Tag: Handel News 73 – September 2018

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Handel in 19th-Century Armagh

Sarah McCleave

All Handelians are aware of the composer’s connection with Dublin; both Dublin and Cork have entries in the Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia. But the composer’s work was also a significant musical presence in the north of Ireland – specifically in Armagh, an inland settlement some 80 miles north of Dublin and 40 miles south-west of Belfast. As the seat for both the Anglican and Roman Catholic archbishops of Armagh, this small city (current population c. 15,000) boasts two cathedrals, each named for St Patrick. The cathedral for the Church of Ireland cultivated Handel’s music for over a century, as is attested by a substantial collection of music now housed in the historic Armagh Robinson library (est. 1771).

In 2002, Theodore Saunders, organist at St Patrick’s (Church of Ireland), discovered the collection. He contacted me to determine if the School of Music at Queen’s University Belfast could catalogue it. Anne Dempsey (now Anne Campbell) took on this substantial task for her Master’s dissertation (1). The full catalogue is found at the McClay library, Queen’s University Belfast and the Armagh Robinson Library. Some records are already available on the RISM Ireland website , thanks to the efforts of another BMus student from Queen’s, Cherith Conn.

What does this collection of vocal and instrumental music represent? Ink, pencil, and stamped markings establish performance documents in use from the 1840s through to the 1950s – serving the cathedral, the Armagh Musical Society, the Armagh Philharmonic Society, the Armagh Amateur Harmonic Society, and the Orchestral Society. Volume 1 of Dempsey is an 87-page tabular record of the manuscript material (mostly part-books); Volume 2 records printed sources in descriptive catalogue format (421 pages); Volume 3 is a listed record of manuscript and printed music bound in compiled anthologies—these are normally part-books for particular voices or instruments. In chronological scope, the music ranges from Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625) to Herbert Howells (1892-1983).

By the mid-1840s the Cathedral Orchestral Society (founded by Precentor Richard Allott Junior) and the Armagh Musical Society were established (Dempsey 1: xxv). The Armagh Guardian for 13 October 1846 identifies what may be the first public performance involving members of the latter:

The Banbridge Choral Society, under the direction of Mr. Lee, of the Armagh Cathedral, gave their second dress concert in the Town-hall, on Wednesday evening, the 7th instant, on which occasion they were assisted [by] Monsieur Potionier, the celebrated pianist, from Paris, several of the gentlemen of the Armagh Musical Society, and others. The audience was very large and most respectable. (2)

Within the Armagh collection, Handel is the most popular instrumental and vocal composer; his works constitute one tenth of it (Dempsey 1: xix). In Volume 2 of Dempsey he is represented particularly by the following genres: oratorios (58 imprints), theatre overtures (30), concertos (14) and anthems (11). The earliest known performance document of Handel’s music is a manuscript full score and parts for Handel’s Concerto 6th Trio in G, Op. 3 (HWV 324), arranged by one Richard Cherry and dated 01/12/1843 (Vol.365). As late as 1920, a Vicar Choral possessed a 72-item anthology of ‘Anthem-folios’ including ‘Oh God, who in thy heav’nly hand’ from Joseph (Vol.404 No.64).

Handel’s overtures are the most numerous of his works across the collection. They are found in manuscript part-books for individual works: ‘the dates provided by the copyist indicate that the overtures [in manuscript] … were copied and presumably performed between 1859 and 1868’ (Dempsey 1: xxii). Further research would establish whether these parts were taken from Handel’s overtures, arranged for two violins, flute, tenor, violoncello, contra basso & pianoforte, as issued by R. Cocks & Co. of 20 Princes Street Hanover Square, ‘Music Sellers in Ordinary to her most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria’ (Vol.100) (3).

Handel’s oratorios are represented by printed scores and part-books, as well as by individual pieces. Of particular interest are publisher Novello’s vocal and orchestral parts for Judas Maccabaeus, with ‘additional wind parts … added by Vincent Novello’ (title-page, Vol.163). The clarinet part includes an ‘inserted [manuscript leaf] of a clarinet arrangement of no. 50’ (Dempsey 2: 169). Novello’s The Orchestral and Vocal Parts to Acis & Galatea … The additional accompaniments by W.A. Mozart is inscribed ‘Armagh Cathedral / Orchestral Society, by R. W. Rolston Esq. / March 1919’ (Vols.156-161). By then Acis had been in Armagh’s experienced concert repertory for at least forty years, as this review from the Ulster Gazette (20 December 1879) confirms:

ARMAGH MUSICAL SOCIETY. This society gave its first concert of the second season Monday evening last in the Tontine, under the leadership Dr. Marks. The hall was well filled by a large and appreciative audience. The principal vocalists were Mrs. Mease, Mr. Wentworth, of Christ’s Church Cathedral, Dublin, and Mr. Price [of the] Armagh Choir. The chorus was composed of … ladies and gentlemen of Armagh. … The first part of the programme consisted of a selection from Acis and Galatea …

Acis and Galatea is also represented in the collection by manuscript parts (Vol.349) and by individual pieces (in manuscript) in part-books for bass voice (Vol.415) and violoncello (Vol.374). The Messiah was also in repertory; performance annotations can be seen in the collection’s copy of H. Wright’s circa 1785 edition of Messiah an oratorio in score … to which are added … additional alterations (Dempsey 2: 171). This particular exemplar had wandered as far as Canada, but was returned to the collection after the son of Frederick George Carter (former organist of St Patrick’s 1951-66) discovered it. An anonymous correspondent for the Ulster Gazette (5 April 1879) describes the first public performance of the work in Armagh:

ARMAGH MUSICAL SOCIETY CONCERT. This very successful society, under the conductorship of Dr Marks, organist of Armagh Cathedral, gave the closing concert … on Monday evening last, in the Tontine, before a large, fashionable, and highly appreciative audience. The performance [was] Handel’s great work, the ‘Messiah’, … the first time it has ever been publicly given in Armagh. Anyone at all cognisant with the difficulties attending the production of such a grand Oratorio … will be surprised to find it attempted by such a young society (4); yet it been tried and done effectually to the admiration of the most fastidious critics…

Further oratorios with particularly full representation include Esther (vocal and instrumental parts at Vol.356); Hercules (vocal and instrumental parts at Vol.356); also Israel in Egypt (vocal parts, Vols.340-346). Additional Handel repertory includes the Dettingen Te Deum, Coronation Anthem, Funeral Anthem (‘The Ways of Zion do Mourn’), individual Chandos Anthems, the Concerti Grossi (including the J. Walsh part-books), and an unknown publisher’s Handel’s Water Piece, for the Harpsichord or Pianoforte (Vol.201).

Amongst the collection are many substantial, anthologised, part-books for a particular voice type or instrument. These suggest potential companions in performance, with juxtapositions both expected and intriguing. The bass part-book found at Vol.209 has 52 manuscript and printed items within; a front cover stamp, ‘Armagh Cathedral / 1893’ suggests it served as a working performance document at that time. Handel’s anthem, ‘O Come let us sing unto the Lord’ (No.44 in the volume), is presented alongside anthems by such as John Weldon (1676-1736), William Boyce (1711-79), John Stafford Smith (1750-1836), John Clarke-Whitfield (1770-1836) and Sir William Sterndale Bennett (1816-75). In Volume 229 – a compilation of 76 songs of largely popular or theatrical origin – Handel’s ‘My heart is inditing’ (No.67; from the fourth Coronation Anthem) sits alongside Thomas Moore’s 1805 ‘A Canadian Boat Song’ (No.73) and Orlando Gibbons’s ‘Oh whistle and I’ll come to thee my lad’ (No.20).

The collection is also a valuable historical document regarding publishing and book-trade history. Smaller publishing houses represented include Mary McCalley of 33 Moore Street, Dublin, who produced a vocal score for ‘What tho’ I trace’ from Handel’s Solomon (Vol.201, No.37); this aria is also represented by a manuscript part-book for violoncello (Vol.374, No.34). Local booksellers include ‘J. Lee’ of Armagh, whose stamp is found on the first violin part (Vol.169) for Handel’s overtures in parts … containing no. 2 … Ariadne as published by Coventry & Hottier ‘late Preston’ of 71 Dean Street, Soho. There are also some interesting stories regarding provenance: Vol.227 is an organ score of 33 anthems originally used at Down Cathedral.

This important collection warrants further study.

Notes
(1) Dempsey, A. (2003). A Catalogue of Manuscript Music in the Armagh Cathedral Collection. Belfast. The catalogue also includes printed music (Vols. 2 and 3). For printed music by Handel see Vol. 2, pp.161-195.
(2) All newspapers cited in this article were accessed on 10 April 2018 through www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/.
(3) Due to time constraints, Dempsey did not attempt to date any of the printed material.
(4) Although an ‘Armagh Musical Society’ flourished in the 1840s, this reviewer speaks of a recent renewal of that society (1878?) after some years in abeyance.

Dr Sarah McCleave is Senior Lecturer in Musicology and Composition at Queen’s University Belfast.

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Staging Handel: a Response to Ruth Smith and Brian Robins

Sandra Bowdler

In a recent issue of the Handel News, I was much stimulated and entertained by the articles by Ruth Smith (1) and Brian Robins (2) on staging Handel, the former concentrating on the oratorios, the latter on the original staging of the operas. Smith concludes that Handel’s oratorios are better in non-staged performances; Robbins argues that, with respect to the operas, ‘only by seeing them as a totality unifying sets, costumes, gesture and expressiveness that we can truly understand the nobility of this great corpus of works on its own terms’. While finding myself sympathetic to both arguments, I have reservations about realising these ideals in the context of modern opera, and oratorio, performance. My views have been influenced by a long-term interest in the wider field of opera performance and recent experiences of Handel productions at home (Australia) and abroad.

Why do opera companies or other organisations even want to stage oratorios, when Handel has left us some 40 actual operas for the purpose? This is a puzzle, and can perhaps only be answered on a case-by-case basis by directors and intendants. I can hazard a guess with respect to the Sydney opera company Pinchgut Opera. From its inception – Semele in 2002 – the company has been associated with the (excellent) choir Cantillation, and it seems that it has specifically sought works with a large choral component. I think this also applies to the more recently established ‘Handel in the Theatre’ group in Canberra, which arose out of the Canberra Choral Society with Alexander Balus in 2014; though its current name seems odd as it has only performed oratorios, including the forthcoming Susanna. This argument about work for the chorus might also I daresay be applied to Glyndebourne. But why on earth would Halle Opera choose to stage Jephtha, albeit during the annual Handel festival there? Quite apart from its turning out to be a monumental train wreck, why not stick with actual operas? Perhaps modern directors feel that Handel’s oratorios provide more familiar storylines than the very obscure personages that feature in the operas? Although these days the likes of Jephtha, Susanna, Alexander Balus etc. are hardly household names.

The other issue highlighted by Smith is the way the oratorios are staged, with the literal specificity of stage action reigning in the inherent ambiguity of the oratorios’ text and music and thus restricting the imaginative reception by the audience. There is also the fact that modern directors are trying to do things with the oratorios that not only did Handel not intend, but which also do not work in a modern operatic context. It is interesting to consider what might be called the converse.

Smith mentions Wagner. I have attended quite a few successful concert performances of Wagner operas over the years (Tristan und Isolde, Tannhäuser, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung come to mind). In Tristan in particular, staging is practically otiose: some 90% of the whole work comprises long ecstatic passages of singing during which a park and bark performance is practically obligatory. Those who love Wagner, and (like me) are drawn in by his excessively passionate, verging on decadent, music with its long unresolved passages culminating in orgiastic resolutions, see no need for stage encumbrences. The recent New York Metropolitan Opera production (available online and on DVD) has the sketchiest of sets. Regular opera-goers do not actually need elaborate settings. When it comes to Handel, however, directors and producers seem to feel the need to over-embellish.

Returning to oratorio, the recent Pinchgut production of Athalia, despite being musically outstanding, illustrated much that is wrong in staging oratorios, including some new terrible ideas. Who, outside this production, could possibly imagine that an 18th-century English oratorio needed surtitles translated into English (i.e. modern-day English)? This was almost enough to kill the whole production, with the distraction of having two sets of English words being thrown at you at once. I will not go into what might be described as directorial infelicities – I know my mentioning that there is a pretty explicit sex scene between Athalia and Mathan will be enough to have this readership running screaming from the room – but the director Lindy Hume is known for her desire to seek modern ‘relevance’. But every review I read blamed the work for its lack of dramatic cohesion, development and so on. In one case, the reviewer found that ‘Until the last 20 minutes or so of the performance, there was very little action in the story of the opera; this often made Hume’s job difficult, as she designed the protagonists’ movements on stage’ (3). Bloody Handel, making the director’s job difficult. While this might seem to justify Smith’s view, I can imagine another director taking Athalia and producing something both more like a regular modern opera production on the one hand, while on the other also preserving the underlying 18th-century sensibility. It can be done with Mozart and Wagner: why not with Handel?

In this vein, the way Robins describes modern Handel productions in his first paragraph is essentially correct, but not, to me, a bad thing. Those pared-down austere sets do exactly what Smith suggests in allowing the audience’s imagination to fill in the dark spaces; the ones that do not work so well are those forced into a more particularistic setting (e.g. Rodelinda always now seems to happen in a 20th-century police state) or one of fluffy over-embellishment without any particular regard for ‘authenticity’. I also loved his description of an historical performance, reinforced by a recent visit to the Baroque theatre in Cesky Krumlov (not alas for a performance, although the thought of sitting through four hours of opera on one of the benches is a matter of some trepidation). Someone once said to me however that were I (or any Handel fan) to sit through a full historically performed Baroque opera replete with 18th-century conventions, Gest, costume and so on, I/we would be bored stupid. Actually, I love the productions of Sigrid T’Hooft: her recent Parnasso in Festa at Bad Lauchstädt was utterly blissful, as were her Göttingen performances of Amadigi and Imeneo in recent years, all deploying the full authentic range of Baroque opera performance. But would we want all operas to be performed like that today?

The reality is that there are very few appropriate venues for such productions. Cesky Krumlov and Drottningholm are the only two surviving Baroque theatres in Europe, and presumably the world. Early 19th-century buildings like the Goethestheater at Bad Lauchstädt and the Deutschestheater in Göttingen serve well, but this is not the kind of venue in which Baroque operas can be solely performed if we have some hope of their gaining and maintaining an ongoing place in regular opera-going. Perhaps we do not want that, but if they are not performed in regular theatres they are not going to have much survival potential.

Another recent experience of mine was a performance of Tamerlano at La Scala in Milan, a heartland of the opera experience. The stage there is vast, and an ‘authentic’ performance would be lost in the shadows. What I saw was a huge modern production which relocated the scene to the Russian revolution. The mise en scène comprised an enormous train, occasionally in motion (clever back-projection of trees being rushed past) and more often stationary in the snowy wilderness, with doors opening to reveal interactions inside. Maybe Franco Fagioli as Trotsky was a bridge too far, but it was definitely a popular hit and did not, to my mind, get in the way of the story or the meanings inherent in the text and music. If we want Handel opera to survive and flourish, it needs to be performed in these 19th-century barns alongside the core operatic repertoire, together with the more privileged locations of specialised theatres in the context of festivals and informed audiences.

Notes
(1) Smith, R. (2018). Staging Handel’s oratorios: gain and loss. Handel News, 71, January, 5-10.
(2) Robbins, B. (2018). Staging Handel – now … and then. Handel News, 71, January, 10-13.
(3) Szabo, Z. (2018). Pinchgut brings yet more exciting surprises to opera with Handel’s Athalia. The Conversation, 26 June.

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Handel’s Adaptation of Congreve’s Libretto for Semele

John Andrews

Tracing the revision to the libretto for Semele from first draft to conducting score offers a fascinating insight into the way that Handel revised text during composition. Comparison of Handel’s compositional drafts with the copy of Semele submitted to the Lord Chamberlain shows the chronology of the development of Handel’s libretto, and shows him doing so not only for music and practical reasons, but also to adapt the erotically-charged text to the moral and political atmosphere of the 1740s.

Facing rivalry from both Thomas Arne and Lord Middlesex, Semele offered Handel an opportunity to find a new niche, setting a text by a great English literary figure. But William Congreve’s libretto had been controversial in its aesthetic, moral and political outlook even in 1707 when it had been set by John Eccles. While Congreve remained an imposing figure, in 1737 the Daily Gazetteer said of The Way of the World that ‘All the characters in that play are immoral, immodest, and shocking in sobriety of Thinking…Tickling a man’s ear is no excuse for corrupting his mind.’ Aaron Hill criticised the portrayal of genuinely evil characters in The Double Dealer, and cited The Way of the World as an illustration of the libertine degeneration of British theatre. Handel’s revisions demonstrate his sensitivity to these changing social attitudes, and also illuminate his approach in adapting the work’s tone away from opera towards oratorio.

Handel’s adapter/librettist – probably Newburgh Hamilton – made three types of changes. First, a series of cuts reduce the length of the text to accommodate da capo arias and the more melismatic vocal writing of Italian opera. But there are also cuts of individual lines, couplets, and even single words, which seem to accommodate the piece to a more censorious age. Second, there are interpolations from Congreve’s poetry, from Pope’s Pastorals and from untraced sources. These provide additional arias for his principals but more importantly create and shape the role of the chorus. Handel also created two choruses by reassigning lines from minor characters. Finally, one aria was re-written to fit better with Handel’s music.

Handel was free to leave omitted dialogue in the printed word-books: he did precisely this in the oratorios he produced on either side of Semele – Samson and Joseph and his Brethren. However, in Semele, cut lines were suppressed completely, suggesting that changes were made for moral and political reasons.

The chronology of adaptations

The libretto that Handel used when composing his autograph score (A) does not survive, but can be reconstructed through a comparison between the existing sources. It will be referred to hereafter as U. Handel made changes to the libretto during the initial composition and filling-up stage. After that, the Larpent Manuscript libretto (L) was copied by J.C. Smith for submission to the Lord Chamberlain’s office. The evidence suggests that Smith created this from both U and A, since stage directions appear in L which are not in A. There are also variant readings of the text which reflect the Congreve version rather than what Handel set. L includes Handel’s re-written final chorus so was made after the filling-up stage. L in addition shows a set of corrections to the text on the face of the manuscript which were also made on the face of A.

Then the conducting score (C) was then made, and a set of parts (P) copied. P contains additions to the score not found in L (e.g. the insertion of ‘Despair no more shall wound me’) suggesting that they were made later. Finally, the word-book (W) was prepared for the first performance, which included several further minor changes. From this evidence, the following sequence can be established.

Changes made during the draft composition process, and therefore reflected in L

  1. ‘See, she blushing turns her eyes’ was given to Ino as an aria with the words of the final line altered:

See, she blushing turns her eyes
See with sighs her bosom panting
If from love those sighs arise
My rest ever will be wanting.

2. The other sources all give ‘Endless pleasure’ to an unnamed commentator. In the autograph, Handel assigns it to Semele herself. The evidence of the printed scores suggests that Avoglio (singing Iris) had her part increased with lines from Ino and even Cadmus, so could easily have sung it. The decision to give it to Semele was Handel’s own and increases its erotic charge.

3. The text of ‘With fond desiring’ is already in its final form in the autograph, so the changes must have been made by the adapter for the U libretto.

4. In Part Two, Handel inverted the first two lines of ‘I must with speed amuse her’ in the autograph, but the lines appear in Congreve’s form in L which suggests that the copyist was working from both U and A, and failed to spot this change.

5. Handel added an extra syllable to ‘Where e’er you walk’ which was not spotted by the copyist of L or W. Perhaps this was to avoid drawing attention to Handel’s rewriting of Pope.

6. In Act Three, the libretto had given Semele the sexually explicit culmination of her demands to Jupiter:

When next you desire I shou’d charm ye,
As when Juno you bless,
So you me must caress,
And with all your omnipotence arm ye.

Handel wrote these lines into the autograph, but never set them to music. The motivation for the cut may have been musical, but is more likely to have been their overt sexuality.

7. The autograph shows Handel’s dissatisfaction with the underlay of ‘I’ll be pleased with no less’. The corrections show clearly that Handel changed the last four lines of Congreve’s text during the composition itself:

Congreve (WC)

I’ll be pleas’d with no less,
Than my Wish in excess:
Let the Oath you have taken alarm ye:
Haste, haste and prepare
For I’ll know what you are;
So with all your Omnipotence arm ye.


Autograph (A)

I’ll be pleased with no less
Than my wish in excess
Your oath it may alarm you
Yet haste and prepare,
For I’ll know what you are
With all your powers arm you.

Changes made during the filling-up

  1. Between the first draft and the filling-up stage, Athamas was recast from a tenor to an alto, resulting in new keys for several of the arias. Mostly Handel wrote the new part over the old one. For the arias and most of ‘You’ve undone me’ he inserted fresh sheets. Handel improved and extended his first recitative with Cadmus, adding a final ritornello which leads into Semele’s ‘Ah me!’
  2. A recitative version of ‘Turn hopeless lover’ was inserted for Ino, and the second half of ‘Hail, Cadmus hail’ was revised with the new sheets stuck over the old ones. At some point, Handel wrote ‘Un mezzo tono piu basso ex D sharp’ over ‘O sleep’ – i.e. that it should be in E flat. This would have made a more expressive key change from the G major of ‘Come zephyrs, come’. The excision of ‘Come zephyrs’ later rendered it pointless,
  3. Handel inserted a new version of ‘Bless the glad earth’ to conclude Part Two.
  4. Handel re-composed the entrance of Juno and Iris in the Cave of Sleep and this was inserted into A.
  5. The first draft of the autograph concluded with Congreve’s bacchanalian ‘Now mortals be merry.’ This was replaced at the filling-up stage by ‘Happy, happy!’ This chronology is clear because L has the new ending, but not the re-writing of Athamas. It fundamentally changes the character of the work, replacing a drinking song with high baroque religious ceremonial. The oratorio character of the conclusion is thereby reinforced.

Changes made after composition was completed (shown as corrections on L and A)

  1. After Handel had completed the filling-up, he changed Congreve’s lines ‘by this conjunction / With entire divinity / You shall partake of heavenly essence’, to ‘partake of immortality.’ The handwriting looks like that of the copyist, but it is much less tidy than elsewhere. This suggests that the change was made at the last minute, and that the seminal image was offensive to the Chamberlain.

2. ‘Leave me, loathsome light’ still had its da capo in P and L. Its crossing out in A is therefore later, improving dramatic flow and creating a great comic effect in Somnus’s return to sleep.

3. ‘Behold in this mirror’ remains an aria in L, but by C and P it has been changed to a recitative.

4. Handel continued to make changes to the opening of ‘No no I’ll take no less’. In P, it has the same words as were originally in A. However, after this, A, C and L were corrected to give the final version. Again the writing is less neat than the rest of L. It looks as though the correction was made by Handel himself, confirming that he took a direct part in managing the libretto’s submission and alterations.

No no! I’ll take no less
I’ll be pleas’d with no less,
Than all in full Excess
Than my Wish in excess:
Your oath It may alarm you
Yet haste and prepare,
For I’ll know what you are;
With all your powers arm you.

5. In L, ‘See, she blushing turns her eyes’ has been neatly corrected on the face of the manuscript, giving it as a recitative for Athamas, with Congreve’s original words. This was made on the basis of C.

6. Handel changed ‘comets’ to ‘meteors’ in the penultimate chorus, presumably for greater poetic beauty.

Changes made after the correction of A

  1. ‘See, she blushing turns her eyes’ was changed to a recitative for Ino by the time P was copied and was retrospectively changed in L.
  2. ‘Curs’t adulteress’ stands in A but was scratched out of L and replaced by ‘Curséd Semele.’ The correction appears to have been made by Smith (the writing is cramped between two lines, but his characteristic d and S are the same), and again suggests that the language was too direct for the Chamberlain.

Changes made after the correction of A and L

  1. ‘Despair no more shall wound me’ was inserted into A after the copying out of L, which suggests that L was prepared during Handel’s revisions to A, or shortly after.
  2. Before C was prepared, ‘Come zephyrs come’ was removed completely.

The role of the chorus

It is the role of the chorus and the grand ceremonial tone of most of their music that fundamentally transmutes the character of the piece from the opera envisaged by Congreve to the oratorio of Handel. In his Chapel Royal anthems Handel had demonstrated his assimilation of English style and through these he could out-English Arne. Simultaneously, by preserving the fully Italianate arias, he could out-opera Middlesex. Semele contains ten choruses and they bring both gravity and explicit moral commentary foreign to Congreve’s original: in fact, precisely what the playwright’s critics had demanded.

In perhaps a deliberate nod to Purcell and the masque tradition, all of the Part One choruses are linked to religious ceremonial, with the chorus identified as ‘priests and augurs.’ In Part Two the chorus appear as immortal ‘loves and zephyrs’ and in ‘Bless the glad earth’ evoke the music of the spheres in an entirely ecclesiastical anthem-chorus. Handel’s treatment, beginning with a weighty homophonic passage and followed by a double fugue, aims at the religious sublime.

In Part Three, the chorus begin as a Greek chorus, again offering an explicit moral commentary. The shocked reaction to Semele’s destruction, ‘O terror and astonishment’ (given to Cadmus and Athamas), was in Congreve; but the moral lesson, ‘Nature to each allots his proper sphere’, is an addition. This leads on to the final chorus in the work: the singers become again citizens of Thebes. But instead of Congreve’s bacchanal, we in stead return to a royal, religious ceremonial complete with music straight from the Coronation Anthems. That the deity in question was the god of wine and theatre was possible a joke of Handel’s. Reactions to Semele suggest that he did not entirely get away with it.

This addition of the chorus has created confusion over Semele’s genre. Mainwaring’s ‘an English opera, but called an oratorio and acted as such’, and Jennens’s scathing ‘no oratorio but a baudy opera’, emphasised its operatic qualities (1). Burrows called it ‘virtually an opera’, while Dean says it is ‘clearly an opera’. Lang went further and called it ‘the first full-length English Opera’ and Mellers a ‘full-scale heroic opera’ (2). The arias are clearly operatic in style but Newburgh Hamilton, in his preface to Samson (1743), defined oratorio as a drama ‘…in which the Solemnity of Church-Musick is agreeably united with the most pleasing Airs of the Stage’.

Handel’s revisions show that he was fully aware of what the moral reaction might be, and in the suppression of the most explicit text and introduction of a moralising chorus, he sought to mitigate these concerns. The strength of Semele surely comes from its seamless fusion of the two contrasting elements. To the opera audience he offered florid, Italianate, da capo arias of rich and varied drama (3). To his oratorio audience he offered the religious sublime of ‘Bless the glad earth’ and the coronation splendour of ‘Happy, happy!’

This brief survey of how the libretto was transformed to his new purpose shows Handel searching for a new theatrical approach in the early 1740s, ready to use all the resources at his disposal, but at the same time acutely conscious of the gap between the world of his libretto and the more censorious ambience of his own audience. Ultimately the failure of Semele led him to look elsewhere, but we can see from his efforts described here that it was not for want of caution.

Notes
(1) Mainwaring, J. (1760). Memoirs of the Life of the late George Frederic Handel, p.152. Dean, W. (1972). Charles Jennens’ marginalia to Mainwaring’s Life of Handel. ML, liii, pp.160-164.
(2) Burrows, D. (1994). Handel, p.274. Dean, W. (1959). Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques, p.365. Lang, P.H. (1966). George Frideric Handel, p.417. Mellers, W. (1965). Harmonious Meeting: a Study of the Relationship between English Music, Poetry and Theatre, p.243. Dent, E.J. (1928). Foundations of English Opera, p.231. Smither omitted it from his history of oratorio on the same grounds. Smither, H.E. (1977). History of the Oratorio, Vol.2, p.280.
(3) Semele has a far lower percentage of da capo arias than the original versions of Acis (85%, 11 out of 13), and Esther (75%) and all of the Royal Academy operas. Of Semele’s successors, Alexander Balus has 40%, Hercules and Theodora both 52%, and Susanna 62%. However, all of these have many more than the immediate predecessors L’Allegro (8%), Samson (11%) and Saul (17%); Judas, Joshua and Belshazzar all have 23-24%. This supports the theory that with Semele Handel tried to fuse the choral and da capo elements out of which came a distinct genre in the later dramatic oratorios.

Dr John Andrews is Principal Guest Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra. This article is based on his PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge.