Tag: Charles Jennens

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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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Bringing Athalia Home: Handel and the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford

Robin Darwall-Smith

In 2019 Oxford will celebrate the 350th anniversary of the inauguration of Christopher Wren’s early masterpiece, the Sheldonian Theatre. Although it was built primarily as a venue for university ceremonies, from the first it led a parallel life as a concert hall, and eminent musicians visiting Oxford, such as Joseph Haydn or Jenny Lind, have performed there – as did Handel.

Handel’s visit to Oxford on 5-12 July 1733 coincided with the University’s ‘Publick Act’. This was a grand festival in which benefactors to the university were commemorated, honorary degrees conferred, and grand Latin orations delivered. The Act had been in abeyance for some years, and special efforts were made to ensure that this would be a special occasion: Handel was invited to Oxford by the Vice-Chancellor of the University.

Handel offered Oxford a rich bill of fare. The ‘Utrecht’ Te Deum and Jubilate were heard in the University Church on 8 July, and Acis and Galatea in Christ Church Hall on the morning of 11 July; while in the Sheldonian Theatre, Handel performed two older oratorios, Esther (on 5 and 7 July), and Deborah (on 12 July), but also offered there on 10 and 11 July the first two performances of a new work, Athalia.

There is debate about whether Handel intended to take a Doctorate in Music at Oxford: some sources claimed that he was even an offered an honorary doctorate, which he declined. Even if that story is mere gossip, Handel never did take a doctorate from Oxford (or, indeed, Cambridge), although he would have had every opportunity to do so in 1733. It has even been suggested that Handel might have preferred to remain ‘Mr. Handel’, to stand apart from such musical doctors as Maurice Greene, whose works he considered inferior.

Handel’s visit to Oxford was rather a daring venture. Even in the 1730s the University of Oxford had a reputation as a haven of Jacobites, and Handel was not only a German, but also a German with close links to George II. The splendidly splenetic Oxford diarist Thomas Hearne, whose support for ‘James III’ had led to his dismissal from his university offices, certainly had no time for Handel. In his diary on 6 July he muttered about ‘Handel and (his lowsy Crew) a great number of forreign fidlers’. Others grumbled at the prices of tickets for Handel’s concerts: a satirical play from later in 1733, The Oxford Act, includes among its characters music-obsessed Fellows and undergraduates bankrupted by attending Handel’s concerts.

Nevertheless, Handel did choose a nicely ambiguous subject for his Oxford oratorio, for the plot of Athalia, about an apostate usurper being overthrown by the rightful (and orthodox) heir, could be read in two very different ways. Loyal Hanoverians could recall the overthrow of the Catholic James II, and the protection of the Protestant religion under the first two Georges; while Jacobites might yearn for the time when George II would be sent back to Germany, and James II’s son re-installed as Britain’s rightful monarch. But Handel had his own ambiguities: for all his close links to the House of Hanover, perhaps his greatest English librettist, Charles Jennens, was a non-juror, opposed to the Hanoverian succession.

Whatever controversies may have been aroused by Handel’s visit to Oxford, he left behind many admirers there. The most notable was the Professor of Music, William Hayes, who established a strong performing tradition of Handel. In 1749, to mark the opening of the Radcliffe Camera, Hayes arranged a Handel festival, giving performances of Esther and Samson, and also Messiah, which until then had never been heard outside Dublin or London.

The tale of Handel’s 1733 Oxford trip might seem now more than an interesting interlude in his life as a whole, were it not for an important accident of history. The Sheldonian Theatre is now arguably the only building standing – and standing in substantially the same condition – in which Handel premiered one of his oratorios.

On 8 June 2019 the Oxford Bach Choir will therefore make its own contribution to the 350th anniversary of the opening of the Sheldonian Theatre by performing Athalia there with its Principal Conductor Benjamin Nicholas, thus offering lovers of Handel’s music the very rare opportunity to hear one of his works performed in the very space in which it was first heard, under the composer’s direction, over 280 years ago.

Note
Further information on Handel’s visit to Oxford may be found in, among other places, Susan Wollenberg’s Music at Oxford in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Oxford, 2001), pp. 23-29.

Robin Darwall-Smith is Archivist of University and Jesus Colleges, Oxford

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Handel, Maestro al Cembalo

Peter Holman

In the last issue of Handel News (No.71) Brian Robins took us in imagination into the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket to experience the staging of one of Handel’s operas. As he rightly pointed out, it was quite different from most modern performances. Indeed, he suggested that that the modern norm – ‘an austere, darkly-lit stage’ unvaried throughout the opera, modern dress, ‘soap-opera’ acting and that indispensable standby, the AK 47 – is ‘aesthetically diametrically opposed to the way Handel’s operas were staged in London in his own day’. Quite.

In this article I will take the reader again into the King’s Theatre, but this time to focus on the pit when Handel was in command. I use ‘pit’ as shorthand: as 18th-century pictures show, such as the well-known painting of an opera performance in the Teatro Regio in Turin c.1750 , opera houses were laid out so that all the musicians could see the stage while seated. Sunken pits were popularised by Wagner at Bayreuth and were designed so that the audience could not see the musicians and only the conductor could see the stage. I would prefer to use the historically appropriate word ‘orchestra’ rather than ‘pit’, but a potential confusion lurks in it: now it means a group of instrumentalists but in Handel’s time it meant the place where they played. The change to a sunken pit had profound implications for the way operas were directed, and it is now an obstacle to achieving truly historically informed performances of Handel’s operas, as we shall see.

We might think that modern performances of Handel’s music are by definition historically informed if they use period instruments, but that is far from the case. Let us start with the way the instruments are laid out. We have no pictures of operas being performed in Vanbrugh’s Haymarket Theatre, built in 1705 and destroyed by fire in 1789, but we have no reason to think that Handel or anyone else using it departed from the norm for Italian opera, as shown in the Turin painting. The continuo team was not a single group but was divided into two at each end of the pit, with the bass players (including double basses and bassoons) grouped around the two harpsichords, some of them reading over the shoulders of the keyboard players. This was partly so that the double basses did not obscure the audience’s view, but mainly to ensure that the singers could hear the accompaniment anywhere on the stage. Pasquale Cafaro, maestro al cembalo at Naples, argued against the removal of the second harpsichord in 1773 by pointing out that (in translation) ‘the second cembalo, violoncello and double bass, in that position [Stage Left], are absolutely necessary to assist the singers, at those moments when they find themselves far from the first [continuo group], to ensure that the singers will not stray from the straight path of perfect intonation’ (1). The second harpsichord was not removed from the Haymarket Theatre until the start of the 1781 season (2).

I will return to the way the continuo groups operated later, but Cafaro tells us that the maestro al cembalo was seated at the first instrument, Stage Right (on the left from the audience’s perspective), thought to be the more ‘noble’ side of the theatre, where the heroes and heroines tended to stand. This position tells us that the maestro – Handel in our case – did not try to exert control over his orchestra in performance. This began to change after Handel’s time, as is shown by Rousseau’s diagram of the pit at Dresden in 1754, published in his Dictionnaire de Musique, where Johann Adolf Hasse’s harpsichord is now in the middle of the pit. But the maestro in eighteenth-century Italian opera never stood and conducted with a baton, as routinely happens in supposedly ‘historically informed’ performances today. Rossini was still directing from the keyboard in the 1820s, as is shown by Stendahl’s well-known description of him taking ‘his seat at the piano’ for the first performance of new operas, and rising ‘from his seat at the piano’ to acknowledge the applause at the end of arias (3). The Frenchman Charles de Brosses, visiting Italy in 1739-40, wrote that the Italians ‘never beat time at the opera, whatever the size of the orchestra, however many parts the aria being played is in’ (4). Time-beating was the norm in French opera, and France was to be the cradle of modern-style baton conducting at the end of the 18th century.

Returning to the painting of the Teatro Regio in Turin, placing the bass instruments at each end of the pit meant that there was room of two rows of violinists and other higher-pitched instruments between them. It was standard practice for the first violins to be in a line facing the stage, with the leader sitting next to the maestro, sometimes on a raised seat. Again, this suggests a situation in which the members of the orchestra had much more individual autonomy than in modern orchestras, even those using period instruments. Since they spent much of the time in operas of the period doubling the voice, it made sense for the first violins to be able to watch the singers. The second violins, oboes and (presumably) violas were placed against the stage facing the first violins so that they would easily maintain good ensemble with them. There was no need for the maestro to wave his arms around.

Brass instruments, which tend to be used only occasionally in the operas of Handel’s time, were placed at the side – as can be seen in the Turin picture, which includes two horns standing behind the maestro and playing with raised bells. In that position they could easily slip away when not needed. Handel’s opera orchestra was large by English standards and was thought to be one of the best in Europe, as J.J. Quantz recognised when he visited London from Dresden in 1727. He wrote after going to Ottone that ‘The orchestra consisted mostly of Germans, with some Italians and a couple of Englishmen. [Pietro] Castrucci, an Italian violinist, was the leader. The full ensemble, under Handel’s direction, created an excellent effect’ – ‘eine überaus gute Wirkung’ (5).

There is a crucial role for the continuo group in Handel’s operas. Not only did it accompany most of the recitatives, but he often scored arias for continuo alone or with a large number of passages where the rest of the orchestra is silent. For this reason, Handel and his contemporaries thought it essential to direct by playing the first harpsichord as part of the continuo group, and so I will devote the rest of this article to discussing the way it functioned.

First, we know from documents relating to the first years of the Haymarket Theatre, just before Handel arrived in London, that it included double basses as well as violoncellos. In 1708 ‘Seggione’ (i.e. Saggione, the Venetian double-bass player and composer Giuseppe Fedeli) was paid more than the rest of the orchestra along with his fellow continuo players, the harpsichordists Charles Dieupart and J.C. Pepusch, and the cellist Nicola Haym; this included ‘5 shillings per Practice’ – that is, for taking part in rehearsals, presumably without the rest of the orchestra (6).

A group of this sort can be seen in action in Marco Ricci’s series of paintings apparently depicting opera rehearsals ; they are traditionally said to depict rehearsals for the pasticcio Pyrrhus and Demetrius, arranged by Haym from Alessandro Scarlatti and put on at the Haymarket Theatre on 14 December 1708. One type (they fall into three basic types) shows a cellist, a double bass player and a lutenist all reading from a small oblong music book on the harpsichord’s music desk. There is only one keyboard and the rehearsal is in a grand room rather than in the theatre, so it apparently depicts a preliminary rehearsal, before the production was transferred to the stage and the second continuo group was added. Indications in Handel’s scores show that he continued to use a lute-family instrument – mostly a theorbo early on, an archlute later – until his last opera, Deidamia (1741); I have argued that his regular player was the Genoese musician John Francis Weber, active in London from at least 1721 to until his death in 1751 (7).

The practice of continuo players reading over the shoulder of harpsichordists was widespread and long-lived, which is not surprising since it had several advantages. Close proximity made for good ensemble. Decisions about continuo scoring could easily be worked out informally in rehearsal or even adjusted in the middle of a performance with a nudge or a nod. Most important, it meant that continuo players could read from the score (they need to see the vocal line in recitatives) without having to worry about page-turning – the harpsichordist could do it for them; all they had to have was good eyesight! A list of the opera orchestra at the Haymarket Theatre dated 22 November 1710 gives ‘Heyam’ (Haym) and ‘Pilotti’ (the Venetian Giovanni Schiavonetti, husband of the soprano Elisabetta Pilotti) as the cellists who are ‘to play every night and to take their places att ye [?first] Harpiscord [sic] by Turns’ (8). This document comes at a crucial moment in the history of the Haymarket opera company. Handel was already in London (he apparently arrived in September or October 1710 rather than November or December as used to be thought), and Rinaldo, his first London opera, was produced on 24 February 1711. Haym was to be Handel’s close colleague as librettist and cellist until his death in 1729.

All the evidence, from descriptions of Handel’s operas in performance, from his performing material, as well as the wider practice of Italian opera companies at the time, suggests that his continuo team consisted of six or seven instrumentalists divided into two groups: two harpsichords, two violoncellos, one or possibly two double basses, and a theorbo or archlute. These were the only continuo instruments regularly used in Italian opera at the time; given their popularity today with period-instrument groups, it is worth emphasising that Baroque guitars, harps, organs and regals had no place in the continuo group for Handel’s operas.

How would Handel have deployed his continuo group? Or, to use Donald Burrows’s formulation, ‘who does what, when?’ (9). The composer’s options would presumably have been: (1) everyone essentially playing throughout; (2) the team divided into a concertino playing throughout and a ripieno joining in at particular moments; (3) particular continuo instruments assigned to particular characters; or (4) some combination of the above.

At first sight Option 1 is the common-sense solution, since with continuo groups at each end of the pit it ensures the accompaniment is audible anywhere on the stage (which Pasquale Cafaro thought ‘absolutely necessary’), and with six or seven instruments it reduces the disparity of sound between the recitatives and the full orchestra in the arias. In the original performing material used by Handel and his continuo players, the so-called Direktsionspartituren (sometimes misleadingly translated as ‘conducting scores) and Cembalopartituren now mostly in Hamburg, the former (used by Handel himself and his bass players) are full scores as we might expect, while the latter (used by the second continuo team) vary in format, sometimes just giving the vocal line and bass or even just the bass line. But the Cembalopartituren do include the recitatives, which would have meant that the second group could take part in them – which of course is not evidence that it necessarily did so. However, the main disadvantage with this option is that an unvaried massed continuo sound would be tedious for players and listeners alike in an opera lasting three hours or more.

Option 2, the concertino-ripieno principle, is an obvious way of getting an opera into production with limited rehearsal, and is suggested by the Ricci paintings, which only show a single continuo group and one harpsichord. There is also evidence for it in the Cembalopartitur for Poro, which has four arias for the 1736-7 revival containing only the music for the orchestral passages, with rests in the solo vocal sections. There are also some early scores omitting the recitatives, such as those for Teseo (1713), Amadigi di Gaula (1715) and the 1720 version of Radamisto (10), as well as most of the harpsichord parts in the sets of performing material, now in Manchester, copied by Handel’s scriptorium for his friend and librettist Charles Jennens. However, Jennens may have had no interest in performing the operas complete, and some of the scores without recitatives are clearly just aria collections copied for domestic use. Nevertheless, the same feature can be seen in some scores of operas by Handel’s contemporaries.

Option 3, assigning continuo instruments consistently to particular characters, deployed ‘one for each speaker in a duologue’ as suggested by Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp (11), has become popular in modern productions of Handel, perhaps influenced by the indications in the score of Monteverdi’s Orfeo – in which, for instance, Caronte is allocated a regal. But Monteverdi’s continuo practice is much more subtle than that, and I know of no evidence for its use in Handel’s time. Also, using a keyboard or a lute alone ignores an important change to the role of bowed bass instruments around 1700. Before then, the sources of all sorts of concerted music show that it was the norm to accompany solo vocal sections just with continuo instruments, with the bowed basses playing only in tuttis or when the upper strings are playing. However, by Handel’s time the norm was for bowed basses to play throughout, in recitatives as well as arias, and there is a lot of evidence that double basses also played in solo sections, including in recitatives – something that is strongly suggested by the Ricci paintings.

This brings us to Option 4, combining these various approaches: in my opinion this is what Handel is likely to have done, and is the best solution for us today. We can presume that he started with a rough idea of the continuo scoring he wanted, ranging from the whole team playing together at climaxes to perhaps just two instruments in the most intimate moments, and then worked out a detailed scheme as rehearsals proceeded. There are some indications in the sources of Handel’s operas to help us understand his practice, though they are rather neglected by performers because they tend to be hidden away in the critical commentaries of editions. Interesting cases are the senza cembalo indications that occur in passages with continuo figures, as in ‘Spietati, io vi giurai’ from Rodelinda (1725) (HWV 19/16), implying the deployment of a lute or perhaps a continuo cellist playing in chords. Equally significant are some ‘Senza Lute’ indications, as in the arias ‘Scherza infida!’ and ‘Io ti bacio’ from Ariodante (1735) (HWV 33/23, 37). What is striking about these arias is that they are soft, slow and thinly scored, the sort of movements that conductors today tend to give to lutenists, silencing the harpsichords. Incidentally, these indications appear in the Cembalopartituren, which suggests that Handel’s lutenist played in the second continuo group, not the first.

A fascinating case of sophisticated continuo scoring is the duet ‘Tu caro sei il dolce mio tesoro’ from Sosarme (1732) (HWV 30/30). The orchestra is divided in places into two, with Elmira accompanied by pianissimo unison violins and a bass line marked ‘Cembalo 1mo con i suoi Bassi’, Sosarme by four unison violas and a second bass marked ‘Cembalo 2do Colla Teorba e i suoi Bassi’. These indications, which appear in the Cembalopartitur as well as the Direktsionspartitur, are significant because bassi is in the plural in both parts, suggesting a double bass as well as a violoncello in each group, and because it provides more evidence of the lutenist being assigned to the second group. It is unclear whether this divided continuo scoring is a special, unusual effect or just a notated example of a widespread semi-improvised practice, though there are other notated examples, including the duet ‘I’ll proclaim the wondrous way’ in the 1732 version of Esther (HWV 50b/32) and an aria by Pergolesi, used in Adriano in Siria, Act I, Scene 8, and L’Olimpiade, Act III, Scene 5 (see facsimiles of the scores).

Does all this matter? Yes, I think it does, because it suggests a mode of performance startlingly different even from most ‘historically informed’ performances. Handel as maestro al cembalo, seated at the first harpsichord and playing rather than conducting, did not impose his will on his singers and instrumentalists in performance as conductors do today. The way his orchestra would have been laid out, with the continuo team divided into two groups at either end of the pit and most of the other instruments in rows between them, was designed so that everyone could relate to the singers without his direct intervention, effectively working as a large chamber ensemble – which of course depends on not having a sunken pit. And with two harpsichords, two violoncellos, one or two double basses and a theorbo or archlute at his disposal, he would have been able to make the accompaniment of the recitatives almost as varied and expressive as the arias. It all reinforces the truth of L.P. Hartley’s dictum: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’.

Notes
(1) Gossett, P. (2006, reprinted 2008). Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera, p.439.
(2) Petty, F.C. (1980). Italian Opera in London 1760-1800, p.183. Quoting Public Advertiser, 23 November 1781.
(3) Stendahl [Beyle, M.-H.], Life of Rossini, translated by R.N. Coe (New York, 1957), pp.112-113.
(4) President de Brosses en Italie: lettres familières écrites d’Italie en 1739 et 1740, 2 vols. (2/1858), Vol.II, p.378: ‘On bat la mesure … jamais à l’Opéra, quelque nombreux que soit l’orchestre, quelque chargé de parties que soit l’air que l’on exécute’.
(5) Burrows, D., Coffey, H., Greenacombe, J. & Hicks, A. (eds.) (2015). George Frideric Handel: Collected Documents, Volume 2, 1725-1734, pp.107-110.
(6) Milhous, J. & Hume, R.D. (eds.) (1982). Vice Chamberlain Coke’s Theatrical Papers 1706-1715, pp.67-71.
(7) Holman, P. (2015). Handel’s lutenist, the mandolino in England, and John Francis Weber. Händel-Jahrbuch, 61, pp.241-257, at pp.241-244.
(8) Milhous & Hume (1982). Op. cit., pp.159-161.
(9) Burrows, D. (2009). Who does what, when? On the instrumentation of the basso continuo and the use of the organ in Handel’s English oratorios. In Handel Studies: A Gedenkschrift for Howard Serwer (ed. R.G. King), pp.107-126.
(10) Dean, W. & Knapp, J.M. (1987). Handel’s Operas 1704-1726, pp.257, 291, 293, 359-360.
(11) Dean & Knapp (1987). Op. cit., p.32.

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Staging Handel’s Oratorios: Gain and Loss

Ruth Smith

An advertisement in Gramophone (June 2017) for a box of Handel DVDs from Glyndebourne states: ‘This set brings together three of Handel’s most compelling works for the stage’. It does not, as the three works are Rinaldo, Giulio Cesare, and Saul. Handel News 70 (September 2017) announced that at the Australian 2017 Helpmann Awards the Glyndebourne production of Saul gained six awards, including Best Direction of an Opera and Best Opera. When WNO’s Jephtha (directed Katie Mitchell) was staged at ENO (2005) it was billed as one of ‘four classic operas with love and passion’.

But Handel did not call Saul or Jephtha operas, and he did not stage them.

Like (some) film versions of great novels, (some) stagings of Handel’s English-language compositions for the theatre attract new audiences and appreciation. Many in the Glyndebourne audience who would never have gone to hear Theodora in a concert hall were deeply affected by Peter Sellars’s production (1996) and subsequently bought a recording. It inaugurated modern admiration for Theodora. At Milton Keynes the theatre seats 1,400 and was full for every night of Barrie Kosky’s Saul (2015). Having the largest orchestra and greatest number of soloists of any of Handel’s dramas, Saul is seldom performed, so we should be pleased if Glyndebourne’s success prompts more groups to attempt it, three trombones, a harp and a glockenspiel notwithstanding.

But I think that in staging the English music dramas we lose more than we gain, and, worse, we diminish Handel’s music and travesty his ability as a dramatist.

‘Stage directions’

The rationale of some modern performers and critics has been: Handel was an opera composer at heart. He gave up opera only because it had become a loss-maker. He had to ‘put up with’ unstaged oratorio because the Bishop of London prohibited the involvement of Chapel Royal choristers in a staged Esther. He wrote ‘stage directions’ into the scores of his English music dramas because he would have preferred them to be staged. By staging them we will reveal their ‘true nature’: what Handel really meant.

This was the influential view of Winton Dean (Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques), formed when he was an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge. He was a chorus member in a staged production of Saul, an experience he found so moving that at one point he was unable to sing.

But there is no evidence that Handel hankered for stagings of his English music dramas. Had he wanted them staged or hoped they would be staged in future, he would have written them differently. He knew how to write for the stage, and that is not how he wrote in the oratorios.

The ‘stage directions’ are in the score because Handel, with what may seem uncharacteristically punctilious subservience to his librettist, copied out what he found in the libretto. Some think he transcribed the ‘stage directions’ and scene descriptions to stimulate his own imagination. They were certainly intended to stimulate the audience’s imagination, like the Chorus in Henry V: ‘Think, when we speak of horses, that you see them.’ Handel’s audience, with no dimming of house lights, following the wordbook, could and can augment the sung text with prompts for their mental landscape.

The wordbook was an essential ingredient of the audience experience, and we lose meaning from some of the dramas if we do not have it in front of us. For example, in Belshazzar (Act 1 Scene 3) Daniel is teaching his pupils the scriptures. We read:

Daniel’s house. Daniel, with the Prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah open before him. Other Jews.
Daniel: O sacred oracles of truth, O living spring of purest joy!

Daniel does not specify whose oracles he is quoting, but the wordbook does. A marginal note gives exact sources: Jeremiah 29: 13-14, Isaiah 45: 1-6; 44: 28

That information is vital to our appreciation of the drama. At the climax of the action Daniel shows the Bible to the conquering Cyrus, to prove to him that his conquest is part of the divine plan, and to persuade him to implement what is foretold of him in the Bible; and again we have marginal notes directing us to the precise passage of scripture that the librettist is encapsulating, so that we see, hear and believe too. The librettist, Charles Jennens, meant to strengthen belief in Jesus as redeemer. Cyrus, an attested historical figure, fulfilling Old Testament prophecy, reinforces the credibility of Old Testament prophecy of the Messiah. But without the wordbook in front of us, we do not know whose ‘oracles’ they are and will not make the connection.

Musical action

Handel is well known (as in his own day) for delighting in musical mimesis, and especially for imitating action in music. Unstaged oratorio gave him scope to substitute music for action.

For example, at Belshazzar’s feast, Belshazzar challenges the Jewish God to show his hand. The wordbook states: ‘As he is going to drink, a hand appears writing upon the wall over against him: he sees it, turns pale with fear, drops the bowl of wine, falls back in his seat, trembling from head to foot, and his knees knocking against each other.’ Belshazzar exclaims in horror: ‘Pointing to the hand upon the wall, which, while they gaze at it with astonishment, finishes the writing, and vanishes.’

With a single violin line, Handel depicts the hand writing, gradually forming the letters. We hear the line being traced. The combination of the wordbook and the music makes action redundant. Back-projection in time to the music would not just lessen the tension and the mystery: it would be tautologous.

Examples of musical mimesis are legion: for example, the sun stands still for Joshua; the giant Goliath strides past the frightened Israelites in Saul; Saul’s javelin whizzes through the air at David. All are startling moments musically, stretching musical convention and stimulating our imagination, and all are diminished by being shown. You know from the thud in the bass lines that you have to crane your neck to see Goliath’s head. He is more terrifying in music than he could be on stage. Did Wagner mean Fafner and Fasolt to seem merely silly? They often do. Goliath does not.
Oratorio gave Handel scope for new levels of musico-dramatic realism and complexity, precisely in not being staged. It freed him from a basic realism, the need for physical bodies to be given time and space to move.

This freedom allowed one of the glories of oratorio, the chorus. A physically acting chorus presents all sorts of problems: getting them to learn their parts by heart; getting them on and off stage; choreographing them; getting them changed out of their Israelite costumes in time to appear again as Philistines or, still more difficult unless one’s budget is limitless, organising them to be both at once, as is demanded in Deborah and Samson.

None of this needed to bother Handel, who therefore can write for a chorus that is both the army of the chosen people and a group of philosophers questioning the meaning of life, as in Jephtha; for a chorus of citizens that celebrates its monarch one moment and sits in judgement on him the next, as in Saul; for Philistines in Samson singing ‘at a distance’ while the Israelites (‘on stage’) sing in reaction to them; for a chorus that disperses in half a dozen hectic bars, as in Semele – without the inevitable log-jam at the side of the stage that distracted from the music and, worse, belied Handel’s stagecraft in Robert Carson’s 1999 production for ENO.

Multiple perspectives

Instead, Handel exploited oratorio to transcend physical space, even imagined physical space, and, moving between the exterior and interior worlds of his characters, gave us new dimensions of drama.

In Saul the women of Jerusalem come out to celebrate Saul’s and David’s victory. We first hear the women’s instruments, a long way off. The music gives us listeners a specific location amidst the imagined action: we are among Saul’s entourage, hearing the procession of women getting closer. When we and Saul can hear what they are singing, and Saul hears them giving more praise to David than to himself, he has an outburst of jealous rage, which we can hear, placed (as it were) near him, but which the approaching women, still distant, cannot, and so, disastrously, they go on with their tactless song. As they get nearer the men join in: they add volume, making the crowd sound even nearer. Saul rages again.

Saul’s son Jonathan upbraids the chorus: ‘Imprudent women’. But we heard the men’s voices joining in. Apparently Jonathan did not. Saul’s reaction to the chorus’ acclamation of David was: ‘what can they give him more, except the kingdom?’ – a fear which a crowd of silly women would not engender. Saul heard the men. So did we. But in the biblical account, which the libretto is following closely here, only women sing, as Jonathan’s words confirm. So Saul heard the whole nation acclaiming David only in his mind, on which we eavesdropped. To create the same impression in 18th-century opera, a composer had to resort to the convention of the ‘aside’. With oratorio, Handel enabled us to do what the bewildered people around Saul could not do, shift our standpoint, enter Saul’s mind and share his morbid fantasy. (I am grateful to David Vickers for discussion of this point.)

Multifarious meaning

Dramatic oratorio is often called ‘opera of the mind’. The mind can comprehend several states of being simultaneously. But it is impossible for a singer to manifest several conflicting emotions simultaneously. Yet Handel’s music often invites us to hear in it more than one possible emotional state. Staging unavoidably simplifies the effect of such music, negating Handel’s perhaps unparalleled ability to suggest complexity and ambiguity in music.
For instance, Theodora’s ‘O that I on wings could rise’ could be heard as aspirational and hopeful, or caged and desperate, and in concert performance you could feel that either is possible while it is being sung. But if we see someone doing something, that determines what we think the music is representing. Sellars took the decision for us. Theodora was desperate, pacing round and round: no aspiration, no hope.

Handel often suggests psychological and emotional complexity in the introduction to an aria. Staging usually gives us action to watch during aria introductions, action that is likely to overlay the subtlety of the music. At Glyndebourne, Theodora acted out her first aria from the start of its introduction, expressing a convinced renunciation of the world, according to the aria’s text: ‘Fond flatt’ring world, adieu’. But the introduction to the aria suggests a far more complex state, having the form of three answering phrases, so definitely demarcated as to suggest debate. Is that debate in Theodora’s soul? Among the congregation of the faithful that she is addressing? Between her present state and the outside world? A foreshadowing of the conflicts to come? All these can be suggested to us during the twenty bars of the introduction. But Sellars made her aria a sermon, not a soliloquy, and her action during the introduction overrode its music and suppressed its potential meanings.

In ENO’s staging of the Passion sequence of Messiah (Deborah Warner, 2009), during ‘And with his stripes we are healed’ we watched a defenceless man being beaten by two others. We saw the stripes, but not the healing; we saw the man of grief, but not the saviour by whose Passion mankind is redeemed. The mystery of the Passion (‘Behold, I tell you a mystery’) was nowhere.

Italian oratorio was born from the Counter-Reformation. Powerfully emotional, it was intended as edifying entertainment which would engage hearers in spiritual devotion, and prompt spiritual exercises; it was intended to make you reflect, meditate, think. However fine singers’ acting, staging inhibits our thinking. It turns what could be a meditation into a performance. And by occluding Handel’s music and musico-dramatic craftsmanship, it does him a disservice.

Soon after he started writing oratorios for his English public, Handel composed an ode on the power of music, setting Dryden’s greatest poem, Alexander’s Feast. It is a paradigm of the power of dramatic oratorio, of opera imagined. With his music Timotheus not only puts the conqueror through a series of contrasting emotions: he makes Alexander believe he is literally seeing things. In oratorio Handel shows that he has similar power, that the modern musician is equal to the artistic giants of antiquity, and that he needs no help from the arts of the stage. We diminish his achievement by staging it.