Tag: Handel News 72 – May 2018

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‘But here comes Unulfo, oh God!’: Modern Stagings of Rodelinda

Lawrence Zazzo

The argument for historically-informed singing and playing of Handel’s operas, if not always on original instruments, has been almost universally accepted. However, opinions about how to stage Handel’s operas in the modern era still vary widely. Few directors advocate directorial intervention on the level of the musical ‘text’ to the degree of Oskar Hagen, whose revival of Rodelinda in 1920 in Göttingen was the first modern revival of any Handel opera. Hagen made Bertarido and Unulfo bass roles, cut every da capo and all of the arias for Unulfo and Eduige on the grounds that they were subsidiary to the main plot, and even sliced and diced ritornelli within arias, or inserted arias and ‘pantomime’ scenes from other Handel operas.

I have been involved in three productions of Rodelinda: the Karlsruhe Handel Festival in 1998, conducted by Trevor Pinnock and directed by Ulrich Peters; a revival of the Glyndebourne production in 2000 conducted by Harry Bicket and originally directed by Jean-Marie Villégier; and most recently a new production at the Teatro Real Madrid, conducted by Ivor Bolton and directed by Claus Guth. All are lovely productions, but all are influenced by Regietheater and take varying degrees of directorial licence. In all three I played Unulfo, a character who often bears the brunt of cuts, changes and extreme depictions, and a character of whom I have grown fond over the years. The following will, through the eyes of Unulfo, give my own personal perspective on these three productions, and in so doing highlight the challenges and rewards for the modern director in staging Rodelinda and Baroque opera in general.

A potential difficulty in presenting Unulfo is his somewhat ambiguous status, a result of Handel and Haym’s conflation of two unfortunately similarly-named characters from an earlier source libretto by Antonio Salvi. Is Unulfo a servant, a nobleman, a friend to Bertarido, or all three (with all the potential contradictions that implies, for both 18th-century and modern audiences)? Furthermore, he exhibits no ‘character arc’ – his traits of fidelity, optimism, and constancy are unwaveringly present from beginning to end. He is almost annoyingly practical, insistent on status but manhandling Bertarido when he is foolishly at risk of revealing himself, and almost comically more concerned in Act 3 about getting Bertarido out of his dungeon prison than staunching his own stab wound. Finally, a potential dramatic kiss of death (at least in modern terms): he is not paired romantically with any other character.

But does this all really make him uninteresting? Handel did not seem to think so, giving him three substantial arias, while the villain Garibaldo has only two. Unulfo’s final aria, ‘Un zeffiro spiro’, was originally assigned to Eduige by Salvi, whose third aria ‘Quanto piu fiera’ Handel sets in a rather perfunctory way. Ulrich Peters’s 1998 Karlsruhe production presented the most muscular, high-status Unulfo, taking the character’s dramatis personae designation as a ‘signor Lombardo’ (Lombard nobleman) seriously and depicting Unulfo as a sword-bearing, obviously proven fighting lieutenant, as he probably would have been in 7th-century Lombardy. In Peters’s staging of Unulfo’s first aria, ‘Sono i colpi’, Unulfo heroically and physically prevents Bertarido from killing himself. Peters’s romantic pairing of Unulfo with Eduige in Act 3 is not in the original plot and might be thought of as Hagenesque directorial licence, but it does solve the often unbelievable denouement of Grimoaldo’s reunion with Eduige in the lieto fine (often a true problem in Baroque opera). But is Unulfo’s confirmed bachelor status really a problem that needs a solution? Only if erotic relationships are privileged over friendships (more on this later).

Yet another solution to the ‘problem’ of Unulfo is that taken at Glyndebourne – comic relief. Villégier introduces comic elements in all three of Unulfo’s arias, in an otherwise well-thought-out, uncut and beautiful production, which aligns the Baroque aesthetic with that of silent film of the 20s. A gag involving drinking brandy in the first aria falls flat, and Unulfo’s second aria demotes the character to a mere valet, as he folds Bertarido’s evening wear into a briefcase and shines his shoes. This may make him cheerfully Chaplinesque (certainly another reference for Villégier), but the amount of comedy diminishes not just Unulfo but Bertarido – Unulfo is depicted as a Pollyanna or Pangloss, almost gleefully oblivious of the danger not only Bertarido and Rodelinda are in, but now himself, having revealed his thoughts to Garibaldo. The most successful staging of the three is his last, ‘Un zeffiro spirò’, which seems to take its cue from the music, the recorders and bubbling bassoons complementing the hushed secrecy of Unulfo and Eduige. and the tea-trolley wheels and the exits and entrances of most of the characters echoing the rolling triplets in the bass, which suggest the acceleration of the plot at this point.

Minor characters like Unulfo are especially important in the absence of supernumeraries, which were very much a part of 18th-century stagings of Baroque operas but are often completely absent in modern revivals (usually due to cost and time constraints). A contemporary prompt book for the 1720 Radamisto in the V&A Museum lists at least 26 supernumeraries – 10 women and 16 to 18 men. In their roles as attendants, servants or soldiers, they served to promote or demote the changing status of the principals onstage with them. Minor characters like Unulfo can, in the absence of such supernumeraries or a chorus, be even more effective in this role, not only in establishing status but in offering commentary and contrast, enriching the depiction of the ‘principal’ characters by serving as a kind of moral weather-gauge. In Rodelinda, Bertarido is not necessarily a very likeable character, too quickly doubting Rodelinda and too self-pitying. But his obvious affection for Unulfo, and Unulfo’s unflagging devotion, redeems him. In Act 2 scene VII, when Bertarido and Rodelinda are brought together for the very first time, Bertarido kneels before embracing her and asks for forgiveness – clearly an echo of Unulfo’s similar act of obeisance in Act 1 at meeting Bertarido, which seems overly formal at the time but pays dividends later here. Has Bertarido learned – or relearned – proper conduct, from Unulfo? Heavily cutting Unulfo’s role, as many directors do, diminishes not only him but also his ‘reflectee’, Bertarido.

Like Unulfo, Rodelida’s son Flavio is also a gauge of a director’s attention to detail – one could call this silent character the most unsuperfluous of supernumeraries. A key part of the plot, Flavio forms the backbone of Claus Guth’s 2016 Teatro Real Madrid production, which takes place in an Escherian nightmare of a Georgian house surrounded by a lunar landscape. With its staircases and hallways going nowhere or turning in upon themselves as the set revolves, the house is for Guth a synecdoche of our tiny planet on which we must all get along. It is also a simulacrum of Flavio’s psyche – its many rooms locations of trauma for this boy who has witnessed God-knows-what and whose house has been invaded by an evil stepfather. While Guth reduces Unulfo’s social status, as at Glyndebourne, to that of a servant or butler, his relationship with the tormented Flavio as a kind of substitute father or uncle is touching, and serves as a contrast to the somewhat blinkered romantic or dynastic preoccupations of all the characters, including at times even Rodelinda herself.

Male friendships like that of Bertarido and Unulfo are extremely rare in Handel’s operas and oratorios. Other than Bertarido and Unulfo in Rodelinda, I can find only Arasse and Siroe in Siroe, Micah and Samson in Samson, and Didymus and Septimius in Theodora. In fact, they are rare in opera in general (La Bohème being a notable exception), as opera plots tend to privilege the erotic, the familial, or the antagonistic over the amicable: if you are not a lover or father or baddy, you are just not interesting. But this relative rarity is all the more reason for such relationships to be celebrated and explored. Handel, as we know, never married, and the character or even existence of any romantic attachments are as hotly debated as the Regietheater stagings of his operas. In his will, as Ellen Harris has described in Handel: A Life with Friends (2016), Handel reveals a large network of friends, both male and female. As it was for Handel, characters like Unulfo could and should be an invitation, not an obstacle, to modern directors.

Lawrence Zazzo is an internationally renowned counter-tenor. He is also Head of Performance and Lecturer in Music at Newcastle University. This article is based on his presentation at a Study Afternoon held in April 2018, organised by the Handel Institute in association with the Cambridge Handel Opera production of Rodelinda.

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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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Handel on YouTube

Graham Pont

YouTube (www.youtube.com) is a unique and extraordinary website devoted to publishing videos on almost any subject. While music-making is only one of thousands of activities presented on-line, YouTube is easily the most important electronic resource currently available for practical musicians of all levels of accomplishment and for music-lovers ranging from casual amateurs to serious musicologists.

A simple exercise immediately reveals the extent of the musical resources available at a click or two. If you google ‘YouTube J S Bach’ you are quickly confronted with the choice of an estimated 1,340,000 websites relating to Bach. If you google ‘YouTube G F Handel’, you get only 270,000 hits, but this is only part of the story: googling ‘Messiah’ gets 14,200,000 hits; ‘YouTube Handel’ a whopping 20,600,000. On other composers, ‘YouTube Beethoven’ gets 28,100,000; ‘YouTube Mozart’, 24,300,000; ‘YouTube Wagner’, 24,700,000; ‘YouTube Verdi’, only 14,700,000. Surprisingly, ‘YouTube Vivaldi’ gets a measly 5,530, but ‘YouTube Vivaldi Seasons’ a less surprising 2,750,000.

You can explore the holdings on YouTube for Handel, or any other composer, by googling the titles of specific works. ‘YouTube Fireworks Music’ gets 1,650,000 hits, confirming the high regard which this perennial classic has enjoyed since its first performance in 1749. The first website that popped up for ‘Fireworks Music’ was ‘The Best of Handel’ and this recording correctly observes the single-dotted rhythms of the first movement of the overture. Nearly all the other recordings of this movement that I have heard on YouTube introduce the double-dotted rhythms that have become fashionable during the last fifty years or so (1). These sharpened rhythms are simply a wrong-headed musicological speculation promoted by Thurston Dart, Robert Donington and others which is accepted as Gospel by their uncritical followers. There is not the slightest historical justification for the consistent over-dotting of this movement.

Within the limits of a brief article it is impossible to do justice to the huge number of Handel websites available on YouTube. I can do no more than draw attention to a few sites that suggest possible lines of inquiry. An obvious starting-point is ‘Handel’s Largo’ (179,000 hits) or ‘Ombra mai fu’ (154,000 hits). The Italians have not always been great admirers of Handel, even though he was the leading composer of Italian opera in his day. But Italian singers have left some superb renditions of ‘Ombra mai fu’. One of my favourites is by Tito Schipa (1888-1965), perhaps the finest lyric tenor (tenore di grazia) of the twentieth century. In his undated recording of ‘Ombra mai fu’, Schipa begins the aria with a beautiful messa di voce on the first syllable – an appropriate refinement that Handel would certainly have expected from his soloist, the great Caffarelli. However, like nearly all the male singers of his period, Schipa lacked the shake (or trill). But, when I played Enrico Caruso’s recordings of the aria (1904, 1920, etc), I was astonished to hear his shake on the first beat (C#) of bar 32 – an ornament I had never noticed in Caruso’s recordings. These great Italian singers both take the aria at a very slow tempo – almost at an adagio.

With an aria composed for a mezzo-soprano castrato, producers of Serse have long had to be content with travesty soloists, but the role of Xerxes can now be performed by the nearest possible equivalent to the original vocalist – the German countertenor (falsettist) Andreas Scholl (born in 1967). Scholl has an exceptionally beautiful voice, even throughout its register. Though he lacks a good shake, his interpretation of ‘Ombra mai fu’ is very impressive.

When we come to the female vocalists who have recorded ‘Ombra mai fu’, it is sometimes a different story. In her 1917 recording of ‘Ombra mai fu’ Clara Butt (1872-1936) takes the aria more quickly than usual – at a true larghetto – and she also introduces the shake at bar 32. The leading interpreter of ‘Ombra mai fu’ on the recent British stage has been Janet Baker (born in 1933). A prominent performer of Handel – and influenced no doubt by the early music movement – she revived something of the traditional ad libitum ornamentation that was generally unknown to her predecessors and older contemporaries: in her much-admired interpretation of ‘Ombra mai fu’ she introduces the shake in bars 36 and 40. Although the unrivalled contralto Kathleen Ferrier (1912-53) showed little interest in vocal ornamentation, her recordings of ‘Ombra mai fu’ are among the finest specimens of classic British cantabile singing.

There could hardly be a greater contrast to the dignified and restrained Ferrier than the brilliant and playful Italian contralto Cecilia Bartoli (born 1966). ‘YouTube Cecilia Bartoli’ gets 1,260,000 hits and her recordings of ‘Ombra mai fu’ 61,600. One of her videos features a fetching image of her as a muscular but rather worn classical marble statue. I have greatly enjoyed Bartoli’s several recordings of ‘Ombra mai fu’: despite her notorious sense of humour and uninhibited spontaneity, her interpretation of the Handel aria is refined, chaste and embellished with her own voluntary ornamentation in fine period taste.

I was surprised, however, to discover that the figure of 61,000 YouTube hits was not confined to Bartoli’s recordings of Handel’s ‘Ombra mai fu’: it also included her recordings of another setting of the same words by the Italian composer Giovanni Bononcini (1670-1747). In January 1694 Bononcini produced at Rome his opera Xerse to a libretto revised by Silvio Stampiglia, which included an aria ‘Ombra mai fu’. Another version of this libretto was set in 1738 by Handel who, it now appears, was not only familiar with Bononcini’s opera but also based his setting of ‘Ombra mai fu’ on Bononcini’s aria, with the same words and even some of the same music! In her video presentation of this aria (2010) Simone Kermes affirms that Handel used Bononcini’s aria as a ‘model’ (Vorlage) for ‘Ombra mai fu’. I would say that the relationship between the two arias is much stronger than this – that Handel, in his inspired reworking of Bononcini’s aria, produced a magnificent diamond from a fine but less valuable stone.

Handel’s transformation of Bononcini’s air is magical. Whereas Bononcini begins his introduction with an unremarkable phrase in crotchets F-D-A-Bflat, Handel begins his symphony an octave lower, prolonging the F to four beats (bars 1 and 2) and then moving down to A, just like Bononcini. But Handel grandly continues the downward trajectory with E-D-C-C (bars 2-3) thus creating a superb cantabile entry for the instruments. At the vocal entry (bars 15-18), he enriches this unforgettable phrase by lengthening the first note (C) to six beats, naturally inviting the full messa di voce with the ideally symmetrical crescendo and diminuendo to which Schipa only approximates.

In bars 21ff Handel then develops his aria with new materials previously anticipated in the instrumental introduction: on the last beat of bar 26, he introduces a variation of Bononcini’s second vocal phrase (bars 7ff), tying together the Fs, the equivalents of Bononcini’s first two E flats, but otherwise following the Italian’s pitch profile. Handel repeats this borrowed phrase in bars 39-40 with the first two notes now detached and the additional appoggiatura made by repeating the equivalent of Bononcini’s third note (D).This beautiful variation, first heard in bar 11 of the introduction, is repeated in Handel’s concluding symphony (bars 47-48). The persistent crotchet notes in the accompaniment, which give ‘Handel’s Largo’ such a majestic tread, were also derived from Bononcini – from his opening bar and concluding symphony.

This ingenious borrowing by Handel has eluded nearly all the musical reference works (2). Yet the borrowing was (?first) identified and briefly discussed by Harvard Professor Harold S. Powers (1928-2007) in the second part of an article ‘Il SerseTrasformato’ (3): this fine study leaves no doubt that several of Handel’s movements in Serse were similarly created by adapting motifs from an opera composed by his rival Giovanni Bononcini more than forty years previously (4). So there was little chance of Handel’s borrowing being recognised by his London audiences! But how could Handel have known about an opera that was produced in faraway Rome when he was a child aged only nine living in Halle? The answer is probably to be found in an early-18th-century manuscript of Xerse held by the British Library, Add. Ms. 22102, which is the only early full score of Bononcini’s opera I have been able to find. It will be interesting to look into the provenance of this manuscript, which was possibly known to Handel.

The fact that YouTube was able to reveal such an important but generally unknown borrowing from Bononcini by Handel that is still almost entirely unnoticed by the scholarly reference literature is a striking example of how on-line resources are playing an increasingly significant role in modern musical culture.

Notes
(1) Curiously the recordings of the Fireworks Music overture conducted by Trevor Pinnock on YouTube all double-dot the first movement, except the one posted on 24 May 2008 under the title ‘Mix – Handel Royal Fireworks mvt 1’, which correctly follows Handel’s single-dotted rhythms.
(2) The only exception I am aware of is the facsimile of Giovanni Bononcini’s Il Xerse (Add. Ms. 22102) in John H. Roberts (ed.) (1986), Handel Sources: Materials for the Study of Handel’s Borrowing (New York: Garland), II – Xerse, pp.8-10.
(3) ‘Il Serse Trasformato – II’, The Musical Quarterly, 48(1), January 1962, pp.87-88. Despite its appearance in a leading musical journal, Powers’s publication was overlooked in both editions of Konrad Sasse’s Händel Bibliographie (Leipzig, 1963; 1967).
(4) I was interested to read in Handel News 70 (p.15) that three settings of ‘Ombra mai fu’, by Cavalli, Bononcini and Handel, were performed at the American Handel Society Conference in 2017.

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Richard Löwenherz: Telemann and Handel Compared

Mark Windisch

Telemann adapted three operas for the Hamburg theatre from those originally composed by Handel: Ottone, Poro and Riccardo Primo. The last of these, Handel’s version of which was performed on 11 November 1727 in The King’s Theatre, was performed in its adapted format by Telemann in Hamburg and Braunschweig in 1729. It is this version that was performed in the 2018 Telemann Festival in Magdeburg.

Handel’s libretto was written by Paolo Rolli from a text by Briani, and was used by German poet Gottlieb Wend for Telemann, to create a somewhat altered story for a very different audience and without the expensive stars that Handel was able to engage.

In Handel’s version, Richard (sung by Senesino, an alto castrato) had travelled to Cyprus on the way to join the third Crusade and to meet his prospective bride Costanza (soprano Francesca Cuzzoni). Shipwrecked in Cyprus, Richard had come up against the Cyprus Governor Isacio (bass Giuseppe Maria Boschi) and his daughter Pulcheria (soprano Faustina Bordoni). Two other characters featured: Oronte, prince of Syria (alto castrato Antonio Baldi) and Berardo (bass Giovanni Battista Palmerini).

In Telemann’s version as sung in Magdeburg in 2018, Richard was sung by a bass (the top castrati were unaffordable and might not have been culturally acceptable), changing the dynamic balance somewhat. Some of the other characters’ names were restored to the original ones in Briani, so that Costanza was listed as Berengera of Navarre, and a new character Philippus was introduced as her companion. Pulcheria, daughter of Isacio, came out as Formosa. The main change in characters was the introduction of two comic figures, Gelasius and Murmilla, both cross-dressers spending considerable time playing for laughs and scoring points off one another in spoken dialogue.

As to the music, Telemann largely used Handel’s arias sung in Italian; though in some cases, especially in arias for Richard himself, he composed new arias in German. All recitatives were in German (macaronic compositions were common in Hamburg – cf. Handel’s Almira composed during his earlier time there). The Isacio character, a tall imposing bearded figure in Magdeburg, was given some very florid arias which he found quite challenging. The interruptions to the flow of the story with the comic additions detracted somewhat from the performance. Other than that, I thought it hung together as a performance, with Telemann’s invention matching Handel’s well.

The story in Telemann’s version remained basically the same as in Handel’s. Richard and Berengera are madly in love despite never having met. Isacio tries to pass his daughter off as Berengera. This is so that he can marry the real Berengera and get Richard to marry his daughter for dynastic reasons. Oronte declares his love for Berengera but is overheard by Formosa, which leads to a lover’s tiff. Richard and Isacio face it off and for a while Isacio gets the upper hand, until Oronte rescues Richard and redeems himself. Good triumphs in the end: Richard and Pulcheria get married; Isacio is forgiven; Oronte and Formosa will rule Cyprus; and the cross-dressers are carted off in a wheelbarrow.