist Mrs Gaskell asked her daughters to destroy her letters.) This silence could represent many things; there has been speculation about Handel’s sexuality, but silence could simply represent other types of illicit relationship such as with married women.
It may seem prurient to want to dig into a composer’s love life, but it would be useful and illuminating to know whether he fell in love with his heroines (Puccini) or identified with them (Tchaikovsky), to at least learn if not with whom, then how, why and when? With Handel, we just don’t know, yet his music gives us a vast array of characters embroiled in the complexities of love and with whom the composer is in deep sympathy.
Here it is perhaps useful to give a brief sketch of his life and where any emotional life might sit. Always independent of mind, Handel learned his trade as a jobbing musician (and then composer) at Hamburg’s Gänsemarkt Theatre but as soon as he could afford it, he took himself off to Italy (aged 21). There he eschewed attaching himself to a particular patron and dealt with a wide variety of Cardinals and Princes. He was not only highly talented but charming and personable as an early portrait would suggest (though it no-longer survives). He dealt successfully with the necessary complexities of a society where many of his patrons took a more than a professional interest in him. Princes and even Cardinals had liaisons with members of both sexes. Ellen T. Harris has explored this in her book on Handel’s chamber cantatas, pointing out that a few cantatas have homosocial elements in their text and that, intriguingly, when Handel came to reuse one in London, he removed these elements.
It is from this period that we have snippets of gossip about Handel’s ‘amours’ with his (female) singers. But once he moved to London (aged 25), the trail goes largely cold. He is linked to the circle of the Earl of Burlington, and the Duke of Chandos, but largely seems to remain magnificently alone. Which leaves us extremely curious. Yet from the music, we cannot help but feel that at some point he must have felt deeply rejected and experienced unrequited love.
Whilst Handel’s music can be highly erotic, just think of Poppea in Agrippina or Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare, often, his richest and most emotionally expressive music is for the characters who suffer in love. The sorceress Alcina is, technically, the villain of the opera Alcina but by the beginning of Act Three, we are in no doubt that we are in sympathy with her as she experiences the loss both of her powers and her lover. Alcina is just the last in a series of sorceresses who thread their way through Handel’s operas, usually getting the finest music. Medea in Teseo is even allowed to get away with it, for her no religious conversion or comeuppance, instead, she departs magnificently in a chariot drawn by fire-breathing dragons.
In Amadigi, most of the characters experience love, and Handel finds ways to bring strong emotional expression to a form like opera seria which, in the wrong hands, can seem stiff or lacking in emotional connection. By the end of Amadigi, Amadigi and Oriana are happily united, but it is two other characters, Dardano and Melissa (another of Handel’s sorceresses) who get some of the most extraordinary music. They both experience unrequited love in different ways, and Handel uses his music to take them on a journey and to give a depth to the opera which is lacking in the source (Amadis de Grèce, a French tragédie-lyrique by André Cardinal Destouches and Antoine Houdar de la Motte.). In Act Two, Dardano has a powerful expression of the pain of thwarted love in ‘Pena tiranna’, an aria with a remarkable richness of texture, and then when Orianna seems within his grasp his remarkable aria, ‘Tu mia speranaza’ seems to convey the irony of his situation (he is about to die). From the first, Handel seems interested in Melissa as a woman in love, rather than simply a sorceress, and by Act Three she realises that love is not something to be cured by magic, and her final scene has intense pathos as well as being structurally imaginative in the way Handel depicts her steps faltering and life ebbing away.
This is music which as well as being powerfully memorable, is psychologically profound and erotically charged. So, we are permitted to try and fill the silence at the heart of Handel’s life with events which might suggest how the composer was able to write music with such a deep knowledge of the workings of the human heart.
This article is reproduced by kind permission of the author and of English Touring Opera who commissioned it for their tour of Amadigi, re di Gaula