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The Sound of Silence

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

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Handel Fernando 6th April 2022 at The London Handel Festival

By Miranda Houghton

The Hallische Händel Ausgabe is a collection of Handel editions held in Halle, the city of Handel’s birth. A new edition of Fernando, re di Castiglia, the product of extensive scholarly research by Michael Pacholke and subsequently published by Bärenreiter will be performed by Opera Settecento at both the London and Halle Festivals in 2022. This edition is based on a comprehensive study of all the surviving sources. It represents both published research and functions as a performing edition. At the request of the Director of the Halle Händel Festival, Clemens Birnbaum, Opera Settecento under the baton of Leo Duarte, oboist and musicologist were preparing to perform the premiere of Fernando in 2020 before the pandemic struck. We live in hope that both the London and Halle Festivals will return with their usual magnificence in 2022.

Anyone was able to attend the Alan Curtis-devised staged production in 2005 or has acquired a copy of the CD might well ask on what grounds the Halle Handel edition can claim the April performance as a premiere. The critical edition editor explains that the Curtis version of Fernando is in fact a significantly-shortened version of the 1732 (First) version of Sosarme, but with the Iberian setting and the character names derived from the libretto of Fernando. In terms of the proportion of music which appears only in Fernando and not in Sosarme, the recording includes only 2 bars. Not one of the over 130 bars of recitative which were deleted when Fernando became Sosarme was reinstated by Curtis.

In December 1731 after Ezio was completed, Handel began to compose his second new opera for the 1731/32 season. He chose as his text Dionisio, Re di Portogallo by Antonio Salvi (1664-1724,) first set to music by Giacomo Antonio Perti in Florence in 1707. The following appeared in the original published version of the libretto:

“Most honoured reader, Dionision, King of Portugal, had with Queen Isabella of Aragon his first-born son who succeeded him on the throne. He also had a daughter who was married to Fernando, King of Castile. He had in addition several illegitimate children, amongst whom was Alfonso Sancio who, because he was loved above all others by his father, aroused such jealousy in Prince Alfonso that, fearing that the succession to the crown might fall to Sancio, after many manifestations of ill will and anger towards his father, eventually declared against him with a shameless rebellion. Dionisio was compelled to gather together the forces of the kingdom and attack Colimbra (ancient spelling) in order to restore his son and the rebels to their duty and to punish them. The resistance was so obstinate, as was the siege, and the anger of the father and the son went so far that, among historians there are those who assert that they finally challenged each other to end their conflict with a duel; but because of the great danger of parricide, Queen Isabella hastened there, settled their differences and reconciled the minds of her husband and son.

All this is true, taken from the History of Portugal written in French by Monsieur Lequien de la Neufville. The rest is a poetic fiction, based upon probability.”

In his creation of a new opera, Handel as usual changed the title to reflect one of the other key characters, calling his new work Fernando, re di Castiglia. At the end of the 13th century, King Dionysius I of Portugal signed the peace treaty of Alcañices between Portugal and Castile. Ferdinand IV of Castile was at the time twelve years old. The treaty was sealed with two marriages, the more important of which was that of Ferdinand IV of Castile and Constança de Portugal, (called Elvida in Fernando,) King Dionysius’ daughter. They were betrothed in 1291 when Ferdinand was six and Constança not even two years old and married when they were respectively 17 and 12. King Dionysius did indeed face a rebellion from his eldest son, Alfonso who feared he would lose his right to the succession in favour to Alfonso Sanchez, his father’s favourite. In fact Ferdinand and Constança had died about a decade before the rebellion occurred, so Ferdinand’s embodied involvement in the plot is poetic licence. What is document is the fact that Elizabeth or Isabel de Aragão did stand between the rival armies of her husband and her son, preventing battle on that occasion and contributing to her canonisation after death.

Scholars are not sure who reworked Salvi’s text into the “book” Handel set. However some anomalies which have been described as “poetic awkwardness” and a poor command of grammar have led to the suggestion the librettist was Giacomo Rossi. We know he prepared the libretti of Rinaldo and Il pastor fido and he is also credited as librettist of Silla which was later recycled as Amadigi di Gaula. Rossi’s limitations with the Italian language were apparently well-known amongst the Italian chattering classes in London who already objected to the way Handel stripped fine Italian poetry down to a bare minimum to appease his inadequately polyglot London audience. In 1729 Paulo Antonio Rolli mockingly wrote to Giuseppe Riva, “Now I must inform you that Signor Rossi, that famous Italian poet (not ed.), is Handel’s librettist.

The action of Fernando takes place in Coimbra, currently Portugal’s 4th largest city. The city is under siege which dates the plot to between 1280-1320. This makes Fernando the second most “modern” of Handel’s operas, after Tamerlano. There are no documents explaining why Handel changed the locus of the drama two thirds of the way through its composition. It could be because the setting was within living memory rather than set in Ancient Rome or a mythical middle-Eastern country. From 1727-1729 there had been war between England and Spain, so the portrayal of the eponymous magnanimous hero as a Spanish king might have offended some at a time when Spaniards were demonised as the enemy. By contrast Portugal had for centuries been a traditional ally of England.

Perhaps, instead it was the focus on a conflict between father and son which was felt to be insensitive. George II, one of Handel’s staunchest supporters and his son, Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales were estranged at the time of Fernando’s composition. When Queen Anne died, Frederick’s parents left Hanover for England. Their eldest son was 7 and was not reunited with his parents until he was 14. When his father ascended the throne in 1727, Frederick was called upon to give up his role as Head of the House of Hanover and take his place at his parents’ side as Prince of Wales. Sadly the separation irreparably damaged his relationship with his parents. In England he surrounded himself with dissenting politicians and supported The Opera of the Nobility, the rival opera company to Handel’s because his father attended and financially supported the latter. Frederick Lewis also played the cello and was a discerning collector of paintings as well as composers. His country seat was at Cliveden where the masque, Alfred (including Rule Britannia,) written by Arne was premiered by a cast including Kitty Clive. Would a depiction of a warlike rebellion in the 13th century of a son against his father be viewed as too resonant with England in 1732 and therefore disloyal to Handel’s greatest moral and financial supporter? Frederick, Prince of Wales married Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. The wedding was celebrated by a production of Atalanta at the King’s Haymarket and Porpora’s serenata, La festa d’Imeneo at The Opera of Nobility. As far as we know, the conflict was not resolved; Frederick Lewis predeceased his father at the age of 44.

Whatever the reason for realising the plot’s insensitivity, its locus was shifted to Lydia in a mythical period. The names of 6 out of 7 characters were changed. The editor of this edition posits that the only remaining connection to the Iberian peninsula is the use of a Sarabande in the opening movement of the overture – something unique amongst Handel’s operas. The reworking of Fernando (which Handel dropped within sight of the end of Act Two) involved significant cuts in the first accompagnato and in about half of the recitatives. Much has been written about the London audience struggling with long stretches of Italian recitative, even though for the most part a published translation was made available for premieres. It could be in part due to the fact that the preceding opera, Ezio which contained extensive recitative was not successful.

So Fernando became Sosarme and was premiered to great acclaim on 15th February 1732. At least two members of the Royal Family attended each of the initial 11 performances. The first cast featured Senesino, Anna Maria Strada del Po, Francesca Bertolli and the great bass, Montagnana. It also included an Italian tenor called Pinacci. When viewing Baroque opera from a 21st century perspective, we must suspend notions of copyright in the sense of droit d’auteur (rather than publishing copyright which was already in its infancy.) Operas at this time were events, the best possible combination of libretto, stage machinery, star singers, fine players and of course the music. Because of the success of Sosarme, Handel recycled five arias from the opera in the pasticcio, Oreste which he put together himself. He also reused a duet from Sosarme in Imeneo. Sosarme was reviewed by Handel in 1734. He made yet more cuts in recitative, reducing 505 lines of text to 365.

The differences between Sosarme 1732 and Sosarme 1734 largely came about because 6 of the 7 vocal parts were allocated to new singers. In taking over from Senesino, Giovanni Carestini retained none of Sosarme’s arias without alteration from the 1732 version of the opera. Two of the arias he sang were rearranged from Riccardo Primo. Two further arias were transposed upwards to reflect the higher fach of Carestini’s voice. The two duets were rearranged so that the lower part didn’t go too low for Carestini (who we think was a dramatic soprano rather than a contralto.) Otto Erich Deutsch, the 20th century Austrian musicologist, presumed Durastanti performed Haliate (which had been sung by a tenor in 1732) as trouser role. There are marks in the score which suggest the role was largely transposed up an octave, but then the second and third arias were subsequently removed. The performance materials have not survived from the 1734 performances so we cannot verify if this role was allocated to Durastanti. Two of Erenice’s arias were excised from the 1734 version and it appears the remaining arias were raised in pitch by a tone. The role of Argone was given to Scalzi, a soprano castrato. He was allocated two more rearranged arias from Riccardo Primo and a rearranged aria sung by Sosarme in the 1732 version. Whoever sang Melo’s role in 1734 lost one aria and the remaining arias were reworked for a singer with a more restricted range than Bertolli in 1732. With the loss of Montagnana, the first of Altomaro’s 1732 arias was cut (music which was lifted by the composer from Aci, Galatea e Polifemo) and also the second so that the baddie was left with only one aria to sing.

In conclusion, there is no such thing as a definitive Baroque opera in the sense that each busy composer would reuse/recycle/reinvent existing arias or adapt popular arias favoured by a new cast member to fit the context. The dramma, or section of epic poetry if you will, was at the heart of each opera and the arias had emotional themes which made them eminently adaptable to being recycled in a similar context. Two thirds of Sosarme started life as Fernando. It could be argued that there is a greater overlap between Fernando and Sosarme 1732 than there is between the two versions of what we now consider to be Handel’s opera, Sosarme.

Fernando, re di Castiglia: A Handel Premiere, Wednesday 06 April 2022, 19:00 at St George’s, Hanover Square – Opera Settecento conducted by Leo Duarte.

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Book review: Three Papers on Handel by Anthony Hicks

By Les Robarts

In these short papers Tony Hicks explores some of the creative work of three men whose labours inextricably link them to Handel’s music. They are a twentieth-century conductor, an Italian poet who wrote verse to be set to music, and an English librettist for Handel. Written by an acknowledged expert on Handel sources, these papers typify the author’s assiduous scholarship. He delves behind the music, finding new sources and unveiling hidden meanings, taking readers carefully and logically through his topics, flawlessly sharing his extensive knowledge. He makes his methods approachable and, more importantly, readable.

Your eyes won’t glaze over at any discussion of diminished thirds, augmented fourths and submerged tenths, for there isn’t any. No technical words obscure meaning, no arcane musical analysis clogs the story. The few music examples illustrate verbal underlay, how the words fit musical notes. Written with rigour these papers allow discerning readers easily to follow this Handelian sleuth’s logic. He never assumes prior knowledge, for every point is explained. While detail is fastidious it is never otiose, its simplicity belying considerable intellectual depth.

In presenting Paolo Rolli’s cantatas and strophic songs, Hicks sets out concise terms of reference and makes no claim to being definitive. His decidedly exploratory style does not hide a confident expertise, inviting readers with occasional tentative suggestions, e.g. ‘it is plausible that Rolli and Handel would have encountered each other when they were in Rome’. He never hides the need for further research. Such provisos prevent reckless assertion and disarm negative criticism.

Wordbooks published for Handel’s oratorios whose words are by Thomas Morell aroused curiosity by some inverted commas preceding the poetic text on the page. Hicks identifies several sources for the quotations, concluding that what he found should provide ‘a better-informed view’ of the librettist’s work. Isn’t it odd that Handel’s reputation has suffered from indictments of ‘borrowings’ while literary writers are not morally scarred when employing ‘quotations’?

Reading a biography of Thomas Beecham led Hicks to explore connections between Beecham’s ballet music and Handel. Not all is what is claimed, he finds, for some locations are misattributed. Hicks sets all to right.

These papers resonate with the author’s astonishing grasp of sources, materials, context, and interleaved concepts. In a closely wrought discussion he never speculates but offers possibilities. Judicious conclusions carry us with him. Hicks opens fascinating vistas as he lets readers into a hitherto unrevealed world of three musical and poetic artists associated with Handel across three centuries.

Hicks is a secure guide, modest in style, never pompous. Be assured, he smiles as he conducts us to broad conclusions while sometimes accepting that for all his exertions he still cannot be certain. We emerge from these brief tours engrossed and wiser, even entertained. Be prepared to be amazed, for new information, fresh interpretation and invention await the purchaser. Colin Timms, editor of the three papers, updates Hicks’s spoken papers in the light of recent research. No lover of Handel’s music should be without this book.

The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation at the Foundling Museum together with the Handel Institute published this booklet as a tribute to Tony Hicks who died in 2010. Copies may be obtained from the Foundation through: colin@ foundlingmuseum.org.uk

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Handel in Cambridge

By Tony Watts

In 1733 Handel visited Oxford at the invitation of its University’s ViceChancellor. Although Handel was reported as not accepting a doctorate offered to him, it was a great occasion, attended by many Heads of Houses from Cambridge, and included the first performance of his new oratorio, Athalia in the Sheldonian Theatre. So far as we know, Handel never visited Cambridge. But it was reported that he refused a doctorate here too (though no documented evidence of either offer exists), and he had other contacts with Cambridge: for example, Thomas Morell, one of his main librettists, was a Fellow of King’s. But subsequently, Cambridge has made a huge contribution to both Handel scholarship and Handel performance, at least comparable to that of Oxford. The Cambridge Handel Opera Company (CHOC) is part of that tradition.

The collection of Handel autographs in the Fitzwilliam Museum is second in importance only to the Royal Collection in the British Library. Handel was the great hero of the Museum’s founder, Viscount Fitzwilliam, who acquired all the material that had not been bound and presented to King George III. This comprised over 500 leaves of complete, incomplete and uncompleted works, fragments and sketches, written between about 1708 and Handel’s death – now bound in 15 volumes. This collection has subsequently been extended, notably by Francis Barrett Lennard’s gift in 1902 of 67 volumes of early copies of Handel’s scores. In addition, the Fitzwilliam holds the terracotta model of Roubiliac’s famous statue of Handel erected during Handel’s lifetime in the Vauxhall Gardens: public statues of living individuals other than monarchs were rare in England at that time, and the informality of Handel’s attire and pose are strikingly realistic.

There are also important Handel collections in several College libraries. In particular the Rowe Music Library in King’s contains a substantial collection of both contemporary manuscript sources and of 19th century copies assembled by A.H. Mann (1850- 1929), and its Rowe Collection is even richer in first editions of Handel’s music. In addition, the Wren Library in Trinity houses several scores of Handel’s English oratorios which were edited and/or published in Cambridge in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The first biography of Handel – published in 1760, a year after the composer’s death – was written by John Mainwaring (c.1724-1807), a graduate and Fellow of St John’s. A later biography was written by Edward Dent (1876- 1957), a Fellow of King’s and Professor of Music. Dent was also responsible for bringing to Cambridge a number of eminent musicians to escape Nazi persecution, including the great scholar Otto Erich Deutsch (1883-1967), cataloguer of Schubert’s compositions: while in Cambridge (1939-51) Deutsch collected material for his Handel: A Documentary Biography (1955), which served for decades as the ‘bible’ of Handel biography and was the precursor to Handel: Collected Documents. The most substantial work on Handel’s music, the monumental three volumes on his operas and oratorios, was by Winton Dean (1916-2013), a graduate of King’s: his work is widely recognised as seminal in musicology as a whole, a benchmark for analytical and perceptive scholarship, based on comprehensive and strongly contextualised documentary research.

Christopher Hogwood (1941-2014), a graduate and Honorary Fellow of Pembroke and also an Honorary Fellow of Jesus, was a leading figure in the early-music revival of the late 20th century, wrote yet another biography of Handel, and was involved in several concert performances and recordings of Handel operas and oratorios by the Cambridge-based Academy of Ancient Music, of which he was the founder. More recently, Andrew Jones, a Fellow of Selwyn, was founder and conductor of the Cambridge Handel Opera Group (see below), and is currently preparing an edition of Handel’s continuo cantatas; and Ruth Smith, an independent Cambridge-based Handel scholar, is author of Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought and of many essays in programmes for Handel productions both in the UK and internationally.

Many of the most important books on Handel have been published by Cambridge University Press. These include the five volumes of Handel: Collected Documents, The Cambridge Companion to Handel, The Cambridge Handel Encyclopaedia, and several monographs.

Only one performance of Handel’s works is recorded as taking place in Cambridge during his lifetime: Acis and Galatea at Trinity in February 1756, conducted by John Randall, Professor of Music in the University. Randall subsequently performed Messiah in the Senate House a month after Handel’s death, in May 1759, following this over the next few years with a series of other Handel oratorios in the same location: a number of these were designed to raise funds for the new Addenbrooke’s Hospital (echoing the role famously played by Handel’s own performances of Messiah in fund-raising for the Foundling Hospital in London). Between 1789 and 1809 The Musical Society at the Black Bear Inn in Market Street was almost a Handel Society, an average of three out of eight items at their monthly concerts being devoted to Handel. The first performance in England of Mozart’s arrangement of Alexander’s Feast was given in the Senate House in 1819; and the first revival in England of Semele in the Guildhall in 1878, under Sir Charles Stanford.

A particularly significant series of Cambridge productions was the staged performances of Handel’s oratorios between 1925 and 1948, following the powerful movement in Germany to stage these works – which, though highly dramatic, were not designed by Handel for staged performance. The stage première of Semele was mounted in 1925 by Dennis Arundell, a Fellow of St John’s: a reviewer noted that the artists included two Borzoi dogs, a fantail pigeon, and two goats, which “appeared to require a little more stage experience”. This was followed by staged performances of Samson, Jephtha, The Choice of Hercules, Susanna, Saul and Solomon, some at the Guildhall and others on the back lawn of King’s. They were conducted by Cyril Rootham of St John’s and later by Boris Ord of King’s, with staging by Camille Prior, and costumes and sets by Gwen Raverat – all famous Cambridge figures. The 1935 performances were part of a substantial Cambridge Handel Festival.

In the 1980s Andrew Jones founded the Cambridge Handel Opera Group (CHOG). Its first production, Rodelinda (1985), was followed by 14 further productions of Handel operas, every two years, usually with four performances, at West Road Concert Hall. A distinctive aim of these productions was to observe principles of 18th century performance practice in visual as well as musical respects. They were always in English, with new translations by Andrew Jones that were often used elsewhere, notably at the Coliseum in London. They were accompanied by a Study Afternoon on the opera being performed, with presentations by Handel scholars and, usually, the Stage Director.

Alongside CHOG, there have been other recent staged Handel productions in Cambridge, including by Colleges, like Xerxes at Fitzwilliam (2007), and by Cambridge University Opera Society, like Jephtha (2015). Particularly notable have been productions by English Touring Opera, of which there were at least ten in Cambridge between 2007 and 2014 at the Arts Theatre and West Road, many produced by James Conway.

CHOG ended in 2013, but King’s graduate Julian Perkins has subsequently revived it as CHOC. Its first production was Rodelinda (2018) at The Leys; Tamerlano is its second. CHOC reaffirms the staging principles which underpinned CHOG’s work, and has also sustained the tradition of the Study Afternoon, now extended by the “Green Room” online seminars, again linked to the production – both curated by Ruth Smith. CHOC’s production values, and its commitment to promoting relevant scholarship alongside its productions, give it a unique position in the world of Handel performance. It has also mounted a concert performance of John Eccles’s Semele in Trinity, recorded in a much-praised CD, in collaboration with the Academy of Ancient Music and Cambridge Early Music – bringing together the vibrant earlymusic scene in Cambridge. In all these respects, CHOC is building upon and extending a long, rich and widely influential tradition.

The CHOC production of Tamerlano will be staged in Cambridge on 5, 6, 8 and 9 April. Tickets are available from Cambridge Live: https://www.cambridgelive.org.uk/tickets/events/cambridge-handel-operacompany-presents-handels-tamerlano

Meanwhile, CHOC is holding three online ‘Handel’s Green Room’ discussions in February/March, curated by Ruth Smith, on preparations for the Tamerlano production. For details, and to subscribe to CHOC’s News Bulletin, see: https://cambridgehandel.org.uk/

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Arias for Ballino

By Leo Duarte

Opera Settecento, whom you may think of as “The pasticcio people” after our performances at the London Handel and Halle Handel Festivals of Handel’s 34 PROOF 7: 21-10-22 pasticcio operas, Elpidia, Ormisda and Venceslao is poised to go into the recording studio next month with tenor, Jorge Navarro Colorado. We are most grateful to those members of The Handel Friends, The Serse Trust and Jorge’s family whose donations have enabled us to record our first CD which is entitled “Arias for Ballino.”

Owen Swiney relates that Handel talent-spotted Annibale Pio Fabri, known affectionately as Balino or Ballino, the diminutive form of his forename, in Bologna. Swiney writes, “This Man Sings in as good a Taste as any Man in Italy.” Of a performance of Lotario in London, Mrs Pendarves wrote, “a tenor voice, sweet clear and firm..He sings like a gentleman without making faces. The greatest master of musick that ever sung upon the stage.” I hope any of you who have recently attended ETO’s Tamerlano production will agree this review could easily have been written about Jorge’s performance in the role of Bajazet. Before travelling to London, Ballino sang in operas by Vivaldi, Caldara, Alessandro Scarlatti, Orlandini, Gasparini, Leo, Vinci and Porpora. In 1719 he became a member of the Accademia Filharmonica of Bologna as a composer. He was named President of the Society no less than five times. In London Handel wrote roles for him in Lotario, Partenope and Poro and he appeared in revivals of Cesare, Tolomeo and Rodelinda. Handel also transposed arias from Scipione, originally written for castrato, specifically for Ballino to sing the title role. Later in his career he was based in Vienna, had considerable success in three operas by Hasse performed in Madrid and composed his own setting of Metastasio’s great libretto, Alessandro nell’Indie. With such a wealth of wonderful repertoire associated with Ballino, we have not only put together an enticing and varied list of arias but can also claim modern premieres for many of them.

Until now Opera Settecento has focused on resurrecting neglected operas as concert performances, although both our Halle and Vienna performances have been broadcast around the world. It is a big step for us to launch our first CD and we need in the region of a further £10,000 to make its release in 2023 a reality. Cheques can be made payable to The Serse Trust, and sent to 6, Beechwood Avenue Weybridge, Surrey, KT13 9TE. We are a registered charity so can claim Gift Aid on your donation if you are a UK tax payer. As a taster of what is to come, here is a link to Jorge singing with us on Youtube. 

https://youtu.be/PUcWXO52sJk
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Handel’s Fairest Dalila

By Miranda Houghton

“In practice, however, the rich theatrical contextualisation tends to shift the focus away from her singing. From a performer’s point-of-view, a summary of her repertoire, and perhaps a separate chapter on her vocal characteristics regarding range, tessitura and their eventual changes, would have been useful, with more musical examples.” So wrote Judit Zsovár in Handel News in 2019. Adverse reviews usually put me off a product, but in this case I decided to purchase and read Berta Joncus’ book, Kitty Clive or the Fair Songster (Boydell Press 2019) as I have read other publications by Berta Joncus and found them not only well-researched but inspiring.

One of my own areas of interest is the “stylistic” process Handel went through in the dying years of Italian opera’s pre-eminence on the London stage. By the time of his death he had established as much of a reputation as a composer of oratorio as he had enjoyed as a foremost composer of opera seria. Very much tied up in that period was John Beard, introduced as a tenor in Handel’s later operas but more significantly the tenor primo uomo in virtually all of Handel’s oratorios. Were Handel’s oratorios a natural progression from dramas set for the stage in the Italian style, or did he (as I believe) invent his own version of “devotional” works, choosing to use his unique ability to express intense emotion through word painting to set biblical dramas? I would particularly like to know if the character of ornamentation in Handel’s oratorios became progressively muted as his company of Italian singers became interspersed with talented British singers of the day, less conversant with the florid excesses of Italian high Baroque, but also because decoration for the aggrandisement of individual singers was considered out of keeping with the biblical subject matter.

One clue is in the sort of voices and the technical ability we imagine singers such as John Beard had. Was he the equivalent of a Lieder singer today, acting purely with the voice, or was he as much of a dramatic singing actors as Kitty Clive clearly was? What Joncus’ book proves is that Kitty Clive was capable of singing in the bel canto style along with the best of the Italians, such was her versatility as a performer. We should not forget that John Beard sang in public entertainment alongside Kitty Clive. Yes, the role of Dalila in Samson was written for Kitty Clive with her arch-rival, Susanna Cibber as seconda donna, yet these two sopranos were also the leading ladies in Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera – in which John Beard also sang. Why is it then that history remembers John Beard as the greatest English tenor of the era, able to move seamlessly between masques, ballad operas and six of Handel’s opera 32 serie to Handel’s dramatic oratorios without any loss of reputation whereas Clive is relegated by posterity to a mere purveyor of bawdy low art? Why is Beard described as a singer whereas Clive is a “songster”?

One is forced to conclude this is due to the fact she was an intelligent and powerful woman who refused to be manipulated by men. She was in later years criticised for her looks, yet in portraits of her as a young woman, she is no less agreeable than Cuzzoni, Faustina and indeed Strada Del Po, Handel’s great Italian leading ladies. Clive was a star for a long time, suggesting her charisma and comedic talent transcended the requirement to look young and pretty on stage. As contemporary reviews show us, she also won the right to be judged as a singer, known for her sparkling delivery of music by Handel, Purcell, Arne, Bononcini and her ability to parody the day’s leading Italian opera singers. My point is she would have risen above criticism when being judged purely for her exceptional talent as a singer.

Contrary to Ms Zsár’s contention that Berta Joncus tells us little about the quality of Clive’s vocal prowess, her fach and her musicianship, the detailed research into the wide variety of vehicles which the most famous actormanagers created for her offer a clear indication of Clive’s star quality. After all, to be renowned for her brilliant mimicry of the Italian singers of the day is no mean feat.

Contemporary sources tell us that Clive was able to enliven an otherwise dull performance with singing which was fresh and direct. In one of London’s most popular ballad operas, Damon and Phillida, Clive was given an Italian da capo aria from one of London’ s most celebrated operas, Camilla by Bononcini. To sing this and other arias from the Italian high Baroque, she will have relied on bel canto technique like the finest Italian singers in The Royal Academy. Her musical director, Carey wrote a cantata for her which captures the fashionable Neapolitan writing of the day with its suave melodies and demanding melismas. We suspect it was Carey who trained her in her famous exaggerated parodies of Italian singers with extravagant gestures and elaborate coloratura on prepositions. In interludes in ballad operas and masques, Clive performed Handel operatic arias as well as Cuzzoni or Strada Del Po. Fielding drew on her versatility when he burlesqued Handel’s oratorio Deborah. Drury Lane’s Opera of Operas gave Clive her first chance to extravagantly burlesque Italian opera, flexing her vocal muscle with runs up to high B.

As Professor Wendy Heller wrote in her review of Joncus’ book in Early Music America, “For Clive, as Joncus shows, it all began with an extraordinary singing voice that allowed her to “straddle” high and low rhetorical registers. Clive could compete with (or even mock) the best Italian sopranos; she could use the lower part of her voice to excel in popular songs and raunchy ballad operas on one night and employ her secure vocal technique the next day to become a goddess in a lofty masque…. Kitty Clive, or the Fair Songster opens up entirely new ways of thinking about how a singer might wield her voice. Joncus does not so much invoke the abstract concept of “Voice,” but rather helps the reader imagine the specific grain of a very specific instrument with which Clive was identified throughout her long career. What is particularly fascinating is the extent to which Clive’s musicianship and ability as a singer became the catalyst for all that followed. Joncus persuasively shows how her musical skill helped her excel in the spoken theater, pointing out the extent to which control of tempo, rhythm, and melody are essential for stage speech, a point that musicians and actors rarely acknowledge today.”

Kitty Clive or The Fair Songster by Berta Joncus (Boydell Press 2019) is available from all good bookshops.

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The progress from Keyboard virtuoso to Opera composer of Genius 

By Mark Windisch

One must delve into biographies of Handel to trace where his interest in stage works first became evident. Mainwaring writes of a visit to Berlin in 1698 where Handel was supposed to have met Ariosti and Bononcini. (There appear to be some inaccuracies in Mainwaring’s statements as the reports of Handel’s meeting these composers do not tally with his stated age at the time.) However, it may be assumed that the young Handel could have made more than one visit to the Ducal Palace in view of the position (barber/surgeon) both Handel’s
brother and his father had in the Duke’s household.


It is certainly true that a well-known composer, Johann Philipp Krieger was active in the Ducal palace at that time. It is recorded that he produced 18 German operas there. We don’t know how many of these the young Handel heard, but in Handel’s 1698 theme book there are pieces of music by J P Krieger or his younger brother J Krieger, which implies he had access to the scores. Handel used music by J P Krieger in several of his compositions. The Weissenfels palace had a flourishing artistic programme and was supported by Reinhard Keiser (1674-1739). In addition, nearby Leipzig had a flourishing opera company directed by N A Strungk (1640-1700), who was music director there from 1693-96 and was succeeded later in this post by G P Telemann (1681-1767) from 1702 to 1705. Probably these performances in Weissenfels were not the more modern Opera Seria style, but were certainly performed with beautiful scenery and costumes which would probably have appealed to a young man with a strong imagination, if he was permitted to attend.

The Ducal palace at Weissenfels might have been one place where Handel’s interest was aroused. The question I ask myself is whether Duke Johann Adolf I, who clearly spotted Handel’s talent early and persuaded Handel’s father that he should encourage Handel to study music, carried his interest in the boy further. Might he not have allowed young Handel to attend performances in the castle?

Duke Johann Adolf I

Handel’s training with Zachow was mostly with keyboard music and his paid employment was as church organist at the Cathedral in Halle so probably his professional exposure to theatrical music would have been quite limited. However,
the interest must have been there, even if latent, because he had a lifelong interest in composing music in this genre later.


Music at Weissenfels Castle
Neu-Augustusberg castle is a fine building
erected by the father and grandfather of
Duke Johann Adolf I who spotted Handel’s talent early. The Duke Johann Adolph I had a recorded interest in all the arts and was clearly a man of taste and discernment, choosing many musicians to write music for performance in his castle. Johann Philipp Krieger and his younger brother were both accomplished musicians. Johann Philipp was born in 1648 in Nuremberg, had a spell as Chief Kapellmeister in Bayreuth and held several important positions in Halle. Handel borrowed a number of themes from Krieger’s compositions.

Johann Philipp wanted to study the Italian style and to this end he took himself to Venice to study with Johann Rosenmüller, an exiled German. Krieger is known to have composed “singspiele” which were published in Nuremberg in 1690. Chrysander gives the titles of some operas written for BrunswickWolfenbüttel in 1693, some of which were also performed in Hamburg. (These operas are referred to by Rev J R Milne in my copy of Groves Dictionary from 1928, who significantly states “one may unhesitatingly class them with similar works by Handel.”).

J.S. Bach also travelled to Weissenfels in 1714, where his first secular cantata was performed. Entitled Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd (‘The lively hunt is all my heart’s desire’, BWV 208), it was written to celebrate the birthday of Duke Christian of Saxe-Weissenfels. A few years later, Bach gave a number of recitals at the royal court in Weissenfels, which enjoyed an excellent reputation far and wide for the high quality of its
musical performances. In 1729, Bach was appointed Royal Kapellmeister of Saxe-Weissenfels by the Duke – a position he was entitled to exercise without having to relocate. These facts give some insights into music life in Weissenfels. As a footnote Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672), probably the most famous German musician of the seventeenth century was born and died in this town which had quite a history of musical figures.

Leipzig
The Oper am Brühl was the first opera house in Leipzig and existed from 1693 to 1720. It was initiated by Nicolaus Adam Strungk who saw an opportunity to bring in an audience during the trade fairs (for which Leipzig is still famous). An application was made to the Saxon Elector, Johann Georg IV and was granted for a period of ten years. An architect with Italian experience, Girolamo Sartorio who had built the Hamburg opera house was chosen and put up the building in only four months. The building was a three storey wooden house with a gable roof, 47 metres long, 15 meters wide and 10 metres high. It had a semi-circular auditorium with fifty boxes.

The first opera performed there was Alceste by Strungk on 8 May 1693. The architect, Sartorio built elaborate scenery with a forest, a royal palace, and a
fire-breathing dragon. In 1696 Christian Ludwig Boxberg joined as composer and librettist and his scores are preserved as the oldest surviving Germanlanguage opera from Central Germany. The Opera House flourished when Telemann took over direction in 1703. Even when Telemann left Leipzig for Sorau (now Zary in modern day Poland, then under Saxon rule,) he continued to compose for the Leipzig Opera.


Handel is not mentioned in the history of this opera house although, as a close friend of Telemann, it is likely that he would have attended at least one major work by Telemann. With his legendary energy, Telemann founded the opera orchestra (mostly with amateur musicians), played the keyboard, and even performed as a singer in some productions. In 1704, his opera Germanicus with text by Christine Dorothea Lachs (Strungk’s daughter) was first performed there. Handel moved to Hamburg in 1703 but I cannot imagine that he would not have made the effort to see Germanicus performed in Leipzig.


In total there were 104 productions in the 27 years of the opera house’s existence. Unfortunately, the Leipzig opera house was deemed to be in a dangerous state in 1719 and was demolished in 1729. The company then moved to Opernhaus vorm Salztor in nearby Naumburg.

Hamburg
The Opera in the Gänsemarkt in Hamburg was an altogether more professional arrangement. It was started in 1678 and ran through up to 1738. It was the first theatre in a German-speaking country to have a continuous cast. It was run as a public body without (unusually for the time) any financial support from the nobility or religious establishments. It was founded by a cultured alderman, Gerhard Schott who had travelled widely and encountered opera in Italy. He was supported by Johann Adam Reincken, organist and Kapellmeister of Christian Albert, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp.

Despite some opposition from certain elements of the religious community Girolamo Sartorio (brother of the composer) was engaged to design the theatre and its opening took place on 2 January 1678 with a sacred opera Adam and Eva by Johann Theile. Soon other opera composers submitted works for performance, amongst them Antonio Sartorio, a leading Venetian Opera composer and Kapellmeister to the Catholic Duke Johann Friedrich, Nicolo Minato, Johann Wolfgang Franck, Agostino Steffani, and many others.

The Gänsemarkt opera house became embroiled in several arguments between the pietists who hated the idea of the provision of public entertainment and the standard version of Protestantism which tolerated and even encouraged it. Reinhard Keiser directed
the Opera House between 1703 and 1707, when he employed Handel as violinist
and cembalist. It was during the performance of Mattheson’s opera, Cleopatra where the famous duel between Handel and Mattheson took place. There seemed to be some intense rivalry between the two of them concerning who might take over from Keiser and it might well have spilt over to trigger this duel. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries and their differences were settled amicably. During his time in Hamburg Handel worked on Almira, Nero and Daphne by way of learning how to compose operas. In 1722 Telemann took over management of the opera house, but by this time Handel had been in England for ten years. Handel and Telemann remained lifelong friends and often Telemann would adapt an opera Handel composed for his London theatres. Telemann did not have Handel’s access to expensive prima donnas so he had to rewrite arias, often in German, making a dual language hybrid.

After a short time while working in Hamburg, Handel met Gian Gastone de Medici who invited him to Italy to hear the Italian singers, who Gian Gastone praised very hugely. Handel might well have started his stay in Italy in Florence with Gian Gastone, but it was not long before he visited the music making centres of Venice, Rome, and Naples. The only date we know for certain was 14 January 1707 where Handel’s appearance is noted in the diary
of Francesco Valesio, recording that he had played the organ excellently in St John Lateran in Rome.

Opera was banned in Rome after the papal edict of 1698 but Handel exercised his considerable talents for vocal writing with some splendid cantatas and some major works like Il trionfo del Tempo and the brilliant Dixit Dominus. These all helped him to write music which suited the rhythm and metre of opera sung in Italian. He became kappelmeister of the Hanoverian court in 1710.

On securing an initial twelve month leave of absence from the Hanoverian court, he managed to make his way to London to start his 48-year career as a composer of operas, oratorios and more. In 1711 his opening opera in London, Rinaldo was a great success and launched his operatic career. Following Rinaldo Handel’s career took off in a series of amazing operas and oratorios, the like of which has not been equalled to this day.

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An interview with Alexander Chance

By Francisco Salazar

Alexander Chance is a fast-rising singer who became the first countertenor to win the International Handel Singing Competition.

He has performed at Wigmore Hall, Musikfest Bremen, Nargenfestival in Tallinn, and The Grange Festival, among others. This season as he continues his rise with performances in Ravenna, Japan, Munich, Tel Aviv, and Prague, among many others.


OperaWire had a chance to speak about his Handel Competition win and what he is looking forward to as his career grows.


OperaWire: Tell me about winning the Handel competition? What does this competition mean to you?
Alexander Chance: It’s a competition that gets a lot of attention in the early music world, and I’d always viewed it (as with all competitions) as something I’d have absolutely no chance in, but I finally convinced myself this year to go for it. I wanted to get to the final so that I could invite friends who hadn’t heard me sing before, or hadn’t heard any Händel, or both, and share with them a side of me they hadn’t maybe seen before. This was a great competition for me in that sense because the final happens in the heart of London on a
Friday evening, in a church with an acoustic perfect for Händel’s music, with an orchestra and a conductor, in Laurence Cummings, who are real Händel specialists. Winning was a bonus.

OW: You are the first countertenor to win the International Handel Singing Competition, also winning the Audience Prize. What does that mean to you? What does it mean to make history?

AC: There have been plenty of wonderful countertenors in the final over the years, and really just to be named among them is an honor. I think this was the first year when countertenors have come 1st and 2nd (Meili Li, whom I know quite well, and who is a fantastic person and singer), so I’m pleased that we could jointly fly the flag.

OW: How do you go about choosing your repertoire for a competition like this one?

AC: Within the normal guidelines of showing enough range and variety, and a mixture of opera and oratorio, I chose pieces I knew very well for the earlier rounds: I find walking into a room with a panel of judges and only a pianist or harpsichordist to accompany you (with whom you’ve had ten minutes to rehearse) the most nerve-wracking thing you have to do as a singer. You have very little time to create an atmosphere and leave a convincing
impression, and so I felt I needed to perform pieces I knew like the back of my hand, and could rely on if I got nervous. The final was different – I just chose the pieces I liked the most and thought the audience would like.

As it happens, I hadn’t performed any of them before, which seems a little foolhardy in retrospect, but I knew that I’d have plenty of preparation time, and rehearsal time with the orchestra. Getting to sing “Cara Sposa,” one of Händel’s most beautiful arias, without having to worry about performing the rest of the opera (“Rinaldo”), was a treat!

OW: What are the keys to doing a competition for you?


AC: This was the first competition I’d entered, and in fact it may well be the last! I’ve always been terrified of them, far more so than any concert or opera I’ve ever done. I was focused on showing variety in each round, and planning what I wanted to sing in each round months beforehand, so that I’d have time to learn them from memory well before I needed to perform them. Especially with regard to the final, I wanted to treat it like a concert rather than a competition, and take advantage of the fact that there was a wonderful orchestra and conductor helping me out, and friends and family in the audience who were there to hear me enjoy myself.

OW: This summer you’ll be at the Ravenna Festival. Tell me about the
repertoire you’ll perform there? What do you like about performing
Britten’s music?


AC: I’m singing Britten’s “Canticles” with Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake. This is exciting not only because they are both masters of this music, but also because Julius was our next-door neighbour when I was young, and we’d often hear singers like Ian come over to rehearse with Julius next door. I’ve known him and his family since I was about 5 years old, so performing with him now will be surreal.


Britten’s music is always enchanting to listen to or perform; he has an uncanny ability to conjure up mysticism. Both of the canticles featuring countertenor (“Abraham and Isaac” and “Journey of the Magi”) are based on religious stories, but both come in secular forms: the text of the latter is a TS Eliot poem, and the former is based on a Chester Miracle Play. They represent an interesting junction between his church music and his operas. I know a
little about both, having sung his religious music at school and university, and having sung the role of Oberon in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Grange Festival last summer. I always love how prescriptive he is, and how precise with his markings on the page, meaning he always knew exactly what he wanted from each note. This makes memorizing the Journey of the Magi, in particular, a real challenge!

OW: What does it feel like to perform at this important festival?


AC: I’ve performed at the Ravenna Festival once before, with the Tallis Scholars a few years ago. I love the city, and the people who run the festival, or at least those I’ve met, are a delight. I’m particularly looking forward to a nice meal outside on a nice street after the concert with my girlfriend, who is coming for the week!

OW: The countertenor is sometimes limited to performing only baroque. However, today there are many composers composing for the voice type. What excites you about that and what is some repertoire that you are excited to develop?

AC: Baroque music is a real treat to perform. I love the idea that composers writing today, as ever, will write for particular voices, which means getting to sing music perfectly suited to one’s own voice. I’d like the chance to perform some of the newer opera roles for countertenor, such as Jonathan Dove’s “Flight,” or Thomas Adès’s “The Exterminating Angel.” Equally, if a composer like Jonny Greenwood, who blurs the boundaries between conventional classical music and ‘popular’ music, ever felt moved to write for countertenor (and let’s face it, all of Radiohead’s music is written for countertenor), that would be an exciting prospect.

OW: As a young artist, what are you excited about for the upcoming years? Where do you hope to see your career?


AC: In terms of the future of classical music, I’d love to see more young people come to concerts and operas, a wider array of venues, more variation in how long (or short) concerts are. Personally, I want to make as much of the next ten or so years as possible, which (one’s 30s) are probably the best time vocally for a countertenor, perform as much varied repertoire and go to as many places as I can; and then perhaps do something entirely different afterward. Touring is great fun when you are young, but it takes a lot out of you, and I always miss my girlfriend and my friends when I’m away. And, to be perfectly honest, it is often difficult to make enough money from this job to live comfortably. That might sound like a bum note on which to end, but it’s true!

This interview is published in print by kind permission of the Salazar brothers, founders of the website OperaWire which is an online haven for all passionate about opera around the world.

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‘(Al)l the world at the foundling hospital’

G. R. Sargent, Interior view of the Foundling Hospital chapel from the sanctuary, ca 1830.
© Gerald Coke Handel Foundation.

It is midday on 6 April 1773 and the Foundling Hospital chapel is jam-packed. 35 instrumentalists (plus music stands and instruments), 18 chorus singers, 12 boy choristers, 4 soloists and 1 organist have squeezed into the western gallery, and over eight hundred members of London’s elite are seated in the pews. The musicians have tuned, and the audience is sitting in hushed anticipation, waiting for the concert to begin.

Transcription of a newspaper advertisement for the 1773 performance of Messiah at the
Foundling Hospital. From the Morning Chronicle on 5 April 1773.


But before the music starts, let us consider the logistics of organising such an event. Although ostensibly a charitable and a musical endeavour, the list of expenses relating to this event from the Foundling Hospital minutes demonstrates that several local businesses directly benefited from this performance of Handel’s Messiah. Among the expenses listed are transport for one of the soloists (a ‘Coach for Mr. Rheinhold’) at 7s, and a payment of
£3.3s to ‘Mr Clay High Constable’, who was presumably in charge of security. £4.16s (around £400 in today’s money) was spent on advertisements, such as the one below which appeared in the Morning Chronicle the day before the concert. Like modern concert flyers, these advertisements outlined the location and timing of the event, the programme and the soloists, and gave instructions on where the tickets could be purchased and for how much.

Sourcing these tickets was yet another expense. A Mr Jones was paid £3.6s for sourcing the paper and printing the tickets. Although much larger, more decorative, and without the barcodes and download access experienced today, they nevertheless included information typically expected on a ticket, including the Hospital’s crest, essentially the logo of the institution, and the same details offered in the advertisement. To ensure that this batch of tickets could be used several years running, only the generic information was printed,
with details specific to that year’s performance written in by hand.

Ticket for the 1773 performance of Messiah at the Foundling Hospital.
© Gerald Coke Handel Foundation.

The payment list also provides information about the performers at this concert. Whereas newspaper advertisements only give the names of the star soloists, the Miss Linleys and Mr Stanley, the payment list names all members of the and, from the front desk violinists to the bassoonists and the kettle drummer. Chorus members were also listed, with the exception of a possible volunteer chorus of around 26, used to bolster the paid singers. These volunteers literally ‘sang for their supper’, receiving beef and wine at a total cost of £2.6s in exchange for their services. The named chorus members, orchestra, and
soloists, however, did receive a fee. Most earned 15s (about £65 today), although some section leaders, such as the oboist John Parke, received a guinea (c. £90 today) while the poor viola players took home a mere 10s.6d (c.£45). Although the Hospital paid for his coach, Frederick Reinhold waived his fee, while fellow soloist Robert Hudson received 3 guineas. By far the most extravagant fee, was the £100 (c.£9,000) awarded to the concert manager, Thomas Linley, for himself, his violinist son Thomas junior and his two
daughters Elizabeth and Mary, who were the soprano soloists.

While the 1773 payment list sheds some light on the costs of organising a concert and on the statuses of various musicians in eighteenth-century London, it does not explain how the performers came to be there, bows in the air, breaths held, waiting to begin. In a time before social media, when googling ‘string players in London’ was simply not an option, concert organisers relied on word-of-mouth recommendations to find and hire musicians. It was therefore vital that musicians carefully maintained their business networks to ensure
continuous employment in a relatively insecure profession. An introduction to some of the musicians taking part in this performance of Messiah will take you on a whistle-stop tour through some of the close-knit, interconnected networks that helped to sustain London’s music industry.

‘The Nest of Nightingales’
Known as ‘The Nest of Nightingales’, the Linleys were a musically precocious family, with eight children employed in the music profession and three appearing at the Foundling Hospital in 1773. Their father Thomas was a singer, composer and concert master, and his wife Mary’s musical talents were said to match those of her husband. Following success in their native Bath, Thomas Linley senior and four of his children, Thomas, Elizabeth, Mary and Maria, made regular appearances in the London oratorio seasons from the late 1760s, including at Drury Lane Theatre, managed by John Christopher Smith and John Stanley, who were also involved in the annual Foundling Hospital concerts. Keeping it in the family had its advantages; older family members helped younger members to make professional contacts in addition to teaching them practical musicianship, such as how to compose or play musical instruments.

Elizabeth Linley depicted as St Cecilia by Thomas Watson, c. 1779. © Gerald Coke Handel Foundation.

Continual immersion in this world from an early age certainly seems to have affected the young Thomas junior. When asked by a gentleman, already impressed by the skills of his sisters, whether he too was musical, little Thomas replied: ‘Oh yes, Sir, we are all geniuses!’. Alas, Thomas’s assertion turned out to be unwitting foreshadowing of the tragic events to come. On learning of Thomas’s death in a boating accident aged 22, his friend W. A. Mozart called him a ‘true genius’, whose contribution to English music would be irreplaceable.

Transcription of a newspaper advertisement for Thomas Linley’s 1773 benefit concert.
From the Public Advertiser on 12 April 1773.

(Ed: Our noble chairman spotted the 18th century typographical error in the
penultimate sentence.)


At the time of the Foundling Hospital concert in 1773, though, Thomas’s career was going well. 6 days after his performance at the Foundling Hospital he would perform at his own benefit concert, alongside ‘capital musicians’ including the oboist Johann Christian Fischer. His sisters Elizabeth and Mary also sang, although this appearance was to be Elizabeth’s last. The following day she married the playwright Richard Sheridan, who forbade her from
performing in public. Similar to the previous newspaper snippet, the Thomas Linley’s advertisement advises that tickets for his benefit were on sale at various coffee houses. Alternatively, they could be acquired from Mr Linley directly at his lodgings in Marylebone High Street, where he lived with another musical family, the Storaces.

Thomas Linley junior by Thomas Gainsborough, c. 1771.

The Storaces were evidently family friends of the Linleys. Double bassist Stefano Storace was active in London from the late 1750s and played at the Foundling Hospital on several
occasions, including in 1773. He had also acted as Elizabeth Linley’s agent during their appearances at the Three Choirs Festival. Elizabeth visited the Storaces with her new husband on their return from honeymoon.

A Musical Affair
Stefano Storace was also acquainted with another musical couple, the Pintos. They had perhaps got to know one another after Thomas Pinto and Stefano were both members of the committee for the Royal Society of Musicians in 1766 and 1767. Stefano was also one of the witnesses at Thomas’s wedding in 1766. Violinist Thomas Pinto led the band and played solos at some of London’s most popular theatres. Like many musicians, he was also a teacher and one of his pupils, John Coles, was in the violin section at the 1773 Messiah concert at the Foundling Hospital. Yet despite his moderate success, Pinto was apparently
‘very idle, inclining more to the fine gentleman than the musical student, kept a horse, was always with a switch in his hand instead of a fiddle-stick.’


Until shortly before her marriage to Thomas Pinto, soprano Charlotte Brent had been romantically involved with her teacher, the illustrious composer and serial philanderer Thomas Arne. They had probably been an item since around 1755 when Charlotte, Thomas Arne, his wife Cecilia, Cecilia’s sister Esther and nieces Elizabeth and Polly travelled to Dublin. After Cecilia, formerly a celebrated soprano, became ill and stopped performing, Thomas began composing for Charlotte instead. Thomas left Dublin in 1756 accompanied by Charlotte, leaving Cecilia behind.


Thomas Arne plays ‘Rule Britannia’ on the chamber organ,
after Francesco Bartolozzi, c. 1785. © Gerald Coke Handel Foundation.

Fire insurance documents record a lengthy affair. Nine years after the fated trip to Ireland, Cecilia was living with a carpenter named Mr Goldstone. Charlotte, meanwhile, was residing with Thomas Arne, where she also insured her £400 worth of possessions. By 1772, Cecilia had moved in with Polly, who by then had married the violinist François-Hippolyte Barthélémon.

François-Hippolyte Barthélémon is depicted in Thomas Rowlandson’s 1784 image of a musical performance at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. He is seated directly behind the soprano Frederika Weichsel (1745-1786). Also depicted are the green-jacketed oboist Johann Christian Fischer, and the rotund kettle drummer Jacob Neilson.


Music pavilion at Vauxhall Gardens, after Thomas Rowlandson, 1785. © Gerald Coke Handel Foundation.

At the time this image was created, Frederika lived with her husband, oboist Carl Weichsel, at No. 3 Church Street, just south of Soho Square, and Thomas Rowlandson rented an apartment next door at No. 4. Frederika’s connection to Rowlandson and her prominent position in the image have led David Coke and Alan Borg to suggest that this work may have been commissioned by Frederika herself. Alternatively, they propose that Rowlandson may have presented the picture to Frederika as a retirement gift. Either way, due to various anachronisms in the organisation and ages of those featured, we know that this collection of musicians and audience members are a hypothetical ensemble rather than an accurate depiction of a performance.

However, the musicians depicted must have known each other. Barthélémon frequently performed alongside Fischer and he also played a violin concerto at Stephen Storace’s 1770 benefit concert. In the spring of 1773, Fischer played at Thomas Linley’s benefit concert, and Fischer and Frederika Weichsel performed together at least twice in that season alone. Carl Weichsel and Fischer would presumably have been aware of one another as they were both oboists, and Neilson had long been associated with Vauxhall Gardens, where Frederika Weichsel had been a star performer for over 20 years. All four musicians had performed at the Foundling Hospital. Neilson played the kettledrums there every year between 1767 and 1777 including in 1769 alongside Carl Weichsel, in 1770 with Fischer and Carl Weichsel, and in 1771 and 1772 with Frederika Weichsel. Neilson also took part in the Hospital’s 1773 performance, which is where we find him now.


Among the musicians surrounding Neilson, Storace, Cole, and the Linleys must have been several familiar faces. Some were related, others knew each other through teaching or had played together in the past, including at the Foundling Hospital. Even those they did not recognize might one day become a business partner, an accompanist or a next-door neighbour. Concert appearances like this not only provided much needed income but also
exposed performers to the musical networks that would help them to secure their next gig. But it is not time to pack away yet; they have a job to do at the Foundling Hospital. Let the music commence!

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The Ghostly Hand of Handel: Handel operas not by Handel

By Leo Duarte

The appendix to the Händel-Werk-Verzeichnis comprises a group of fifteen compositions which have been assigned the catalogue numbers HWV A1-A15; one of these (HWV A15) is a collection of keyboard minuets arranged from opera arias; two more (HWV A2 and A5) represent unfinished operas by Handel; the remaining twelve compositions are so-called pasticcio operas. Pasticcios, common in the eighteenth century, brought together selected arias from various different operas to create a new entertainment. In today’s urtext age it is easy to view the pasticcio process pejoratively. We tend to be more interested in hearing music in its original context rather than in a bastardised form, but when such a leading light as Handel is involved first-hand in the bastardisation we might take more notice. Three of the twelve pasticcios (HWV A11, A13 and A14) were put together mainly using arias from Handel’s own back-catalogue with newly composed recitatives to bind the arias into their new librettos. The remaining nine pasticcios, however, are rather different. They were performed as part of Handel’s London opera seasons, probably under his personal musical direction, although they contain hardly a note by Handel himself.

These nine operas on which we will focus can be divided into two groups – the first three, chronologically, being true pasticcios, the last six being more arrangements than real pasticcios. I say arrangements, but in effect they are heavily cut versions of full operas by Geminiano Giacomelli (Lucio Papirio Dittatore, HWV A6), Leonardo Leo (Catone, HWV A7), Adolf Hasse (Caio Fabricio, HWV A9), and three by Leonardo Vinci (Semiramide riconosciuta, HWV A8, Arbace, HWV A10, and Didone abbandonata, HWV A12). Each of these operas does include at least some musical pieces which did not originally belong to it, though the number varies from just two in Lucio Papirio Dittatore to seventeen in Semiramide riconosciuta. Handel likely attended a performance of the original production of Giacomelli’s Lucio Papirio Dittatore while he was on a headhunting mission to Italy for new singers in 1729. Evidently, he enjoyed the opera well enough to wish to stage it in London and deemed the music of a good enough quality that he hardly troubled to interfere with it except to transpose a few arias to suit his London cast and to curtail the recitatives and the number of arias in order to meet the tastes of the London audience. He did, however, allow the phenomenal bass soloist Antonio Montagnana to include two arias which he had presumably sung with great success in previous productions.

Lucio Papirio Dittatore was the only pasticcio Handel produced in London which had so little changed or added. For the rest, it seems likely that, as in the case of Montagnana, the inserted arias came from the repertories of the individual singers. Indeed, to Handel and other eighteenth-century opera producers, one of the attractions of the pasticcio form was that the cast already had the music under their belts and therefore required less time to learn and to prepare it. Handel would have been spared the labour of writing a brand new work, required rehearsal days would have been drastically reduced, and the public would still be receiving something novel and exotic – the newly emerging compositional styles from Italy. London had become accustomed to a diet of Handel’s beautifully wrought and carefully considered orchestral counterpoint; in his music, the orchestra has its own distinctive voice which reflects upon and dialogues with the voice of the singer. The new Italian fashion was often far more straightforward, with the singer bearing the full weight of the important musical material and the orchestra mainly confined to ritornellos and a much simpler accompaniment underneath the vocal line.

This new fashion was not to everyone’s taste. After witnessing a pasticcio rehearsal, Mary Pendarves – one of Handel’s most ardent admirers – exclaimed, “Operas are dying, to my great mortification”. Many of the pasticcios received as few as four performances before being taken off. This diminutive number was bested by Ariosti’s Teuzzone which received only three performances in 1727, but it is also worth noting that Handel’s own Ezio, which today is widely esteemed, received only five performances in 1732. Some of the pasticcios, however, were very warmly received by the public, particularly the first two to be produced: Elpidia, HWV A1 and Ormisda, HWV A3. Ormisda, which had so offended Pendarves in rehearsal, received a total of fourteen performances, outselling both of Handel’s new operas that season, Lotario and Partenope.

Together with Venceslao, HWV A4, Elpidia and Ormisda form the group of three true pasticcios. At the risk of mixing metaphors, I like to think of these as ‘pic ‘n’ mix’ pasticcios. ‘Pasticcio’, in Italian, literally means a ‘pie’ and has also come to mean a ‘jumble’ or a ‘mess’. These pic ‘n’ mix pasticcios are a real jumble of arias by multiple composers from different operas with at most four arias originally from an opera bearing the same title, and even these aria attributions are speculative since the music of the original operas from which they might have been sourced seems not to have survived and cannot, therefore, be conclusively traced. There is consequently more variety in these three early pasticcios than in the later group of six, though that is not to say that they lack stylistic cohesion. The vast majority of the selected arias had come from Italian operas premiered within the preceding two years or so, and had the overriding flavour of the new Italian style to bind them together. To the London audiences, they would have represented an imported entertainment of ‘greatest hits’ from the most recent foreign opera seasons. The novelty value of these pasticcios should not be underestimated and was doubtless part of their original appeal, though today their appeal, indeed the very notice of them, comes solely through their connection with Handel. But can Handel’s connection be found in any more concrete compositional aspects?

The recitatives in four of the group of the six pasticcio-arrangements are largely taken from the original operas on which they are based. Exceptions to this are to be found in the recitatives of Caio Fabricio and Semiramide riconosciuta where Handel himself seems to have taken responsibility for composing new recitatives. The three true pasticcios appear to have had entirely new recitatives composed, though by whom we do not know. Stylistically they do not betray the hand of Handel so, presumably, they were composed by one of the many musicians attached to Handel’s opera company. Indeed, in rather too many instances the recitatives seem to have been rather inexpertly handled, resulting in jarring harmonic progressions and awkward vocal phrasing. These defects can be easily rectified in rehearsal, just as they probably were when they were originally performed, and the defects do not detract from the overall impression of the works. That the recitative composition should be delegated is not all that surprising given that, in London at least, the audience would have understood little of the Italian dialogue and would have been far more interested in the arias.

Another area where we might be able to detect Handel’s influence is in certain arias with which he tinkered. In Elpidia, an aria originally from Vinci’s Iphigenia has had a two-bar phrase crossed out each time it appears (Ex. 1). It is no more than a small cadential coda to the vocal line but evidently it was deemed undesirable and was deleted. The result is a tightening of the musical form, and it is tempting here to see Handel exerting his musical influence over the material. This is not an isolated example; two more arias from Elpidia and others from the other pasticcios have received similar treatment. Handel is infamous for “borrowing” material from other composers, but whenever he does so he drastically alters it, often distilling the ideas into their most concentrated form. Perhaps here also he couldn’t resist amending the musical material to his liking.

(Ex. 1)

Two arias – one each in each Semiramide riconosciuta and Didone abbandonata – underwent even more wholesale reworking. Vinci’s aria Saper bramante in Semiramide had to be transposed down an octave to fit a change of cast. Initially Handel seems to have imagined changing very little of the substance of the aria, but as he went through he decided to alter the character drastically in places, going so far as to recompose the entire closing ritornello. In the case of the aria Se vuoi ch’io mora from Didone, Handel’s interference with Vinci’s original might have had a slightly more duplicitous motive because he had already borrowed some of the musical material for his own opera, Giustino in the same season, so altering the material in the pasticcio would have provided a smokescreen for his magpie-like tendencies.

Aside from the aforementioned musical amendments, I believe Handel’s influence can be detected, less conclusively but perhaps more tellingly, in the way the pasticcios are structured and in their dramatic pacing. For the group of six pasticcio-arrangements Handel’s hands were largely tied to the structure of the original operas. Of course he cut them heavily, and was also forced to make certain concessions on account of the relative standing and ability of his cast members, but the overall structure remained relatively unchanged. It is in the ordering of the three true pasticcios where Handel’s influence might be seen most clearly, and, particularly so I would argue, in Ormisda. Imagine the scene: Handel is presented with a libretto and a pile of his cast’s favourite dismembered arias which he has to mould into a fine new work. The result could have turned into a Frankenstein’s monster of an opera, but instead we glimpse the ghostly hand of Handel, the master of dramatic pacing, at work in the selection and sequence of the arias.

A detailed analysis of the music of Ormisda is beyond the scope of this article, but I will provide a quick tour of Act I since the variety in character and the emotional range of the drama is worthy of note. The overture and the closing chorus are by far the earliest compositions in the work, the style being decidedly antiquarian compared with the arias which form the bulk of Ormisda. The prima donna (Anna Maria Strada) is entrusted with the opening aria, a lilting 6/8 allegro in G major which is followed by a dark, threatening aria sung by the primo uomo (Antonio Bernacchi) in B minor. Next, the principal antagonist (Antonia Merighi) sings an unctuous lament in the unlikely key of B-flat major, replete with crocodile tears to deceive the title-role (Annibale Pio Fabri) who responds with a regal yet spirited aria in D major. The following aria for Strada has two alternatives, one from the original production and one which replaced it in later performances; both are soothing in character. The unwilling puppet of the antagonist (Francesca Bertolli) then sings a defiant aria full of tempo changes and with plenty of opportunities for short cadenzas before Fabri sings a fulminating piece in C minor with much challenging coloratura. Bernacchi is then given a wistful aria in the remote key of E major and Merighi is given the last word of the act in a triumphant allegro with wide vocal leaps and extravagant quadruple stops for the violins over a bassline which alone punctuates the material with brash, almost farcical octave figures.

The final act is noteworthy too for its profusion of bravura arias. The slowest tempo indication is for one of Strada’s arias, marked ‘moderato’, but the rest are high-octane display vehicles for each cast member, and Strada is also granted “The Last Song” (as it is labelled in the manuscript) which is indicated as a rapid ‘Allegro assai con spirito”. It is no wonder that this opera was such a success. In recent performances at the London and Halle Handel Festivals, the way the energy in the room crescendoed throughout the last act was palpable and truly remarkable. This effect can have been no accident on Handel’s part, which leads me to some final thoughts as to what might be important about Handel’s contributions to these poor, neglected pasticcios.

Do the HWV numbers given to these works afford them a sense of legitimacy which is perhaps undeserved? As we have seen, there is very little if anything of Handel the composer in them, and the very act of looking for Handel’s contributions to these pasticcios has recently been called into question. As a performer in an age which would much rather hear Handel than Giacomelli it is all-too-tempting to emphasise the Handelian connection, if for no other reason than to get bums on seats at performances, and it would not be entirely unfair to accuse promoters of trying to dupe the public into thinking that they’re going to hear some unknown Handel operas by publicising the events with a prominent HWV number. Even in Handel’s day, some commentators were apparently unaware that the music in the pasticcios wasn’t by Handel himself. Nevertheless, I hope I have demonstrated that these fine dramatic entertainments are worthy of renewal and of more than a passing interest. Even if Handel’s own compositional processes remained ultimately unaffected by the marked changes in style represented by his continental counterparts, he certainly felt that their music was worth presenting, and who are we to argue with the great man?

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Which of Handel’s overtures had the ‘x’ factor?

Comparing two editions of the collection of Handel’s Keyboard Overtures annotated by Charles Burney

By Graham Pont

In April 2011 I purchased from Colin Coleman a copy of Handel’s Celebrated Overtures Complete from his Oratorios and Operas Arranged by the Author for the Organ or Piano Forte (London: Preston, c.1811). The volume was rebound in London and, on arriving in Sydney, it soon disappeared into a large and badly organised collection of Handel publications. During a recent move of that collection into retirement accommodation, my eye was caught by the early hand-written label on the front.

The original handwritten label of Burney's second collection of Handel's Overtures
The original handwritten label of Burney’s second collection of Handel’s Overtures

I immediately recognised it as the handwriting of Charles Burney.

The British Library holds a similar collection of Handel’s Celebrated Overtures in an earlier printing of Preston’s edition on paper, water-marked 1807 (K. 5.c.2). This volume has extensive manuscript annotations attributed to Charles Burney, Samuel Butler and Henry Festing-Jones. In both volumes Burney has added comments on individual overtures, many of them copied or adapted from his General History of the Science and Practice of Music, Volume the Fourth (London, 1789). The annotations are less extensive in the later Preston edition: what prompted Burney to produce this second version of his notes on the keyboard overtures is not at all obvious.

Following the title page, the later Preston edition has a separate Index to Handel’s Overtures to which Burney has added in ink, or occasionally pencil, what he takes to be the dates of the first productions of many but not all the works listed. There is no comment on No. I, the Overture in Parthenope which Burney described in his earlier volume as “less captivating than any of Handel.” He also omits his earlier comments on the Overtures to Lotharius, Ptolomy and Siroe (wrongly dated in pencil 1713).

In the later Preston edition, Burney judges the Overture in Richard the Ist to be “one of [Handel’s]finest introductory movements – Heroic music.” The second movement, an Allegro, he further notes is ‘Firm and spirited’. In view of these opinions, it is odd to find that Burney has no comments on this overture in his earlier copy of Preston’s collection.

In the earlier Preston edition, Burney has detailed comments on the Overture in Admetus –“the fugue, though spirited and masterly, has been more injured by time than most of his productions of that kind.” On the Second Overture in Admetus, in the later edition, he notes that the fugal subject of the second movement has its ‘answer inverted’.

Burney has no notes on the later Preston edition of the Overture in Alexander which he describes as “excellent” in his earlier copy. This also has warm praise for the Overture in Scipio as “spirited and pleasing” with the fugue ‘upon two pleasing and marked subjects’ and the final minuet “of an agreeable and uncommon cast.” In the later Preston edition the first movement is simply described as “Firm, spirited” and the minuet as “Agreeable, uncommon.” On the last page of this overture there appears for the first time in this volume Burney’s pencilled ‘x’ which appears to be his mark indicating special interest or quality. In a collection of Corelli from Burney’s library (also in the possession of the present writer) movements are marked with one, two or three ‘x’s in what appears to be a Michelin-style star-rating of quality.

In his earlier Preston edition, Burney notes that the Overture in Rodelinda “long remained in favour” that was “considerably lengthened by the natural and pleasing minuet.”. In his later Preston edition, Burney describes the fast movement of the overture as “Very pleasing” and the minuet as “very beautiful.”

In the later Preston edition Burney has no comment on the Overture in Tamerlane which is described in the earlier collection as “Remarkably majestic.” He also passes over the Second Overture in Amadis and the Overtures in Julius Caesar, Flavius and Acis and Galatea without comment.

The Overture in Radamistus was a particular favourite of Burney’s. In his earlier Preston edition he describes the first movement as “grand and Majestic” and the fugue as “Superior to any that can be found in the overtures of other composers.” In the later edition he hails Radamistus as “One of the most remarkable Operas Handel ever produced.” This remark appears in double quotation marks, which suggest that Burney was citing some publication, but his praise of Radamistus in the General History (Vol. IV, pp. 259-262) does not include those words.

In his later edition, Burney describes the Overture in the Water Musick (No. XVIII) as “Spirited, jubilant.” There are no comments on the following overtures until Rinaldo (No. XXIV): this is described as Handel’s “first Work for the London stage” and its overture as “Majestic.” In Burney’s General History the first movement is declared to be “grand and majestic” (Vol. 4, p.233.)

In the later edition of the overtures, the next is the Overture in Ariadne, noted as “a great favourite.” The third movement, an untitled minuet, is marked with an ‘x’ and a recollection added that this was “Played in the streets in Handel’s time.”

The next movement annotated in Burney’s later edition is the Overture in Sosarmes, with all three movements marked with an ‘x’. So also is the first movement of the Overtures in Etius and Esther. The latter is headed with a note: “See my copy arr. by Greatorex, given to me by Rev’d E. Young, Clifton.” The last movement of this admired overture is marked with an ‘x’.

In Burney’s later edition, the Overture in Justin is pronounced “Dignified and spirited,” with the observation that the fast movement is in “3 pt. Counterpoint.” The fast movement in the overture to Arminius is noted as “One of the severest Fugues in Handel’s Overtures.” The Overture in Atalanta is marked with an ‘x’ and the second movementnoted as exhibiting an “unusual mixture of Rhythms.” Burney’s ‘x’ also appears over the Musette in the Overture to Alcina and the first two movements of the 2d Overture in Pastor Fido. The concluding A tempo di Bouree is noted as a “Masterpiece of
brilliancy and delicacy.”

The Overture in Xerxes in Burney’s later collection is headed “Handel’s only comic Opera.” The concluding Gigue is noted for its “Liveliness, humour” and the “imitation
between highest and lowest part(s).”

The first two movements of the Overture in Alexander’s Feast receive a not -unexpected ‘x’ in Burney’s second collection, with a note that the work was “composed in 20 days, Opera completed.” All three movements of the Overture in Faramondo receive an ‘x’. The Overture in Berenice is noted as “Majestic,” echoing the description “peculiarly majestic and masterly” in the General History (Vol. IV, p.408). The fugue is praised for its “almost continuous stretto, masterly” and the concluding Andante Larghetto for its “Exquisite beauty and purity.” After the Gigue Burney notes that “This opera marks the failure of [Handel’s] Opera ventures. He became bankrupt” (a popular misconception for which there is no firm evidence.)

The opening of the Overture in Alexander Severus (the pasticcio HWV A15) is noted in Burney’s later edition as “Impressive and solid;” the following Allegro is adjudged “One of his most powerful orchestral Fugues” and the final movement “Highly dramatic.”

Burney’s ‘x’ of quality or particular interest is awarded in his second collection to both movements of the Overture in Athalia and the first two movements of the Overture in Samson but none to the Overture in Messiah. The first and last movements of the Overture in Saul also receive an ‘x’.

The Overture in Hymen is correctly dated in Burney’s second collection as having been “First performed in 1740” and the fugue is noted as being “Unusually florid.” The Overture in Parnasso in Festa receives an ‘x’ and its concluding Allegro noted as “Graceful.” All four movements of the Overture to the Occasional Oratorio receive an ‘x’. Several overtures are now passed over without comment until the 2nd Overture in Saul, both movements of which receive an ‘x’. So do the first movements of the Overtures in Solomon and Joshua and the 2nd Overture in Solomon.

Burney’s annotations to his second collection of Handel’s keyboard overtures end, appropriately, with the Overture in Jephtha which he notes was the composer’s “last great Work’.” Reviewing these second annotations as a whole, it is difficult to think of any reason to explain why Burney should have undertaken the task of compiling a much-abbreviated version of his notes on Handel’s keyboard overtures. There is no evidence of any substantial change from the opinions and observations recorded in his earlier copy of the Preston edition. All we can confidently conclude is that Burney’s second set of notes and comments leaves no doubt that, near the end of his life, the great historian remained firm in his judgement of Handel’s keyboard overtures. That judgement, which was informed by a personal acquaintance with the composer and a prolonged consideration of his achievements, has unquestionably stood the test of time: modern critical opinion would not significantly differ from Burney on the overtures he actually discusses and evaluates.

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Handel and the Mercurial Art of Theatre Dance.

Sarah McCleave (Queen’s University Belfast)

Handel’s connection with the performers of his music was profound. He understood their unique traits and responded to these in his music. The fiery Faustina, the pathetic yet powerful Strada, the uniquely eloquent Senesino – we feel we know his singers through Handel’s music. A cast change to a theatre work usually resulted in a wholesale rewriting of the affected role. Instrumentalists, too, were also favoured with the composer’s attentions: we can track when fêted performers were available for Handel’s opera orchestra by a flowering of demanding obbligato accompaniments for a particular instrument. And so, too, was it with the theatre dancers of his day: Handel responded to them with inspiration and imagination, leaving behind a body of music that tells a most interesting story.

Where to begin? Just as music of the baroque era is understood to be dominated by the contrasting Italian and French styles, so too was it with the theatre dance of Handel’s time. French style or la belle danse was the main currency, with its emphasis on smooth, sinuous movements and a supreme elegance particularly suited to portraying Gods or heroic figures. Also French was the ‘demi-caractère’ style, a lively and yet still elegant subdivision of la belle danse used to depict the most common opera characters such as shepherds or courtiers (‘the people’). Italian dance was airborne and spirited, particularly suited for depicting comic characters. Italy, too, was home to the commedia dell’arte theatre tradition, which gave rise to a specialist grotesque style of dancing that favoured exaggerated movements, extremely high jumps, tumbling tricks and contortions. In Germany the theatre dance style leaned more towards the Italian, to suit a particular taste for lively occupational or comic dances (fishermen, blacksmiths etc.). London hosted French and Italian dancers simultaneously, while cultivating native theatre dancers—the most versatile of whom brought stage acting experience into their performances. Skilled mimes worked in the grotesque, the comic, and the serious (= la belle danse) styles, developing vocabulary and techniques to tell whole stories through action alone. Variety was the order of the day in what proved to be a particularly innovative period for theatre dance. Handel’s fairly modest body of dance music (from fourteen of his operas) demonstrates an inspired response to each of the styles described here.

This journey started for Handel with his very first opera, Almira (1705), written for Hamburg’s Gänsemarkt theatre. In the style of Italian opera practised there, dances were expected as an integral part of the opera’s structure. The story concerns the tensions arising from the proposed arranged marriage of the new queen, Almira and her inappropriate inclinations for her secretary, Fernando. With the addition of a secondary couple, there is plenty of scope for ballroom intrigues in the Venetian promenade style to mark the budding courtships. The device of a pageant on the theme of the continents permits the introduction of exotic Entries for African and Asian characters. The style of sarabande seen in this opera is a local variant of that dance which Handel also evoked in some of his keyboard music. For Handel’s second Hamburg opera, Nero (1705) an episode where Rome is set ablaze was seen as a chance to indulge the local taste for occupational dances – by admitting a dance for arsonists (Mordbrennern)! Alas, the music for this intriguing dance is lost, as is most of the dance music for Handel’s remaining Hamburg works. Handel’s subsequent period in Italy produced operas for Florence (Rodrigo, 1707) and Venice (Agrippina, 1709), but no theatre dances. Italian centres at that time consigned dances to the entr’actes; this music was not supplied by the opera composers themselves. But Handel did write eight movements with dance titles for the overture to Rodrigo; these and his surviving Hamburg dances are recorded in a stylish performance by Peter Holman with the Parley of Instruments (‘Handel in Hamburg’ for CDA in 1997; now available through Hyperion).

Handel’s move to London in 1711 opened up for him a cosmopolitan city with a thriving theatre scene; Italian opera, however, was a newcomer to this environment and there was little if anything in the way of ‘tradition’ to work with. Handel therefore felt free to draw exclusively from his Italian experiences his first opera, Rinaldo, where the sole dance is a voluptuous Venetian forlana (‘Il vostro maggio’) sung by dancing mermaids intent on distracting Rinaldo from his duty to the Christian crusades. With echoes of a similar scene in Purcell’s King Arthur, the seductresses in this instance are temporarily successful, enticing the knight onto a boat that will bear him to the location of his beloved and incarcerated Almirena. It’s interesting to note that Collegium 1704’s intelligent and highly satisfying period-style production of this opera, as conducted by Václav Luks (and readily available to view on Youtube) adds dance very tastefully to some of the orchestral ritornellos, but offers no choreography (apart from some bold arm sweeps) to a duet version of this choral dance.

Returning to 1710s London, we find Handel forging his own path in terms of theatre dance practice. His Il pastor fido of 1712 contained no dances at all – perhaps a wary response to acerbic comments about ‘Frenchified’ dance-laden pastoral operas recently published in the anonymous pamphlet A Critical Discourse on Operas (1709). Teseo (1713), with a text adapted from a French opera (the original was duly laden with five full-blown danced divertissements) has but one sung chorus and an interrupted ball scene. The former marks the hero’s first entrance and parallels scenes in English tragedies such as Nathaniel Lee’s Mithridates, King of Pontus or John Dryden’s All for Love. The interrupted ballroom scene – unique to Handel’s autograph (Act 5, scene 4) – is another Venetian tradition that is highly organic to the plot (Medea interrupts this festivity that was meant to mark Teseo’s union with her rival, Agilea). Amadigi (1715), also adapted from a French opera, has a ‘Dance of Knights and Ladies’ conjured by the sorceress Melissa to distract Amadigi from his rescue of Oriana (Act 1, scene 7). There’s no music for this dance but Charles Burney makes the very sensible suggestion that Amadigi’s gavotte-like aria, ‘E si dolce il mio contento’ would have been repeated in order to stage this. It would be nice to see this done. This seductive dance at the behest of a sorceress was also in the English theatrical mode, with parallels in dramatic operas such as King Arthur or The British Enchanters; dramatic opera also furnished models for the celebratory dance of shepherds and shepherdesses at end of Handel’s opera.

The next chapter in Handel’s operatic life was as ‘Master of the Orchestra’ for the newly founded Royal Academy of Music in London (1719). The declared aesthetic of this company was to follow previous Italian reforms by privileging stories from ancient history. Further restrictions on subplots and character types effectively consigned dance to the entr’actes. Notwithstanding this intention, the company’s opening opera, Numitore (with a libretto by Paolo Rolli) references Venetian dance practices of the late seventeenth century—including dances as part of a Lupercalian games episode, and a dance for gladiators in another scene. Handel’s first composition for the company, Radamisto, includes a dance suite at the end of each act. Notable are the Germanic influences on his dance music (both style and structure), including the borrowing of a rigaudon from Keiser’s Nebucadnezar (1704) as the core for a suite of thematically linked dances plus chorus in the Act III finale. After Radamisto, we lack evidence pointing to any further dances in the Royal Academy operas for several years.

And yet during the 1720s, newspaper notices and playbills reveal London’s lively theatrical culture of danced entra’ctes and a thriving new genre of pantomime. The latter was inspired by the commedia dell’arte tradition. In 1727, theatre manager and acclaimed harlequin, John Rich suggested the production values of the Royal Academy of Music – by failing to invest in ‘Machinery, Painting, [and] Dances’ – was not taking into account English tastes. He suggested that opera in London would fare better under different management. Handel’s Admeto (also 1727) can be understood as anticipating Rich’s challenge. With a story drawn from ancient mythology, the resultant scope for supernatural characters opened the door to integrating dance once more. The opera opens with a mortally-ill Admeto beset in a nightmare by visions of ‘Spirits with bloody daggers’. Handel’s irregularly accented music in the opening ‘Ballo di larve’ suggests the ‘timorous’ and ‘uncertain’ movements ascribed to such characters by his contemporary, the Leipzig-based dancing master and composer, Samuel Behr. If we consider the implied chronology of the texts represented in the manuscript copies (i.e. the content rather than their date of creation), it seems that the extraordinary mimed sequence staged at the gates of hell involving the singing roles of Alceste and Ercole as well as two dancing furies was actually expanded for one or both revivals in the 1727-1728 season. The evidence for this expansion is a French overture movement found in two manuscript sources (Aylesford and Shaftesbury) that formed part of a danced ‘da capo’ structure. These specialist dances would most probably have been performed by one of two visiting Italian dance troupes; they would have been best placed to perform in the grotesque style of movement implied by the characters (spirits, furies) and also by Handel’s extraordinary music. The ‘Ballo di larve’ from Admeto has proved a popular instrumental foil on aria collections recorded by Andreas Scholl (‘Ombra mai fú’, Harmonia Mundi) Lawrence Zazzo (‘A Royal Trio: Bononcini, Ariosti, Handel’, also Harmonia Mundi), and Hasnaa Bennani (‘Handel: Arie per la Cuzzoni’, Ramée). Also of interest is the 2009 Göttingen Festspiel production of Admeto (currently available on You Tube) where some exceedingly timorous spirits are effectively upstaged by their own shadows.

The 1730s was a period where the native ballad opera and pantomime thrived in London, as did operas that emphasized stage action and visual symbolism. At Covent Garden theatre, the French dancer and acclaimed mime Marie Sallé had a particularly triumphant season in 1733-34, performing in two of her own creations – the ballets en action, Pigmalion as well as Bacchus and Ariadne. She enjoyed a benefit where – as a contemporary tells us – a troupe of dancing satyrs helped gather the bounty that was thrown on the stage by enthusiastic spectators. Handel joined forces at Covent Garden theatre with John Rich and the latter’s star attraction Sallé in autumn 1734, after some fruitful experimentation with dance form and style in a series of autograph sketches now held in the Cambridge Fitzwilliam Museum. French influence, perhaps unsurprisingly, is particularly marked in Handel’s works of this season. All revived and new operas included a suite of dances in or at the end of each act. Handel’s only opera prologue Terpsichore was adapted from Louis Fuzelier’s prologue to Les festes grecques et romaines as set by Collin de Blamont (Paris, 1725). Musical borrowings suggest Handel must have had access to a copy of its score. Scenes were even added to the source text for his Ariodante to admit contexts for dancing, including the close to Act 2 where the accused and bereft princess, Ginevra falls into an uneasy sleep. Handel’s subsequent danced dream sequence is derived – but also departs – from its model, a scene in Lully’s Atys (1676). Both include dances for agreeable and disagreeable dreams – but it is far easier to appreciate Handel’s character depiction, with a smoothly pleasant minuet for the agreeable dreams, and some emphatic tirades and rushing scalic passages for their disagreeable companions. Unique to Handel, too, is the delightful dance depicting the fear of the agreeable dreams, with a highly picturesque use of rests and scurrying semiquavers.

We have two contemporary accounts only of dance scenes in Handel. The dance scene in Handel’s Rinaldo is described by Anne Baker in a letter to her mother. Unfortunately, Miss Baker lacked the confidence to draw on her own words, preferring a close paraphrase of the libretto, where a description of the action is limited to ‘a mermaid in the shape of a Woman, others are seen dancing up and down in the water’. So, we get a sense the scene was of interest, but learn nothing new of it. The second account is a delightfully gossipy letter penned by Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough describing a riot that occurred when George II forbade Sallé an encore of the Act 2 dances in Alcina (these were a reprise of the Ariodante dream sequence). Marlborough gives no hint of the creative act that stimulated the encore although we learn that the riot required a termination of the performance. We can’t firmly reconstruct this repertory as none of Handel’s opera dances was preserved in the then-current Feuillet dance notation (primarily used to record social dances). Indeed, the innovative mime of Sallé could not have been captured by such a method. ‘Handel Ballet Music’ records the music to Alcina and Ariodante’s ballets in a stately and resonant rendition by Sir Neville Marriner with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields (Argo, later Decca); all the 1734-35 opera dances feature in a most polished performance recorded by John Eliot Gardiner with the English Baroque Soloists (‘Handel Ballet Music’ in 1984, for Warner Elatus).

Handel’s collaboration with Marie Sallé was a landmark season in its radical approach to integrating French-style divertissements with opera seria. Their work influenced subsequent developments – including most notably the dance-laden works of London’s Middlesex opera company in the 1740s, the music of which was published in a series known as Hasse’s Comic Tunes. The 1740s and ‘50s saw several composers and choreographers later associated with opera reform on the continent coming to London, including C.W. Gluck and N. Jommelli among the former, and P. Alouard among the latter. The 1740s and ‘50s also bore witness to Handel’s oratorios and musical dramas, which demonstrated what theatre works could do with chorus and scene structure when not shackled by the conventional recitative-aria format of opera seria. The 1740s are also of interest for two events that did not take place. The first was a reunion of Handel and Sallé for a revival of his Hercules in 1746 (see David Charlton and Sarah Hibberd’s article ‘My father was a poor Parisian musician’ for the Journal of the Royal Musical Association in 2003). The second was Handel’s dramatic opera Alcestes, which was already in preparation at Covent Garden theatre when the project was pulled, ostensibly due to a quarrel between author Tobias Smollett and John Rich. Handel’s autograph for Alcestes boasts a ‘Grand Entrée’ that displays his sublime style in full flight. It is a real pity that this innovative work has never been staged. Maybe it will come to light in the present century?

Sarah McCleave is author of Dance in Handel’s London Operas (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013). https://boydellandbrewer.com/university-of-rochester-press/#

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The Triumph of Virtue (or Trust me, I am a composer)

Mark Windisch

Between June 1994 and June 2015 Mr Clifford Bartlett published an Early Music magazine entitled “Early Music Review.” Mr Bartlett who had been a librarian and later a publisher of music under the name King’s Music was a greatly respected figure within the Early Music field.

Early Music Review was suffused with the highly personal, very learnèd if slightly eccentric nature of the editor. The format was always the same. The front page had an editorial. The following pages were filled with reviews of musical publications, books, (sometimes books only obliquely connected with music) and articles from learned sources, following the latest performance trends. There followed several pages of reviews of CDs and often there was a piece of music, sometimes a piece that was not widely available, arranged by Mr Bartlett or his colleague Mr Brian Clark. Every issue contained a very witty and appropriate cartoon by Mr David Hill. Occasionally there was a seasonal recipe. Finally, there were letters from correspondents, often complaining about a review which was perhaps considered to be unfair. Handel often featured in the magazine and articles were often provided by well-known scholarly people.

Sadly, Mr Bartlett died in 2019 after a spell of mental and physical decline. As both he and the relevant contributor are now deceased, I thought readers might be intrigued by this account – a disagreement between a reviewer and a conductor about a CD of Handel’s music. The conductor was Mr Joachim Carlos Martini (1931-2015) and the reviewer, a name familiar to all Handelians, was Mr Tony Hicks (1943-2010).

The piece in question was a Naxos recording promoted as the premiere recording of Handel’s only Italian choral oratorio, entitled Il Trionfo di Tempo e della Verita. Handel devotees will know that this is one of Handel’s first oratorios and is in the Roman style with conversations between characters representing ideas rather than people. In this particular one, Beauty has to decide between Pleasure and Duty before finally reaching enlightenment. Handel returned to the theme several times as described below.

Mr Bartlett clearly thought that this was an important issue, both stimulating and contentious and gave Mr Hicks sufficient space in the magazine to write a detailed review of the recording, far more than was normally allocated for CD reviews. The recording had been taken from a live performance using Die Junge Kantorei, an amateur choir that Mr Martini had founded and it was subsequently marketed under the Naxos label. Mr Martini had already issued a large number of works by Handel in this way.

Mr Hicks’ first point is that in some of the other recordings prior to Il Trionfo Mr Martini had inserted movements from other works by Handel which Handel had never used in that context. In other words, Mr Martini was rather prone to alter Handel’s compositions without any clear justification. In this case Mr Hicks, who had not long since produced a score for this work for performance at the London Handel Festival, thought that Martini had overstepped the mark and said so.

Readers will no doubt know that this work was first produced by Handel in Rome in 1707 under the title Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (The Triumph of Time and Disillusion) HWV46a. Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili produced the libretto. 30 years later (1737&1739) Handel revised and expanded it twice into three sections under the title Il Trionfo del Tempo e della Verita (The Triumph of Time and Truth) HWV 46b. After a further 20 years (when the composer was blind and towards the end of his life,) the oratorio was further expanded and revised with a libretto in English by Thomas Morell, (probably with John Christopher Smith assembling the score with Handel’s knowledge) as The Triumph of Time and Truth HWV 71.

Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili produced the original libretto of Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno.
Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili
Thomas Morrell wrote the libretto in English for the final version of Readers will no doubt know that this work was first produced by Handel in Rome in 1707 under the title Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (The Triumph of Time and Disillusion) HWV46a. Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili produced the libretto. 30 years later (1737&1739) Handel revised and expanded it twice into three sections under the title Il Trionfo del Tempo e della Verita (The Triumph of Time and Truth) HWV 46b. After a further 20 years (when the composer was blind and towards the end of his life,) the oratorio was further expanded and revised with a libretto in English by Thomas Morell, (probably with John Christopher Smith assembling the score with Handel’s knowledge) as The Triumph of Time and Truth HWV 71.
Thomas Morrell
John Christopher Smith probably assembled the score.
John Christopher Smith

It seems that, in the Martini recording, the 1737 version was enhanced by 49 minutes of additional music from the 1707 version and whole pieces from the 1739 version. Mr Hicks’ opinion was that Handel had removed the 1707 extracts in 1737 because they were not appropriate for the mood and context of the 1737 performance. In other words, as the composer, he had his reasons. Mr Martini’s additions from the 1739 version were anachronistic. To make matters worse, the CD notes were no help in explaining how Mr Martini arrived at his decision to create a Frankenstein version of the oratorio.

To his credit, Mr Hicks softens the blow by paying tribute to Mr Martini’s musicianship and praises his attempt to produce as much of Handel’s fine music as possible. However he didn’t hide his disappointment at the lost opportunity to release a recording of a version with integrity at a reasonable price, courtesy of Naxos. Mr Hicks likes the soloists, but the chorus is another matter and comes in for severe criticism.

When it comes to detailed analysis (in which Mr Hicks as a trained mathematician excelled) of the score which Mr Martini had constructed, Mr Hicks highlights a whole raft of solecisms. One is the strange justification given of having consulted another Handel scholar Mr Bernd Baselt about the use of the carillon. It seems that Mr Martini, having found out that Handel used the carillon to replace a solo violin at one point, ignored the fact that the carillon is a transposing instrument and inserted a part for it in the wrong key, thus failing to link properly to Belezza’s aria.

Handel omitted the Sarabande, ‘Lascia la spina’ which opens the 1707 version, but Mr Martini put it back in and follows it with an elaborate harpsichord arrangement taken from Almira and then puts in the aria. Later he adds a section from Acis and Galatea under the title Interludium. There are several more insertions which Mr Hicks considered inappropriate.

Mr Hicks refers to his own work on preparing the 1737 score for the performance at the London Handel Festival with Paul Nicholson conducting. His review of Mr Martini makes it patently clear he considers that to present a work which departs so much from Handel’s intention is an offence to both performers and audience. At this point he reveals his own agenda: he fears any record companies would be reluctant to bring the properly-produced version to the marketplace on the basis that Mr Martini’s version has already captured the market.

The London Handel Festival performed the 1707 version in 1997. On 30th April 1998 they performed Il Trionfo del Tempo e della Verita in the 1737 version in St George’s with Emma Kirby as Belezza, Jeni Bern as Piacere, Catherine Denley as Disinganno and Robin Blaze as Tempo. The following year on 17th April they performed the 1757 Triumph of Time and Truth in the English version complete with Emma Kirkby as Beauty, Joanne Lunn as Deceit, Catherine Denley as Counsel, Ian Partridge as Pleasure and James Rutherford as Time. Paul Nicholson conducted the piece. The 1757 version, The Triumph of Time and Truth was recorded by Hyperion on CDA66071/2 at St Jude-on-the-Hill Hampstead London featuring Gillian Fisher as Beauty, Emma Kirkby as Deceit, Counsel or Truth by Charles Brett, Pleasure by Ian Partridge, and Time by Stephen Varcoe conducted by Denys Darlow. 

Mr Martini wrote to Early Music Review in response to Mr Hicks’ article, pleading artistic licence to follow what he calls traditional ways of performing Handel’s oratorios and mentioning discussions with several Handel luminaries. In his rather rambling reply, he offers little evidence but only mentions the names of several people he had conversations with. In reply Mr Hicks outlined at some length the scholarly approach that he himself applied in providing performing scores for these three works. The notes in the London Handel Festival Programmes in 1997, 1998 and 1999 are models of clarity, describing the research Mr Hicks carried out to produce the performing scores for the Festival. The only relevant further contribution from Mr Hicks concerns Mr Martini’s insistence that Handel used amateur choirs in his oratorios. This is patently incorrect. Handel only used professional singers in his choirs.

The question for lovers of Handel’s music is whether we prefer to hear a work as we believe Handel intended or whether an artistic director has the right to create an anachronistic compilation edition at will. The choice is between Mr Hicks’ precise scholarship versus Mr Martini’s cavalier pursuit of his own musical instincts. I have no doubt which path I prefer.

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Italian Poets of the Renaissance as inspiration for Baroque Opera Composers

By Mark Windisch

Handel composed about 40 operas covering a very wide range of topics, using librettists for the text from a variety of backgrounds to help him. Some operas like Il Pastor Fido and Atalanta are pastoral subjects, some deal with historical characters with which we are familiar, like Riccardo Primo, Giulio Cesare, Xerxes, Tamerlano and Alexander. In this article I should like to take a closer look at the “magic” operas which usually rely on exceptional poets who lived in Italy during the Renaissance. In particular we owe a debt to Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso.


Handel, newly arrived in London in late 1710 was offered an opportunity to stage an opera by Aaron Hill, a dramatist who had recently been appointed to run the King’s Theatre Haymarket. Hill saw opera as the means to further his ambition to make a success of the theatre. He came up with the idea of using the story of Rinaldo and Armida and chose Giacomo Rossi (fl 1710-31) to compose the libretto. The plot laid out by Hill took Torquato Tasso’s famous poem Gerusalemme Liberata but added the love interest between Argante and Armida and inserted the additional character of Almirena. The ending in which the Muslims converted to Christianity was not part of the original.


For Handel it was a wonderful opportunity. He had brought with him to England a collection of pieces already composed for other occasions. Sometimes they were not in any way apt to the plot, but their spectacular impact, delivered mostly by the famous castrato Nicolini (Nicola Grimaldi) and other top singers accompanied by some interesting orchestral effects, ensured that Rinaldo was an instant success. It ran for 33 performances and was revived several times. The novelty of Italian opera presented in London no doubt contributed to the opera’s appeal, but its success was ensured by Hill’s intervention as producer. His choice of Handel to choose the music around which Hill and Rossi then fitted the plot was one masterstroke, but also the extraordinary stage effects which included fire-breathing dragons, live birds, moving mountains and waterfalls, must have been a revelation to London audiences.


Although the music might not always have been appropriate to the subject it illustrated, Handel produced some stunning pieces. The character of Armida has the best arias with “Furie Terribile” and “Vo far Guerra”. Rinaldo has eight arias including “Cara sposa” and the spectacular “Venti turbini”.


Tasso’s poem was very successful in its own right and went on to be the inspiration to many people besides Handel. Operas and cantatas were written by others such as Albinoni, Jommelli, Salieri, Gluck, Myslivecek, Sacchini, Haydn, Sarti, Rossini, Donizetti, Brahms, Dvorak and even Judith Weir (2005). Plays and paintings were also inspired by this poem.
Handel clearly used this opportunity as a learning experience. It not only brought his talents to a wide audience but also put his music in print for the first time. (Walsh is said to have cleared £1500 by printing songs from Rinaldo.) He also got to meet J J Heidegger who introduced him to several influential people which greatly helped his career in London.
Moving forward more than 20 years, Handel’s next venture into a magic opera came in January 1733 with Orlando. Once again, there might have been some link with Aaron Hill and Heidegger for the choice of subject.


Ludovico Ariosto published his vast narrative poem Orlando Furioso (Raging Orlando) in 1532 although a partially complete version appeared 1516. Ariosto followed an earlier poet, Matteo Maria Boiardo who published a romance Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in love), and that in turn was inspired by Chanson de Roland, published in France in the 11th century.
Ariosto’s book is published in translation in two large paperbacks by Penguin, which gives an idea of its scale. The background is the war between Charlemagne’s Christian paladins against Saracen armies under Agramante, which are threatening to overthrow the Christian Empire. In the story, Orlando, a Christian knight is obsessed with the pagan princess, Angelica. A sub plot is the love between Bradamante, a Christian warrior and the Saracen, Ruggiero. Medoro, a wounded Saracen knight is healed and saved by Angelica and elopes with her.


The unhinged Orlando is assisted by another knight and they fly up to the moon (where all things lost are supposed to be stored) on a flying horse where they find Orlando’s lost wits which are then restored to him.


Handelians will recognise some of the characters and situations in Handel’s Orlando. The knight is central to the story, but we also have Angelica and Medoro. Handel introduced two more characters, Zoroastro and Dorinda. He uses the characters to build a story of power, love, and jealousy. He concentrates on the mania from which Orlando suffers, rendering him unable to reconcile his instincts as a warrior with his obsession with Angelica. The character of Zoroastro is a sort of primitive psychiatrist-cum-magician which offers an opportunity for introducing spectacular stage effects. Dorinda is the only solidly grounded character, offering an interesting contrast.


In the opera Handel breathes life into the characters by giving them music appropriate to their thoughts as opposed to their actions. He produces some astonishing arias for Zoroastro, far more convincing in my opinion than that written by Mozart for a similar character in The Magic Flute. Orlando is a deeply damaged character. He first is portrayed as a staunchly heroic character; at the sight of Angelica he is overcome by passion. By Act II overwhelming jealousy is invoked when he realises that Angelica is in love with Medoro. His is aria reflects the resultant disintegration of his mental state. In Act III the confused state of his mind comes through clearly in the music Handel has written for him to sing, especially in his duet with Angelica. Dorinda the shepherdess has several remarkable arias including her reflective soliloquy after the quite frightening encounter with Orlando at his most deranged.


This extended poem by Ariosto became very influential and had many followers including Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queen, Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, Lope de Vega, Cervantes in Don Quixote, Borges and even Salman Rushdie in The Enchantress of Florence.


As to musical compositions, besides forming the storyline of Handel’s Orlando, Ariosto was mined by Caccini, Agostino Steffani, Vivaldi, Lully, Rameau, Hasse and many others. Many artists including Delacroix also drew inspiration from Ariosto with his painting, Marphise.
In 1735 Handel was moved to use Ariosto’s poem again for Alcina. This was another instance of Handel and his producer needing a magic opera to display special effects. The libretto came to Handel via Riccardo Broschi, brother of the singer Farinelli and a composer himself. The characters are from the Ariosto but Broschi changed a few things. He added Oronte, retained Melissa but changed her into Melisso (a bass) and developed Bradamante and Morgana from their relatively minor roles in the poem.


Handel’s genius again was to imbue the characters with human feelings and reactions as opposed to Ariosto’s concentration on just producing a narrative. Alcina, for all her magic powers, is a mature woman needing to love and be loved. Finally, when she cannot find this love, her character disintegrates and her powers are lost. The child, Oberto shows considerable feeling for his father who has been transformed into a lion by Alcina. Ruggiero starts as a puppet figure controlled by his passion for Alcina, but as he realises that Ricciardo is really his beloved Bradamante in disguise, he rejects Alcina. His status as a warrior and hero is then reflected in his music.


I wonder what the famous authors of the poems which inspired Handel and his librettists would have thought of the way their creations came to life in the Baroque opera form. Even the earliest operas, which were little more that recitals with music, did not take place until 1597. Monteverdi, who can be said perhaps to be the first composer to produce an opera approximating to a modern format, only produced his first opera Orfeo in 1607.
Handel was very versatile and flexible in his approach and magic operas form only a very small part of his huge output of Italian opera. All were well received and allowed him to produce some of his most memorable music.

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Handel’s man in Italy

By Miranda Houghton

It is just possible that Mr Swiny was the only honest man in the theatrical business at
the beginning of the 18th century. Christopher Rich was banned from presenting plays at the Theatre Royal when he appropriated a third of the actors’ revenues from benefit performances. Subsequently Swiny, courtesy of the Lord Chamberlain, was made responsible for the opera performances (two a week) at the Queen’s Theatre whilst a consortium of actors presented plays. These actor-managers stole from Swiny whilst he was in Dublin, but he received reparation. Subsequently the Queen’s Theatre was rendered virtually bankrupt when the MP, William Collier, to whom Swiny had sublet the theatrical licence, tried to oust the current manager and strip the theatre of all its assets.

Swiny resumed management of the Queen’s Theatre after this coup, but by 1713, during the production of Handel Teseo, “Mr Swiney brakes and runs away and leaves ye singers unpaid, ye Scenes and Habits also unpaid for.” It was at this point that Mr Swiny fled to the continent, some say to The Netherlands, others to Paris, but eventually located himself in Venice.
He established himself as the Italian agent for The Royal Academy, negotiating contracts before importing Italian singers such as Faustina, the wife of Johann Adolf Hasse. He also sourced the latest “drammas” set to music in Venice and northern Italy in the preceding Carnival season and sent them by horse and ship to Handel in London. This was a time when the latest operas heard by nobles on the Grand Tour were being introduced to English audiences, either by the Royal Academy or its rival, The Opera of the Nobility. We know that two of the pasticcio operas created by Handel and his team, given their modern premieres at recent London Handel Festival performances, were Swiny’s choice. What we don’t know is how much this canny Irish scholar contributed to the finished versions of Ormisda and Elpidia. The original libretti were significantly tampered with in an attempt to make them appealing to an English audience. Recitative was cut, reworked and often freshly set to music. Singers substituted their favourite arias which also involved some rewriting, often part way through a production. Swiny was paid – eventually. What is not quite clear was whether he was merely charging a finder’s fee or did he participate in the creation of these “must see” musical events?
To put Swiny’s early career in context, he worked alongside the famous Colley Cibber, an actor-manager who preceded David Garrick. Colley Cibber wrote 25 plays for his company at the Theatre Royal and amazed the establishment by becoming Poet Laureate in 1730, more as a result of his political affiliations than of his ability as a poet. He was known as a comic, but also bowdlerized the classics, including Shakespeare, in order to adapt “high art” into the vernacular. A 19th century theatrical historian described his Richard III as: “a hodge-podge concocted by Colley Cibber, who cut and transposed the original version, and added to it speeches from four or five other of Shakespeare’s plays, and several really fine speeches of his own.” Even though Cibber takes fewer than 800 lines from Shakespeare, he stays for the most part with the original design, mainly adapting the plot to make it more suitable for the stage, as well as performable in less than two hours. If this sounds familiar to those cognizant with Handel’s operas and pasticcio operas, it is because the plays and operas which would be heard serially on the same stage, suffered similar reworkings.

It is into this world of presumptuous adaptation with little or no respect for the droit d’auteur which would seem shocking today that young Mr Swiny immersed himself. He had presented Italian operas to the London audience before his association with Handel and the Royal Academy began. In 1706 the opera Camilla was presented at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, initially translated into English by Owen Swiny himself before being turned into poetic verse by a Mr Northman and then set to music, adapted from existing music of Bononcini, by one Mr Nicola Haym, better known as “Handel’s librettist” between 1713-28. What is intriguing about this is firstly that Mr Swiny’s Italian was good enough to render a decent English translation from an Italian libretto and secondly that Haym was credited as being the composer of Camilla when in fact he was patently Bononcini’s arranger. In 1708 Haym was once again commissioned to arrange music from an existing opera – this time by Scarlatti – to produce the opera, Pirro e Demetrio. (It also included 18 of his own arias.) For this Haym was paid £300. He was also credited with Dorinda (1712) and Creso (1714) as “set on ye stage by Mr Haym” and for Lucio Vero (1715) at the King’s (formerly Queen’s) Theatre “Ye Musick was managed by Nic Haym.”

In 1712 Haym and two fellow musicians and concert promoters were accused of blocking the performance of Italian opera in London. They wrote a letter to the Spectator, protesting that, “The Songs of different Authors injudiciously put together and a foreign Tone and Manner which are expected in every Thing now performed amongst us, has put Musick itself to a stand; insomuch as the Ears of the People cannot be entertained by any Thing but what has an impertinent Gayety, without any just Spirit; or a Languishment of Notes without any Passion or common Sense.” So Nicola Haym, (who, despite his Italian forenames, was of German extraction,) was instrumental in ensuring opera seria in the Italian style was presented with some modicum of integrity, rather than being bowdlerized in the manner of Cibber’s Richard III.

By 1706 the Queen’s Theatre was leased to Swiny by Sir John Vanbrugh for
£5 “in the acting day.” By 1708 his opera season (part of the theatre’s programme) was sufficiently established to generate subscribers. One of Vanbrugh’s letters to the Earl of Manchester states, “He has a good deal of money in his pocket that he got before by the acting company and is willing to venture it upon the singers.” He brought the famous castrato, Niccolini over to star in Pirro e Demetrio. Despite Niccolini’s bitter complaints about the terms of his contract – drafted and negotiated by Swiny – Niccolini was paid the extortionate sum of 800 guineas per annum. Because the intention was to honour the crowned heards of Europe, Italian opera seria was intended to be a magnificent spectacle, employing the finest singers, players, sets, stage conceits and even full armies and fleets (in the case of some Hasse opera performances.) As the costs escalated, interest in the art form began slowly to wane. Perhaps it is not surprising that by 1713 Swiny was forced to flee his creditors. It was not until 1735 that he was allowed to return the UK (presumably as a discharged bankrupt) and had changed his name to MacSwiney.

Swiny resumed his association from his base in Venice with Italian opera in London by 1724, in which season the libretto of Ariosti’s Artaserse was dedicated to him. Much of his correspondence with the Duke of Richmond, who was elected Deputy Governor of the Royal Academy in 1726, survives. Swiny appears to have undertaken a dual role in Italy as an agent for Venetian painters as well as for the finest Italian singers of the day. In 1724 Haym was deputised to write to Swiny in Venice to ask him to report on the greatest operatic productions in the Italian theatres of the day. Swiny’s response was to snub Haym and send his own vision of the Italian opera in London directly to the Duke of Richmond. It appears he understood his role to be the recommendation of libretti and Italian singers to grace the stage of the Royal Academy. Firstly he had to contend with the composer, Bononcini and castrato, Berenstadt who tried to ensure only their friends obtained the privilege of singing on the London stage.

Both Richmond and Swiny were very keen to import Faustina to the Academy, but were opposed by other directors of the Academy as well as singers already based in London. It took two years of negotiation before Faustina eventually appeared in Alessandro. After that the Academy tried to remove Cuzzoni, the existing prima donna, by offering her less money than Faustina. However the feisty soprano maintained her connection with the Academy beyond the term of its first incarnation, which closed after the 1727-8 season.

In 1725 Swiny was asked to approach both Gizzi and Carestini, possibly because Senesino was proving an unreliable employee, often feigning ill health. He failed to secure their services and in 1728 suggested Farinelli would be more of a draw. Sadly for the Academy, Swiny reported that the singer wished to continue his studies “in the Lombard manner” and could not be persuaded. Subsequently Farinelli was briefly heard in the rival establishment, The Opera of the Nobility.

When it comes to a choice of vehicle with which to present Faustina to the British public, Swiny credits himself with the choice of Venceslao as a libretto. He vetoed Partenope on the basis the opera only worked in Italy because of the “depravity” of the audience. After the premiere in Venice of Porpora Siface he claimed this drama would never work because the protagonists were all vicious and would not elicit compassion from a more refined English audience. When he heard that the Haym-Handel partnership had in fact launched her with Alessandro, he asked to receive a score: his response was predictable. This was the worst book he had ever read and the weakest score Handel had so far written. Swiny tried too to be a precursor of Giovanni Ricordi and put himself in charge of costumes and scenery as well as the music, but the Academy, lurching towards its first demise, was reluctant to import his preferred Italian designers at significant cost.

Despite Swiny’s hopes for Venceslao, because of delays in the postal service it was another libretto handpicked by Swiny and sent on horseback from Venice – Elpidia -which became Handel’s first pasticcio for the Royal Academy. This marks the first time the operatic music of Leonardo Vinci had been heard outside Italy. In the manuscript in the British Library, the published score is misattributed as “Opera de Leonardo Vinci a Londra 11 Mai 1725.” Swiny’s correspondence regarding Elpidia makes it clear that the majority of arias which feature in the pasticcio are taken from Vinci’s Rosmira, Ifigenia and Orlandini Berenice, all three of which were premiered in Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo at Carnival 1725. As to why Swiny chose this particular libretto by Apostolo Zeno, one can only presume he came across it being reincarnated by Vignatti (a Milanese court composer) for performance in Venice at Ascension in 1726. In a letter dated January 23rd 1726 Swiny refers to a payment of £50 for “the opera of Elpidia.” Of this sum, £40 went “for copying the score, and Vinci’s regalo.” According to Markstrom, if Swiny chose the libretto and the best arias of the 1725 Venetian season, “Handel’s role would have been limited to composing the recitative and rehearsing and conducting the new opera.”Elpidia

John H Roberts has postulated that, because of this reference to £40 and the fact that the extant scores appear not to feature the hand of either Handel or his known copyists, plus the attribution of the manuscript in the British Library to Vinci rather than Handel, the score of Elpidia might have been composed or prepared by Vinci himself in Venice. This might explain why the published libretto is only in Italian without the usual verbatim (as opposed to performing) translation into English.

However one has to ask why Vinci would put together an opera which he was never to hear, wasn’t going to rehearse and conduct and, perhaps more to the point, why would he cobble something together for a mere £40 including copying when Haym in London was paid £300 for his arrangement of Scarlatti? I prefer to think that Vinci was rightly paid for providing half the arias included in Elpidia and that the score includes a variety of hands because singers brought in their own favourite arias in many cases. (Certainly the bass arias from Lotti Teofane are written in a completely different hand and their words are also absent from the printed libretto.)

I think it’s likely that whoever edited the Elpidia libretto was also responsible for making the cuts in Leo’s Catone in Utica to create the first Handel pasticcio Opera Settecento premiered at the London Handel Festival. The removal of whole scenes in Elpidia as well as one character (love-interest and all) is very similar to the treatment of Catone; in both cases the original Italian book is virtually unrecognisable. This is presumably what Handel and/or Haym thought worked for a London audience. Having recently heard uncut operas by Hasse, Broschi and Porpora, it is clear that the London audience for Handel’s Italianate operas was not willing to tolerate long stretches of recitative in Italian, much preferring to leap from one engaging aria to the next.

When The Royal Academy dies a second death, we hear no more of Swiny as opera impresario or agent. Swiny turned to his second string as an art dealer. We have all heard of Canaletto, but may not know that it was Swiny in the 1720s who first proposed to the artist that, if he were to create small, topographical views of Venice, his paintings would find a market in the UK. The other Venetian painter who became an international success in her day, due in no small part to the offices of Mr Swiny, was the pastellist, Rosalba Carriera.
The first illustration which follows is her allegorical portrait of Faustina which hangs in the Die Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, the city which was later to become the epicentre of her husband’s highly successful career. It was not unusual for a portraitist at the time to depict his/her subject as a mythical figure or concept, such as Spring. Dating from some six years later, the portrait of Faustina Bordoni Hasse which hangs in the Ca’ Rezzonico in Venice, is more modest and, I think a more realistic record of the singer’s character.

Another of Rosalba’s sitters was Lord Boyne. He embarked on his Grand Tour with Edward Walpole, second son of the prime minister and Horace’s brother; they arrived in Venice in time for the carnival of 1730 at which Hasse Artaserse was performed. From there they travelled to Padua, Bologna, Rome, Naples and Florence, meeting on the way none other than Owen Swiny. They returned to Venice in early 1731 and it is thought Rosalba painted Lord Boyne on that occasion. This portrait currently hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One version of this portrait was listed as being in the possession of Owen Swiny at his death. Not only did he enhance the careers of Venetian artists but he also amassed his own collection of their works, including many works by Canaletto which found their way into the Royal Collection.

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An interview with Dame Sarah Connolly

By Faye Courtney

Indisputedly one of the finest mezzo-sopranos Britain has ever produced, Dame Sarah Connolly has everything you could wish for in an opera singer: a vocal timbre of richest velvet combined with sensitive, intelligent musicality, a dazzling technique and a commanding stage presence that never ceases to impress, no matter what acting challenges are thrown her way. Though equally at home with Wagner and contemporary opera, Handel has always been very close to her heart, as well as an integral part of her career and she was happy to talk to Handel News about her experiences performing the music of the man she describes as “the ultimate dramatist”.

Do you have a favourite Handel role? “Whichever one I’m singing at the time, I cannot be disloyal to the others” – although she has particularly fond memories of the John Copley production of Semele in San Francisco (2000) where she unusually sang the roles of both Juno and Ino, requiring a somewhat frantic 50 second costume change at one point. Although Dame Sarah has sung in three different productions of Semele, she felt Copley’s 1982 Royal Opera House production was absolutely superb, particularly in the handling of the comic scenes and loved the acting challenges of playing two such contrasting parts. “One minute she comes off stage as a sort of frightening Mrs Thatcher person and then 50 seconds later she goes back on as the meek little sister, and I found that ‘schizophrenic’ side of the character very funny.” She felt somewhat “cheated” that she only got to sing one role (Ino) in the Robert Carsen production for ENO but admits it wouldn’t have been practical to do both, due to the complicated nature of the costumes involved.

The title role of Ariodante is also very special, although naturally does not provide her with the same opportunities for comedy. Though there are usually no laughs in that opera, she notes that the character of Polinesso does have the possibility to get the audience on side (particularly when played by a natural stage animal like Christophe Dumaux), and Sir David McVicar’s 2018 Vienna production absolutely understood the comedy potential of Polinesso trapping somebody as gullible and easy prey as Ariodante. Yet the Richard Jones production she performed (in Aix-en-Provence and Amsterdam) had no comic elements whatsoever and was a “deeply nasty” affair, with Polinesso depicted as a violent sexual predator. It is this ability of different directors to portray Handel’s characters in such different ways that she finds so fascinating. In terms of technical challenges, she finds the role of Ariodante the hardest, followed by Xerxes – particularly as you need a very ‘gymnastic’ voice with a big, flexible range to sing arias like “Se bramate” and “Crude furie”. In comparison, the role of Giulio Cesare is not about range but does require coloratura, whereas Semele’s Juno is more about the character than vocal challenges.

Concerning da capo ornamentation, Dame Sarah always makes a point of starting fresh and usually writes her own, and in the past she has collaborated with her singing teacher Gerald Martin Moore, who is also an expert harpsichordist. While rehearsing Xerxes and Alcina at ENO, she found herself at odds with Sir Charles Mackerras, who expected the entire cast to use the same decorations he had written for completely different singers in past productions. Although he eventually, grudgingly allowed her to use her own ornaments at ENO, the two artists later came to a complete impasse in a San Francisco Semele, when he asked her to sing ornaments he had written for Felicity Palmer, including a “comedy bottom G sharp” which Dame Sarah barely had in her voice back in 2000. She politely pointed out that her voice was totally different to Felicity’s and requested to sing a top G sharp instead but Sir Charles took umbrage at this and literally stopped speaking to her for an entire week! On opening night she baked home-made biscuits as presents for her castmates and left some for Sir Charles with a note saying “I’m sorry if you think I’ve been difficult, it’s nothing personal. It’s just that I have to tailor make my decorations to suit my voice. Being given something that isn’t suitable for my voice just won’t work and I’m very sorry if you’ve found this a problem – blame the Irish in me!”. Just before curtain up, he popped his head around her door and said “Thanks for the biccies – I’m half Scottish, you know….Mackerras!” and grinned at her. From that point onwards he couldn’t have been nicer and actually went out of his way to publicly praise her musicianship at a Handel convention in San Francisco, where she was replacing a pregnant Patricia Bardon. Very interestingly, after this incident Sir Charles Mackerras stopped insisting that singers used his decorations.

Dame Sarah has sung Handel with both modern and period instruments but has a definite preference for the latter. She notes the enormous difference it makes, particularly for a high-lying role like Agrippina, where the tessitura feels much more comfortable at the lower baroque pitch. “Because the violins play largely without vibrato, you find yourself as a singer automatically trying to pair the vocal line, expression and phrasing with that of the obbligato solo instrument or just general string sound”. She credits the ten years she spent working with Philippe Herreweghe with influencing the way she sings baroque music; eschewing anything remotely resembling a 19th century sound.

Renowned for her trouser roles, Dame Sarah’s incarnations of male characters are so convincing that one frequently sees confused audience members flicking through their programmes for clarification. While aware of the conceit that she’s a woman playing a man, her approach always starts with the psychology of a character; who he was in history and who Handel intended him to be, and she reads as much as she can about any real-life characters she portrays. Though she feels Julius Caesar definitely had ‘sex appeal’, the main ingredient which makes him attractive is a combination of fear and power, as is still the case today with other men in high office. On the first day of Giulio Cesare rehearsals at Glyndebourne, director David McVicar asked her to improvise the opening scene, which prompted her to naturally sit down on a chair in the centre of the stage – an idea McVicar loved. “That’s something I’ve noticed about all heads of state, including Donald Trump” she remarks, “Trump has learned many things about power, and he’s learned that the person who is seated is the most powerful person in the room”. For that reason (but not because of Donald Trump!) she sings most of the aria “Empio, dirò, tu sei” in a seated position, even though it wasn’t easy and she had to contend with the discomfort of the breast plate on her costume constantly riding up towards her neck.

Why does she think the major international houses programme Handel so infrequently? She feels this lies squarely on the shoulders of the programme planners but also mentions the practical difficulties of either getting in a specialist period orchestra (at considerable extra expense) or using a house orchestra whose musicians are usually not experts in performing baroque music – with the noted exception of the ENO orchestra, who Mackerras trained brilliantly for so many years. “One could easily sell Handel if it’s well directed and well sung. It’s a crime to make Tamerlano boring, an absolute crime. I just think some directors have no business going anywhere near Handel, to be honest, or any opera for that matter. By all means do Handel, but make sure you hire a director who loves it – and who gets it. If you don’t get it, go away!”. She firmly believes that Handel operas don’t need enormous budgets or lavish 18th century brocade costumes to be successful and that with the right singers and a director who really understands what’s going on, a piece like Tamerlano could still be great if set in a simple black box.

On her Handelian wish list, she’d love to sing Dejanira in Hercules and feels she’s the right age to sing it. She would also love to do staged versions of Jephtha, Solomon and Theodora, noting how successfully staged oratorios can work if handled sensitively, such as Peter Sellars did at Glyndebourne. Although recordings are currently off the table in this present Covid world, she does hope to record some more Handel oratorios in the future.

Dame Sarah was widely praised for being so open and honest about her breast cancer diagnosis last summer, an attitude which many found inspiring. She recalled how she Googled ‘opera singers with cancer’ but could only find information about those who had sadly died of the disease, such as Lorraine Hunt and Tatiana Troyanos. She thought “What about the ones who survived it? Where are they?” and had to ask her colleagues who else had experienced cancer, so they could help with her questions about the effects chemotherapy has on the voice. Thankfully she has now finished both chemotherapy and radiotherapy but found the treatments horrendously gruelling; “My vocal cords dried up, my whole throat got swollen and my body was in such pain I couldn’t use the support muscles in my ribcage or my abdominals – everything hurt”. She found herself thinking “Why sing right now? Why bother?” and instead chose to use the time to listen to plays and audio books, as listening to music was too upsetting.

Another result of going public was the enormous outpouring of support she received from friends, colleagues and fans alike, something for which she feels incredibly grateful. Her visibility also meant that she was able to provide vital moral support and be “like a sister” to several other musicians with cancer, who didn’t know who else to talk to during their treatment because nobody in the music profession in general discusses this subject. As well as this desire to break down the ‘taboo’ of cancer not being spoken about in the music world, she didn’t want to become the subject of rumour and speculation that perhaps she was cancelling because she couldn’t sing any more. “These ghastly, gossipy people in the opera world, they’re going to start creating fantasy stories. And anyway, I couldn’t find anything online about women singers with cancer who’d survived and I thought ‘I’m going to flipping well do it, I’m going to say I’ve got breast cancer, there’s no shame’. And if people don’t want to give me work as a result of that then shame on them!”

For the future, Dame Sarah particularly looks forward to singing new music specifically written for her voice, including eight songs Mark-Anthony Turnage has recently composed for her. She would also love to sing in operas about contemporary issues which are relevant to everyone today. An opera about Brexit, perhaps? “Why not? It’s the biggest upheaval in our times and Handel certainly wrote about issues of the day via his music”. Perhaps one day someone will compose that Brexit opera and cast Dame Sarah as Angela Merkel……

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Mr Handel, Gentleman Composer

by Jonathan Keates

During the autumn of 1738, the wit and socialite Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote to her friend, the Countess of Pomfret, then living in Paris, with the latest gossip from London. Harriet Herbert, daughter of Lord Powis, had ‘furnished the tea-tables here with fresh tattle for this last fortnight’ by seeking out a vicar ‘to marry her the next day to Beard, who sings in the farces at Drury Lane’. The intended husband was none other than the young tenor, John Beard who had sung for Handel during the 1734-7 Covent Garden seasons which included the premieres of Ariodante, Alcina and Atalanta. Whatever his gifts (later deployed so effectively in the composer’s English oratorios) Lady Mary was unimpressed. ’Since the lady was capable of such amours I did not doubt if this were broke off she would bestow her person and fortune on some hackney-coachman or chairman’. Only half joking, the writer suggested poisoning Lady Harriet’s tea ‘and offered to be at the expense of arsenic and even to administer it with my own hands’ so as ‘to save her from ruin and her family from dishonour’.

The marriage went ahead and Lord Powis’s family made life duly miserable for his erring daughter. Mary Wortley Montagu, herself never quite respectable enough, hence the keener to stand on her dignity as an earl’s daughter, was only articulating the standard prejudice of her social echelon. Musicians, for all their talents, were deemed unfit to wed scions of the aristocracy and the Beards’ union was an outrage, pure and simple. What Handel himself thought of the alliance – or misalliance – is so far unknown. Music, for much of the eighteenth century, was what would nowadays be termed a service industry, its product delivered within a context of deference and flattery which reduced the composer’s role to that of an artificer or functionary, like a pastry cook, a groom or a gamekeeper. In this respect, however, Handel’s status was exceptional for its period. While he relied, during his years in London, on royal favour, pensions and salaries, we can make too much of this dependent position and too little, correspondingly, of the altogether more nuanced role he designed for himself as a working musician with his own carefully crafted niche in London society.

Family background was significant. His mother Dorothea Trust was the daughter of a distinguished Lutheran pastor and his father Georg Handel, though a blacksmith’s son, had become eminent throughout Germany as a surgeon and consultant physician. Late in his career Dr Handel acquired a coat of arms, featuring a boy carrying a medical flask. The device figured on the composer’s signet ring and is visible, now somewhat faintly, on the ledger stone beneath his monument in Westminster Abbey. Thus armigerous (to use a term from his own era) Handel could reasonably claim to be acknowledged as a gentleman rather than an artisan.

This distinction played its part in his Italian journey between 1706 and 1710, several key aspects of which foreshadow his career in England. His singular gift for networking brought him into early contact with various of Italy’s most prominent cultural patrons, enabling useful links with composers, singers and instrumentalists. He was not tied, on the other hand, to specific employers or court establishments and his respective sojourns in Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice were self-financed. Where the cantatas written for Marquis (later Prince) Francesco Maria Ruspoli are concerned, the word ‘service’ in relation to Handel needs to be used with caution. Their connexion was more obviously that between a discerning enthusiast and a talented visiting artist, whom he was happy to provide with every material comfort, than an orthodox affair of aristocratic condescension rewarding a servile artisan.

In Rome Handel stayed in Ruspoli’s residence, Palazzo Bonelli, and accompanied him, in due season, to his country villas at Vignanzello and Cerveteri, where they went stag-hunting together in the nearby forests. If proof were needed that both marquis and composer felt perfectly at ease with this arrangement, it lies in Alessandro Piazza’s painting of Ruspoli reviewing a regiment he had recently raised in the Pope’s service. Handel features here as a distinguished spectator wearing a gold-trimmed coat, with a smart tricorne hat tucked under his arm. This is emphatically not a servant’s livery but an elegant outfit of the kind he would wear forty years later for Thomas Hudson’s swagger likeness now in the National Portrait Gallery.

Arriving in London in 1710 Handel adopted the same lifestyle that had served him so well in Italy. He developed links with the court and the Chapel Royal and lived for a time in the Piccadilly palazzo of Lord Burlington, the age’s most illustrious patron of the arts. Networking skills were as useful as they had been in Rome, bringing Handel into contact with such choice spirits as Alexander Pope and John Gay, both of whom contributed to the libretto of Acis & Galatea, and, most importantly, with Dr John Arbuthnot, Queen Anne’s physician, a lover of music and dilettante composer. The point specifically made by Sir John Hawkins in the memoir of Handel included in his General History of Music is that he was not treated, while under Burlington’s roof, as a mere household musician but instead ‘left at liberty to follow the dictates of his genius and invention…at dinner he sat down with men of the first eminence for genius and abilities of any in the kingdom’. Hawkins was writing at least a decade after the composer’s death, but we have no reason to doubt this account. Handel had clearly begun as he meant to go on, nurturing a semi-detached relationship with those wielding power and influence while simultaneously maintaining a measure of professional mobility and independence.

Where he eventually chose to settle permanently in London was in itself a social signifier, implying that he had arrived in more senses than one. His working life during the 1720s revolved around the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, so he might have been expected to find a home in the neighbouring complex of streets stretching westwards to Saint Martin’s Lane and north to Soho Square. The area, favoured by musicians, painters and sculptors, was popular also with the town’s well-established Italian community, many of whom worked in different capacities at the theatre.

Instead Handel made what was clearly a calculated decision to live at several removes from this creative quarter. Taking a lease on a newly-built house in Brook Street, Mayfair, he joined a very different community, a select grouping of nobility, gentry and army officers which gave the area a social tone it has never since lost. Admittedly the house itself, whatever its handsome exterior, needed to function as something more than an elegant retreat from operatic stresses and contentions at the Haymarket. One of its parlours would become the composer’s work room. Space was doubtless needed for storing music and making copies for performance and a further area could be used for rehearsals.

Number 25 Brook Street doubled nevertheless as a gentleman’s residence, where Handel lived in relative affluence with a ‘family’ of servants, his art collection and a cellar of good wine to accompany those elaborate meals his erstwhile friend Joseph Goupy would deploy to such malicious effect as accessories in his satirical etching ‘The Charming Brute’. The house was one of a whole range of status indicators which set ’Mr Handel’ at a distance from other London musicians, bringing him closer, instead, to the world of that loyal echelon of genteel admirers, collaborators and commentators which included figures such as Mary Pendarves, Lord Shaftesbury and, most crucial of all, Charles Jennens.

The rhythms and protocols of Handel’s life in England blended easily with those followed by this circle. By no special irony his worsening state of health during the late 1730s coincided with a growing vogue in smart society for the different kinds of therapy offered by spas and thermal establishments. His 1737 visit to the curative springs at Aachen, reported by English newspapers and so engagingly evoked in John Mainwaring’s biography, was followed by trips to Bath, Cheltenham and Tunbridge Wells. Journeys like these could well be extended to include a stay at a friend’s country house. The Italian villeggiatura at Marchese Ruspoli’s castle in Lazio was reproduced at, for example, Exton in Rutland, where in 1745 Handel, en route to drink the waters at Scarborough ( then more popular as a spa than a seaside resort) was welcomed by Lord Gainsborough and obliged his host with some musical numbers for a family performance of Milton’s Comus.

A letter from Gainsborough’s brother James Noel is our chief source for this occasion. ‘As Handel came to this place for Quiet and Retirement’ he writes, ‘we were very loath to lay any task of Composition upon him. Selfishness however prevailed; but we were determined at the same time to be very moderate in our requests. His readiness to oblige soon took off all our apprehensions upon that account. A hint of what we wanted was sufficient, and what should have been an act of Compliance he made a voluntary Deed’. Language and tone here are instructive, presenting the composer as the honoured guest, whose choice of Exton for ‘Quiet and Retirement’ is to be properly respected and whose readiness to comply with the family’s ‘very moderate’ requests thus appears a mark of genuine condescension.

Their house guest was, after all, the modern Apollo, revered as such by visitors to Vauxhall Gardens, where his statue had been placed six years earlier as a species of tutelary spirit. The sculptor Louis-Francois Roubiliac contrived a stunning synthesis of antique and contemporary in his image of the lyre-plucking god of music, with a putto for his amanuensis, as nobody else but Handel, nonchalant in smart Georgian undress, a turban to keep his head warm, one slipper off and the knee-buttons on his breeches unfastened. Roubiliac’s proto-Romantic impulses would find still freer play in his Westminster Abbey monument, with its dramatic juxtaposition of the modern composer and another celestial avatar in the shape of psalmist King David as a bardic harper.

Handel’s request to be buried in the Abbey, with money set aside for a monument, can be seen as a final gesture in his lifelong self-presentation in the guise of the artist as gentleman. Does this aspect of his career especially matter, sub specie aeternitatis? I think it does, more especially since there has been an understandable revolt against earlier ideas of him as the maverick freelance going it alone without salaried posts or official commissions. This necessary revisionism in its turn, however, requires adjustment. How the world saw him and on what terms he was prepared to confront it clearly mattered to Handel both personally and professionally. Without snobbery or toadying he could hold his own among noble and ‘polite’ Handelists like Shaftesbury and the Harris brothers and enjoy the advantages of their encouragement and active collaboration. The aesthetic taste and discernment of a figure like Charles Jennens in helping to shape works as original in concept as Saul, Messiah or Belshazzar was the most obvious advantage reaped from such a milieu. That Handel was careful not to be just another among that ‘lousy crew…. of foreign fiddlers’ Thomas Hearne accused him of bringing to the Oxford Act of 1733 is quintessential to his unique experience as a musician in the broader context of his period.

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Handel and the Bells of Keynsham

Graham Pont

During 2014 the town of Keynsham in Somerset south-east of Bristol was rocked by a disagreement among residents that received coverage in the national press. The dispute arose out of an anonymous complaint by a resident that the bells of the local church, St John the Baptist, were too noisy for one living 300 metres away and should be silenced. In response, local residents raised a petition urging the Church not to take any action: the bells, they argued, were an important part of the town’s daily life and had been that way since Handel, who admired the ‘mellow tone’ of the Church organ, offered a new peal of bells in exchange for the organ.

The coverage of this episode in the Daily Mail (5 August 2014) revealed the existence of a local tradition at least two centuries old, the roots of which had eluded all biographies of the composer and histories of his musical activities. Without looking into the facts of the matter, the reporter Wills Robinson simply printed what the outraged locals had told him, leaving no doubt that this tradition with its curious roots is still alive and well in Keynsham.

Though no specific date has been claimed for the supposed exchange of the organ and bells, Handel was certainly associated with Keynsham. According to the Bath Chronicle and Herald (13 July 1935), Handel visited Bath three times, in 1730 (possibly as the guest of the Duke of Chandos who owned property in the area), in August 1749 and again in May 1751. It was possibly during his second visit that the composer presented the Church with a brass offertory plate inscribed with his name and the date 1750. There is also a Handel Road in Keynsham, not far from the High Street.

Brass plate in church with Handel's name, 1750, Keynsham

The Keynsham tradition was more critically examined by an article in the Bath Weekly, Chronicle and Herald (30 May 1936). This did not question the exchange of the organ and bells but pointed out that Handel could not have donated a complete peal of bells as some of those still extant in the 1930s had inscriptions dating from the 17th century (this evidence no longer exists, as the bells of St John the Baptist were all recast in 1987). In view of this, the anonymous author in the Bath Weekly concluded that Handel’s gift must have extended to only the two smaller bells that were recast in 1731 by the Bilbie family of Chew Stoke. That this recasting took place the year following Handel’s first visit to Bath suggests a plausible date for the legendary exchange. Another consideration overlooked in all accounts of the exchange is that, since Handel was a connoisseur of both organs and bells, this unusual exchange might have seemed a fair deal, at least as far as he was concerned.

Of this strange story one important question remains unanswered: what happened to the organ?

Source
Allen, F.A. (1969): The History of the Parish Church of St John the Baptist Keynsham. Keynsham Parish Church Council.

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Book Review-Berta Joncus: Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster (Boydell & Brewer, 2019, 541 pp.)

Judit Zsovár

The fame of Catherine (Kitty) Clive (1711-85), star actress at English theatre Drury Lane for more than twenty years, was in great part due to her singing. Berta Joncus’s book offers an exhaustive study of Clive’s character and work; her roles and songs; her rise and fall; her feminist ambitions; her public image of chastity and the contrasting reality behind it. It details her collaborations with stage partners like Hannah Pritchard and John Beard as well as actor-manager-playwrights like Colley Cibber, Henry Carrey, James Miller and David Garrick. London’s theatrical life, including the relations between playhouses and Italian opera companies, are pictured, together with the political driving forces behind them. Clive’s seasons are dissected, as are her rivalries with Susannah Cibber and Lavinia Fenton, and scandals like the Drury Lane Actors’ Rebellion (1743-44) and the Green Room gossip (1745-46), both destroyers of Clive’s reputation. In addition, masterly analyses of portraits, in paintings, drawings and porcelain figurines, serve as ‘tangible’ complements to the author’s storytelling, excellently showing the changing nature of Clive’s public persona over time.

In terms of serious songs, apart from Purcell and De Fesch, in the 1730s Clive performed simplified English-language versions of arias from Handel’s Ottone, Poro, Partenope and Alexander’s Feast. Besides contributing a song for Clive’s benefit in 1740, Handel involved her in oratorio performances of L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato and Samson as well as the Messiah (1743 revival). After 1750, to retain the public’s attention, Clive gave up serious songs and turned to satire, mocking Italian operas and singers’ accents in Handelian English oratorios, targeting Caterina Galli among others.

The title of the book stresses Clive as a singer of ballads, masques and popular songs, rather than as an actress (of Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden in particular). Emphasising the importance of Clive’s musical vein in her career and success, the introduction holds out the prospect of a vocal portrait contextualised within her plays, theatrical environment and career. In practice, however, the rich theatrical contextualisation tends to shift the focus away from her singing. From a performer’s point-of-view, a summary of her repertoire, and perhaps a separate chapter on her vocal characteristics regarding range, tessitura and their eventual changes, would have been useful, with more musical examples. Her songs and arias could have been discussed more specifically from a vocal musico-technical perspective, rather than largely from a compositional point-of-view. Unfortunately, contemporary accounts say little about Clive’s exact vocal quality, i.e. tone, flexibility, colouring, volume, etc.; and Frances Brooke’s patriotic claim that Clive was ‘infinitely superior’ to major opera star Regina Mingotti (Porpora’s pupil and Faustina’s worthy rival), when caricaturing her performance style, seems to refer to Clive’s imitative acting skills and English diction, rather than her vocal capacities.

On the whole, however, Joncus’s work is a monumental, worthy, many-sided and richly detailed monograph, providing a strong portrait of Clive as a distinguished actress-songster in Handel’s times.

Dr Judit Zsovár is a soprano and musicologist. Her book on Anna Maria Strada is to be published early in 2020 by Peter Lang.

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Too Much Blood? Music and Mysticism in Handel’s Brockes Passion

Thelma Lovell

‘… the experience of the Holy: terror, bliss, and recognition of an absolute authority … the most thrilling and impressive combination of these elements occurs in sacrificial ritual: the shock of the deadly blow and flowing blood, the bodily and spiritual rapture of festive eating’ (Walter Burkert: Homo Necans)

Baroque is something of a catch-all term but if, as Willi Apel puts it, ecstasy and exuberance are two of its defining characteristics, then the Brockes Passion is a paradigm example of that cultural era. Yet while Handelians feast on the music (as they did during the Academy of Ancient Music’s recent superlative performance at the Barbican on Good Friday 2019) can the text be considered equally palatable to a modern sensibility? Does its undisguised fervour veer into melodrama, too crudely graphic to conform to our ideas of the spiritual?

We are so much more familiar with the deep ocean swell of Bach’s great structures in the St Matthew Passion as the ne plus ultra of sacred music. The comparison, however, is not between better or worse, but of which route to take to the heart of the religious mystery. Roughly speaking, Bach awes us from within to make us receptive to the Passion story. For Handel it is a more empirical process, from the concrete to the abstract; it is through insight into human agency and motivation that the deeper meaning filters through. Hence the Brockes re-telling was the ideal vehicle for such a natural dramatist – and it is worth remembering, as Ruth Smith observed in her fine article ‘Handel’s Brockes Passion: a Unique Composition’ in Handel News No.74 (January 2019), that the composer adhered closely to the instructions of his librettist.

If we flinch at parts of the Brockes Passion, then that is as it should be. Like it or not, we are willing voyeurs of, and thus in a sense participants in, a primeval sacrificial ritual that strengthens social bonds. An anthropologist – Durkheim comes to mind – would instantly recognise the choreographed interplay of tensions whose release can only come with the shedding of blood. This is the essence of the sacred, the mystery of mysteries that ensures divine protection for the community. The opening reference to disease that can only be cured by such means is a familiar theological trope, as for instance in Bach’s cantata 25 (Es ist nicht Gesundes an meinem Leibe), with its catalogue of suppurating horrors (at least Brockes is content with a boil or two). And then we are plunged straight into the Eucharist: the symbolic (or, for a Catholic, the actual) consuming of the victim’s flesh and blood.

This, in a nutshell, comprises the entire programme of the work. But its necessary expansion gives writer and composer much to do. For instance, there is the interplay of three layers of audience; we are watching the Daughter of Zion and the Believing Soul as they themselves watch and comment on the central events. The complex story is propelled onward with Baroque energy in a succession of distinct scenes and, most importantly, through Handel’s variety of mood and characterisation. Conflict, the motor of all drama, is everywhere. Peter’s battles with himself are a case in point: how better could we understand repentance and shame than through his three highly personal arias with their transition from militant bravado to vocal nakedness as he stands unarmed, and that final howl at the admission of defeat? There are powers beyond his control: the force majeure of the angry mob and, most painfully, his own inner limitations as he accepts that his courage has failed.

The panoply of arias for the Daughter of Zion and the Believing Soul – not especially long, but all full of concentrated emotional expression – present an ideal vehicle for Handel as painter of feeling. They embody the Christian collective torn by its own conflicted vision of the Passion: anger, disgust, pity and anguish are on display, but also a kind of horrified desire. The rite has to be fulfilled; in spite of the animal barbarity, the ending of the whole work is one of joy and relief. In the final aria all tears can – indeed must – be wiped away, for this one death brings salvation to all.

But what about the victim himself? He too is drawn into the irresistible nexus of sacrifice, though as a man he wishes desperately to avoid the physical agony. Here, Brockes and Handel jointly stage a scene thick with apprehension. We hear Christ’s juddering heartbeat as he begs his Father to spare him the fated ordeal. There is a particularly eloquent harmonic colouring (the deadness of the flattened supertonic) as he at last yields to the divine will; only thus will he too accede to divinity. The Daughter of Zion then interposes a commentary identifying the source of pollution that corrupts the community and can only be expunged by the death of Christ: it is the monster (Scheusal) of human sin.

Fast forward to the most psychologically difficult part of the Brockes Passion: the prolonged allusion to torture in music of sublime beauty – notably Dem Himmel gleicht and Die Rosen krönen. As Brockes emphasises the physical vulnerability of Christ, the mangling of the flesh, the blood, sweat and tears that brutality exacts, we may well wonder what all this has to do with spirituality. But that is precisely the point: the mystery of the sacred is heightened, not lessened, by the contrast between flesh and spirit. Belief in their reconciliation demands a correspondingly enormous investment of faith which, having once been made, is all the securer for the effort involved. But how is this to be achieved? The answer here is surely music as surrogate and enabler of the synaptic leap between logic and faith – a glimpse of aural heaven amidst the gore. In true Baroque fashion, Affekt is all-conquering, subjecting the evidence of reason to a different sort of power. Perhaps it is music itself that is sacred – benign or dangerous, depending on its uses, but undeniably a mystery.