Tag: Faustina

Posted on

Handel’s Fairest Dalila

By Miranda Houghton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on

Handel and the Mercurial Art of Theatre Dance.

Sarah McCleave (Queen’s University Belfast)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on

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.