John Andrews
Tracing the revision to the libretto for Semele from first draft to conducting score offers a fascinating insight into the way that Handel revised text during composition. Comparison of Handel’s compositional drafts with the copy of Semele submitted to the Lord Chamberlain shows the chronology of the development of Handel’s libretto, and shows him doing so not only for music and practical reasons, but also to adapt the erotically-charged text to the moral and political atmosphere of the 1740s.
Facing rivalry from both Thomas Arne and Lord Middlesex, Semele offered Handel an opportunity to find a new niche, setting a text by a great English literary figure. But William Congreve’s libretto had been controversial in its aesthetic, moral and political outlook even in 1707 when it had been set by John Eccles. While Congreve remained an imposing figure, in 1737 the Daily Gazetteer said of The Way of the World that ‘All the characters in that play are immoral, immodest, and shocking in sobriety of Thinking…Tickling a man’s ear is no excuse for corrupting his mind.’ Aaron Hill criticised the portrayal of genuinely evil characters in The Double Dealer, and cited The Way of the World as an illustration of the libertine degeneration of British theatre. Handel’s revisions demonstrate his sensitivity to these changing social attitudes, and also illuminate his approach in adapting the work’s tone away from opera towards oratorio.
Handel’s adapter/librettist – probably Newburgh Hamilton – made three types of changes. First, a series of cuts reduce the length of the text to accommodate da capo arias and the more melismatic vocal writing of Italian opera. But there are also cuts of individual lines, couplets, and even single words, which seem to accommodate the piece to a more censorious age. Second, there are interpolations from Congreve’s poetry, from Pope’s Pastorals and from untraced sources. These provide additional arias for his principals but more importantly create and shape the role of the chorus. Handel also created two choruses by reassigning lines from minor characters. Finally, one aria was re-written to fit better with Handel’s music.
Handel was free to leave omitted dialogue in the printed word-books: he did precisely this in the oratorios he produced on either side of Semele – Samson and Joseph and his Brethren. However, in Semele, cut lines were suppressed completely, suggesting that changes were made for moral and political reasons.
The chronology of adaptations
The libretto that Handel used when composing his autograph score (A) does not survive, but can be reconstructed through a comparison between the existing sources. It will be referred to hereafter as U. Handel made changes to the libretto during the initial composition and filling-up stage. After that, the Larpent Manuscript libretto (L) was copied by J.C. Smith for submission to the Lord Chamberlain’s office. The evidence suggests that Smith created this from both U and A, since stage directions appear in L which are not in A. There are also variant readings of the text which reflect the Congreve version rather than what Handel set. L includes Handel’s re-written final chorus so was made after the filling-up stage. L in addition shows a set of corrections to the text on the face of the manuscript which were also made on the face of A.
Then the conducting score (C) was then made, and a set of parts (P) copied. P contains additions to the score not found in L (e.g. the insertion of ‘Despair no more shall wound me’) suggesting that they were made later. Finally, the word-book (W) was prepared for the first performance, which included several further minor changes. From this evidence, the following sequence can be established.
Changes made during the draft composition process, and therefore reflected in L
- ‘See, she blushing turns her eyes’ was given to Ino as an aria with the words of the final line altered:
See, she blushing turns her eyes
See with sighs her bosom panting
If from love those sighs arise
My rest ever will be wanting.
2. The other sources all give ‘Endless pleasure’ to an unnamed commentator. In the autograph, Handel assigns it to Semele herself. The evidence of the printed scores suggests that Avoglio (singing Iris) had her part increased with lines from Ino and even Cadmus, so could easily have sung it. The decision to give it to Semele was Handel’s own and increases its erotic charge.
3. The text of ‘With fond desiring’ is already in its final form in the autograph, so the changes must have been made by the adapter for the U libretto.
4. In Part Two, Handel inverted the first two lines of ‘I must with speed amuse her’ in the autograph, but the lines appear in Congreve’s form in L which suggests that the copyist was working from both U and A, and failed to spot this change.
5. Handel added an extra syllable to ‘Where e’er you walk’ which was not spotted by the copyist of L or W. Perhaps this was to avoid drawing attention to Handel’s rewriting of Pope.
6. In Act Three, the libretto had given Semele the sexually explicit culmination of her demands to Jupiter:
When next you desire I shou’d charm ye,
As when Juno you bless,
So you me must caress,
And with all your omnipotence arm ye.
Handel wrote these lines into the autograph, but never set them to music. The motivation for the cut may have been musical, but is more likely to have been their overt sexuality.
7. The autograph shows Handel’s dissatisfaction with the underlay of ‘I’ll be pleased with no less’. The corrections show clearly that Handel changed the last four lines of Congreve’s text during the composition itself:
Congreve (WC)
I’ll be pleas’d with no less,
Than my Wish in excess:
Let the Oath you have taken alarm ye:
Haste, haste and prepare
For I’ll know what you are;
So with all your Omnipotence arm ye.
Autograph (A)
I’ll be pleased with no less
Than my wish in excess
Your oath it may alarm you
Yet haste and prepare,
For I’ll know what you are
With all your powers arm you.
Changes made during the filling-up
- Between the first draft and the filling-up stage, Athamas was recast from a tenor to an alto, resulting in new keys for several of the arias. Mostly Handel wrote the new part over the old one. For the arias and most of ‘You’ve undone me’ he inserted fresh sheets. Handel improved and extended his first recitative with Cadmus, adding a final ritornello which leads into Semele’s ‘Ah me!’
- A recitative version of ‘Turn hopeless lover’ was inserted for Ino, and the second half of ‘Hail, Cadmus hail’ was revised with the new sheets stuck over the old ones. At some point, Handel wrote ‘Un mezzo tono piu basso ex D sharp’ over ‘O sleep’ – i.e. that it should be in E flat. This would have made a more expressive key change from the G major of ‘Come zephyrs, come’. The excision of ‘Come zephyrs’ later rendered it pointless,
- Handel inserted a new version of ‘Bless the glad earth’ to conclude Part Two.
- Handel re-composed the entrance of Juno and Iris in the Cave of Sleep and this was inserted into A.
- The first draft of the autograph concluded with Congreve’s bacchanalian ‘Now mortals be merry.’ This was replaced at the filling-up stage by ‘Happy, happy!’ This chronology is clear because L has the new ending, but not the re-writing of Athamas. It fundamentally changes the character of the work, replacing a drinking song with high baroque religious ceremonial. The oratorio character of the conclusion is thereby reinforced.
Changes made after composition was completed (shown as corrections on L and A)
- After Handel had completed the filling-up, he changed Congreve’s lines ‘by this conjunction / With entire divinity / You shall partake of heavenly essence’, to ‘partake of immortality.’ The handwriting looks like that of the copyist, but it is much less tidy than elsewhere. This suggests that the change was made at the last minute, and that the seminal image was offensive to the Chamberlain.
2. ‘Leave me, loathsome light’ still had its da capo in P and L. Its crossing out in A is therefore later, improving dramatic flow and creating a great comic effect in Somnus’s return to sleep.
3. ‘Behold in this mirror’ remains an aria in L, but by C and P it has been changed to a recitative.
4. Handel continued to make changes to the opening of ‘No no I’ll take no less’. In P, it has the same words as were originally in A. However, after this, A, C and L were corrected to give the final version. Again the writing is less neat than the rest of L. It looks as though the correction was made by Handel himself, confirming that he took a direct part in managing the libretto’s submission and alterations.
No no! I’ll take no less I’ll be pleas’d with no less,
Than all in full ExcessThan my Wish in excess:
Your oath It may alarm you
Yet haste and prepare,
For I’ll know what you are;
With all your powers arm you.
5. In L, ‘See, she blushing turns her eyes’ has been neatly corrected on the face of the manuscript, giving it as a recitative for Athamas, with Congreve’s original words. This was made on the basis of C.
6. Handel changed ‘comets’ to ‘meteors’ in the penultimate chorus, presumably for greater poetic beauty.
Changes made after the correction of A
- ‘See, she blushing turns her eyes’ was changed to a recitative for Ino by the time P was copied and was retrospectively changed in L.
- ‘Curs’t adulteress’ stands in A but was scratched out of L and replaced by ‘Curséd Semele.’ The correction appears to have been made by Smith (the writing is cramped between two lines, but his characteristic d and S are the same), and again suggests that the language was too direct for the Chamberlain.
Changes made after the correction of A and L
- ‘Despair no more shall wound me’ was inserted into A after the copying out of L, which suggests that L was prepared during Handel’s revisions to A, or shortly after.
- Before C was prepared, ‘Come zephyrs come’ was removed completely.
The role of the chorus
It is the role of the chorus and the grand ceremonial tone of most of their music that fundamentally transmutes the character of the piece from the opera envisaged by Congreve to the oratorio of Handel. In his Chapel Royal anthems Handel had demonstrated his assimilation of English style and through these he could out-English Arne. Simultaneously, by preserving the fully Italianate arias, he could out-opera Middlesex. Semele contains ten choruses and they bring both gravity and explicit moral commentary foreign to Congreve’s original: in fact, precisely what the playwright’s critics had demanded.
In perhaps a deliberate nod to Purcell and the masque tradition, all of the Part One choruses are linked to religious ceremonial, with the chorus identified as ‘priests and augurs.’ In Part Two the chorus appear as immortal ‘loves and zephyrs’ and in ‘Bless the glad earth’ evoke the music of the spheres in an entirely ecclesiastical anthem-chorus. Handel’s treatment, beginning with a weighty homophonic passage and followed by a double fugue, aims at the religious sublime.
In Part Three, the chorus begin as a Greek chorus, again offering an explicit moral commentary. The shocked reaction to Semele’s destruction, ‘O terror and astonishment’ (given to Cadmus and Athamas), was in Congreve; but the moral lesson, ‘Nature to each allots his proper sphere’, is an addition. This leads on to the final chorus in the work: the singers become again citizens of Thebes. But instead of Congreve’s bacchanal, we in stead return to a royal, religious ceremonial complete with music straight from the Coronation Anthems. That the deity in question was the god of wine and theatre was possible a joke of Handel’s. Reactions to Semele suggest that he did not entirely get away with it.
This addition of the chorus has created confusion over Semele’s genre. Mainwaring’s ‘an English opera, but called an oratorio and acted as such’, and Jennens’s scathing ‘no oratorio but a baudy opera’, emphasised its operatic qualities (1). Burrows called it ‘virtually an opera’, while Dean says it is ‘clearly an opera’. Lang went further and called it ‘the first full-length English Opera’ and Mellers a ‘full-scale heroic opera’ (2). The arias are clearly operatic in style but Newburgh Hamilton, in his preface to Samson (1743), defined oratorio as a drama ‘…in which the Solemnity of Church-Musick is agreeably united with the most pleasing Airs of the Stage’.
Handel’s revisions show that he was fully aware of what the moral reaction might be, and in the suppression of the most explicit text and introduction of a moralising chorus, he sought to mitigate these concerns. The strength of Semele surely comes from its seamless fusion of the two contrasting elements. To the opera audience he offered florid, Italianate, da capo arias of rich and varied drama (3). To his oratorio audience he offered the religious sublime of ‘Bless the glad earth’ and the coronation splendour of ‘Happy, happy!’
This brief survey of how the libretto was transformed to his new purpose shows Handel searching for a new theatrical approach in the early 1740s, ready to use all the resources at his disposal, but at the same time acutely conscious of the gap between the world of his libretto and the more censorious ambience of his own audience. Ultimately the failure of Semele led him to look elsewhere, but we can see from his efforts described here that it was not for want of caution.
Notes
(1) Mainwaring, J. (1760). Memoirs of the Life of the late George Frederic Handel, p.152. Dean, W. (1972). Charles Jennens’ marginalia to Mainwaring’s Life of Handel. ML, liii, pp.160-164.
(2) Burrows, D. (1994). Handel, p.274. Dean, W. (1959). Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques, p.365. Lang, P.H. (1966). George Frideric Handel, p.417. Mellers, W. (1965). Harmonious Meeting: a Study of the Relationship between English Music, Poetry and Theatre, p.243. Dent, E.J. (1928). Foundations of English Opera, p.231. Smither omitted it from his history of oratorio on the same grounds. Smither, H.E. (1977). History of the Oratorio, Vol.2, p.280.
(3) Semele has a far lower percentage of da capo arias than the original versions of Acis (85%, 11 out of 13), and Esther (75%) and all of the Royal Academy operas. Of Semele’s successors, Alexander Balus has 40%, Hercules and Theodora both 52%, and Susanna 62%. However, all of these have many more than the immediate predecessors L’Allegro (8%), Samson (11%) and Saul (17%); Judas, Joshua and Belshazzar all have 23-24%. This supports the theory that with Semele Handel tried to fuse the choral and da capo elements out of which came a distinct genre in the later dramatic oratorios.
Dr John Andrews is Principal Guest Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra. This article is based on his PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge.