Tag: Farinelli

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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.