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/#
