Tag: historically informed

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Singing Handel, Then and Now

Richard Wistreich

If you attend a performance of a Handel opera or oratorio these days, the chances are it may still be billed, perhaps rather self-consciously, as being ‘historically-informed’ – though increasingly it is no longer considered necessary to draw attention to such exceptionality, because this has become the norm. Our ears (and eyes) are now fully acclimatised to the light and agile playing of gut-strung instruments with short, light bows; the pungent, stringy sounds of baroque oboes and bassoons; the almost reedy, piercing quality of narrow-bore, valveless trumpets and horns; and the dry crack of shallow, calf-skin headed timpani beaten with hardwood sticks. Even the harpsichord, that for a good half-century has been a standard member of the Handel orchestra, has now come into its own as a richly variegated binding agent in the overall sound-palette, rather than being just a dry, percussive clatter disturbing the seamless homogeneity of modern orchestral texture; and as often as not, it is reinforced in the continuo section by a theorbo or two. This lustrous, multi-coloured sound-tool of the ‘Baroque orchestra’, in the hands of skilled and committed players, steeped in the style and fully aware of role they play in the dramatic fabric of Handel’s music, is one of the most exciting developments of the past 30 or so years of the aural experience of this music we love. Indeed, for many people, hearing Handel’s music played on ‘modern instruments’, however well phrased and articulated – but with little differentiation from that of Mozart, Beethoven or Mendelssohn – feels like a distinct disappointment.

Meanwhile, however arresting the transformation in the sound of Handel’s orchestral textures, what can you expect to hear from the most important people to whom you are listening ? the singers? The human larynx may not have evolved over the past 300 years, but the almost infinite number of different sounds that it can produce means that there could be an equally wide range of possibilities for informed hypothesis and experimentation by ‘historically-informed’ singers (one only needs to listen to the huge variety of different singing styles currently in use across genres outside classical music to get a sense of what the singing voice is capable of). Surely, it would be a betrayal of the entire ‘historical performance’ project, and very likely to produce a strange distortion of the aural picture, if the vocal dimension of Handel’s music had not been subjected to the same kind of review and renovation as has happened to the orchestra.

You may well think that this is indeed just what has occurred over the past half-century. Thus, in general, you are probably less likely to hear voices and singing styles more appropriate to Verdi, Wagner or Puccini performing Handel than you might have been in earlier times, although the pace of this change sometimes seems to be painfully halting: a case of two steps forward, one – or sometimes two – steps back. Singers with lighter and more agile voices (particularly sopranos and some tenors) who spend much of their lives performing pre-1800 music are probably more often cast in major productions of Handel’s operas than they once were; although this rarely extends to the huge 19th-century metropolitan opera houses that, thanks rather ironically to the success of the Handel opera ‘revival’, increasingly schedule works that were written for much smaller spaces. Many managers seem to think they have to fill the stage not only with strangely distracting productions, but also to cast singers with vocal techniques designed and honed for the sheer power and decibels necessary to get across a big orchestra and up to the back row of the upper circle.

When it comes to musical style, professional Handel singers these days are more likely to add ornamentation – usually more or less appropriate – to the da capo sections of arias; although very few yet do as their 18th-century predecessors did and actually improvise – or, more accurately, compose – on the spot, new melodic material in the repeats. Indeed, once you have read just a fraction of the evidence about early 18th-century professional singing technique and style contained in contemporary teaching manuals, memoirs, and scientific literature, it quickly becomes clear that (for reasons which are too complex to interrogate in detail here) while there has been a consistent and pretty rigorous approach to recovering historical instrumental sounds and playing techniques over the course of many years, vocal sound has barely budged. It remains ‘the elephant in the room’ of historically informed Handel performance.

Why does any of this matter? First, because of the perplexing mismatch between the vocal and the instrumental components that make up the ‘new’ musical soundscape. The disconnect between the orchestral and singing sounds you will normally encounter in performances of Baroque music, even those whose musical directors are particularly associated with ‘historically informed’ performance, is perhaps even more bewildering than some aspects of contemporary stagings of Handel opera. Among the latter is the terror many theatrical directors apparently have of allowing singers simply to stand still while performing their arias, as they did in Handel’s time, enabling them and the audience to focus on the rhetorical power of the music’s vocality alone to express the emotions of an arrested moment in the drama, rather than trying to make movement and business do the interpretational work.

What, then, are the main differences between the sounds of ‘modern singing’ and the way that singers these days learn their craft and, based on what we can surmise from the evidence, they might have been like in Handel’s time? To begin with perhaps the most obvious, the pursuit of ‘historicism’ has not yet – thankfully – overcome the taboo against reinstating the castrati who were so essential to the whole effect of 18th-century opera seria. However, the typical ‘solution’ normally adopted for the casting of heroic male soprano roles over the past 30-40 years with male falsettists (rather anachronistically called ‘counter-tenors’) was largely a decision based on the priorities of theatrical realism (‘men must be played by men’), rather than the likelihood that the way that modern counter-tenors produce their voices actually most closely approximates to the sound of castrati – any more than that of modern female sopranos, now increasingly being cast to play such roles, dressed in male costumes. Indeed, when it comes to vocal production in general (and this includes all voice types, from soprano down to bass), notwithstanding the earnest commitment of some musical directors to enforcing ‘historically informed’ style (at least in the music, as they rarely have any say in the production style), all the ‘surface’ effects they demand of their singers – attention to ornamentation in particular, but also matters of phrasing, articulation and dynamics – are essentially ‘instrumental’ effects that sidestep the fundamental, but also potentially troubling, implications of attempting reconstruction of Baroque vocal production itself, and hence its sound.
Today’s professional Handel singers, especially in opera, are almost exclusively products of conservatoire vocal education, which has been progressively cemented into a fairly universal ‘method’. This found its most thorough manifestation back in the mid-19th century: Manuel García the younger’s Traité complet de l’art du chant, published in Paris in 1840 and subsequently reworked in English in 1847. García, trained in the master-apprentice system (initially taught by his father, Manuel the elder, a famous early 19th-century Mozart singer who also created roles for Rossini), exercised a commanding influence as a pedagogue, first in France and then in England, for more almost three-quarters of a century. He began teaching at the Paris Conservatoire in 1829, became professor of singing at the Royal Academy of Music in 1847, where he taught for over 50 years, and lived to the age of 102. The legacy of his method (still in use to this day) continues to dominate classical vocal training right across the world. The treatise effectively lays out the technical principles of modern classical singing: in particular, the process by which singers can consciously elongate the vocal tract by gently depressing the larynx and keeping it depressed as the voice ascends through its pitch register, at the same time lifting the soft palate and projecting the sound forwards to maximise the natural resonances of the facial cavities. With careful control, achieved through concentrated training, the effect of this is that the voice finds a particularly advantageous frequency band, known as ‘the singers’ formant’. This is what enables opera singers’ voices to carry over big orchestras and fill large auditoria without the need for artificial amplification, and for them to maintain equal power throughout the whole vocal range, from low to high.

This production is ‘mechanically’ highly efficient, and when done correctly, involves little or no vocal strain. However, the downsides include the necessity to modify vowel sounds, a result of maintaining the elongation of the vocal tract particularly as the voice reaches its upper range, in order to maintain a consistent ‘ring’; this is the reason why it is often difficult to hear differences between opera singers’ vowels (something particularly detrimental to the pure vowels of the Italian language of Handel’s operas). Another disadvantage is the relatively high sub-glottal breath pressure needed to maintain such vocal carrying power. This seriously mitigates against the natural flexibility of the larynx that is essential for achieving truly rapid coloratura, including trills and highly articulated runs – both key elements in the armoury of the vocal effects which characterised virtuoso and affective singing style from the Renaissance until at least the early 19th century. Nevertheless, even professional ‘early music singers’ (including, by the way, counter-tenors), employ this form of vocal production, essentially because it is the recognised ‘sound of classical singing’.

By contrast, vocal training before the Romantic era was focused on a number of distinctly different priorities, which are in turn reflected in the various forms of written vocal music from the mid-16th until the mid-19th centuries, and are a particularly distinctive feature of opera and oratorio from the ‘long 18th century’. If there is a counterpart to Manual García for this era, it is probably the castrato and voice teacher Pier Francesco Tosi’s Opinioni de’ cantori antichi e moderni (1723), which effectively summarises the principal elements of vocal training going back to the mid-17th century, when Tosi learned his art. Thanks to subsequent translations and updatings of his book, these elements remained largely unchanged until well into the 19th century. Tosi describes the process of gradually and systematically developing the young singer’s natural voice into a flexible and expressive instrument (he recommends starting studies aged 12, 13 or 14, although many, especially girls, began much earlier). Instead of striving for unity of sound quality across the whole range, the aim was strong differentiation of the two registers, chest and falsetto, while making the transition between them seamless (tenors, for example, changed over into falsetto above a certain point, rather than pushing the chest voice up into the head as they do now). An exercise called messa di voce (literally ‘placing the voice’) focused on producing a perfect swelling of every note from very soft to loud and back again without deviation in pitch (wobble). This developed breath control and was also in itself an expressive device to be applied to all long notes in performance. Finally, the singer needed to develop disposizione (disposition, or skill) in order to produce trills and very fast passage-work. This requires the larynx to ‘float’ freely, the breath is kept at a very low pressure, and the coloratura is articulated in the throat (known in Italian as cantar di gorga); this, in turn, reduces the carrying power of the voice. Of all the technical aspects of early 18th-century singing technique, it is this latter which is perhaps most alien to almost all singers trained in the modern classical style.

So, just suppose we were to try to apply such a pedagogical programme – something that would, ironically, be particularly difficult for Handel singers already steeped in modern vocal production – how different might Handel’s vocal music actually sound? The short answer is that singers would have to undertake a lengthy process of experimentation, with completely open minds, just as players of Baroque orchestral instruments have been doing for a long time. The outcome could be a revelation.

Note
Suggestions for further reading:
Potter, J. (2012). Vocal performance in the ‘long eighteenth century’. In The Cambridge History of Musical Performance (eds. Lawson, C. & Stowell, R.), 506-526. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wistreich, R. (2000). Reconstructing pre-Romantic singing technique. In The Cambridge Companion to Singing (ed. Potter, J.), 178-191. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Professor Richard Wistreich is Director of Research at the Royal College of Music.

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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.