Tag: Publication Year: 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.

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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.

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Reichardt’s Review of Handel Concerts in London

Beverly Jerold

If we could travel back to the age of Bach and Handel to hear how music was performed, we would often be disappointed. Technology is unnecessary for music composition, but can greatly enhance performance. For example, early sources reveal that many musicians are not born with the ability to sing or play pleasingly in tune. In contrast, the music we hear every day provides automatic ear training and many other benefits. Since we cannot imagine a world that had never experienced our concepts of refined tone quality, consistently good intonation, and rhythmic accuracy, our reading of early sources may be coloured by modern assumptions. Some of these are called into question by the Berlin court Kapellmeister Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s report of two Handel concerts he heard in London in 1785.(1)

The first was Samson at the Drury Lane Theatre, whose entrance was in a dirty alley and down some steps, as in a beer hall. In the foremost loge, almost on the stage of this small, plain theatre, were King George III and the Queen. Some disorderly young chaps settled themselves very close to the king’s loge, making an unruly disturbance during the performance – mostly mockery of the singers – such as Reichardt had never heard at the worst German theatre. One of them took loud delight in the stiff enunciation of the singers, who made a point of thrusting out each syllable extremely firmly and distinctly. Particularly in the recitatives, Mr Reinhold attacked the difficult words with such pedantic preparation, executing each single consonant so elaborately that one would often have had time to look up the word in a dictionary.

‘But what I wouldn’t have given for a better musical performance’, declares Reichardt. ‘The singing was often downright poor. In comparison, the instrumental music was much better, at least the string instruments. The blown instruments were often intolerably out of tune.’ As first violinist, Mr Richards led the orchestra just passably. Because of the many participants, the choruses made more effect than they usually do in Germany, but were nevertheless disappointing: ‘Often the choral singing was filled with screaming from the most wretched voices. Miss George and Miss Philips, the principal female soloists, were very mediocre indeed, frequently singing heartily out of tune, while Messrs Quest, Norris and Reinhold were deplorable, and often bellowed like lions.’ Reichardt’s observations are confirmed by Charles Burney’s letter of 1771 to Montagu North in which he complains that English ‘singing must be so barbarous as to ruin the best Compositions of our own or of any Country on the Globe’ until they have music schools and better salaries.(2)

After the first part of Samson, a little girl played a modish concerto on the fortepiano. Reichardt’s footnote quoting The Morning Post for 12 March suggests that the composer often took the blame for a wretched performance:

‘At the Oratorio yesterday evening Miss Parke… performed a concerto on the Piano Forte… her execution was such that a veteran in the profession might not be ashamed to imitate. This… was a sufficient compensation for three tedious Acts of Handel’s worst Composition.’

Standards varied dramatically between this programme for the general public, even though it included royalty, and one exclusively for the upper class. On 12 March, Reichardt heard the Concert of Ancient Music, limited to music more than 25 years old, and sponsored by a society of 300 subscribers from the court and highest nobility. Since even the most respected musician could not be admitted, the famed German soprano Gertrud Elisabeth Mara had to use all her influence to enable Reichardt to hear some of Handel’s music that was completely to his liking.

This concert’s hall, an oblong of more pleasing form and appropriate height than the Drury Lane Theatre, was just large enough to accommodate an orchestra of very considerable size and the subscribers. Seating on the floor began in the middle of the hall, leaving a substantial space between the first row and the orchestra, leading the frequent-traveller Reichardt to comment about conventional orchestral volume level:

‘I very much like having the instruments at a distance, for when they are close, particularly the string instruments whose every separate, strong stroke is always a powerful shock, it makes an extremely adverse, and often painful, long-lasting impression on my nerves.’ (3)

Mara and Samuel Harrison were the principal soloists; Wilhelm Cramer, the concertmaster; and Mr Bath, the organist. The orchestra was large and the chorus adequately strong. In the chorus from Handel’s Saul, ‘How excellent thy Name, O Lord!’, Reichardt found more good voices than in the programme the day before, particularly since several Royal Chapel choirboys, some with very beautiful voices, participated. But for the most part, the lower voices were the same, and again just as harsh and screaming.

Reichardt was pleased that Handel’s second Concerto Grosso, which is so different from their present instrumental music, was performed well and strongly, with its own character. In his youth, this work’s simple, harmonically compact music had made a strong impression. Today, he therefore expected nothing more than what it really is, so he readily found it pleasurable. But it will be a disappointment to those who think that the title ‘Concerto’ promises a display of the principal player’s skill with difficult passages. The principal parts do not have as many difficult passages to execute as each part in the easiest new Haydn symphony: ‘We can regard them as a document showing the character of instrumental music at that time. From this we can judge the great progress instrumental music has made in the last thirty years.’ Yet this type of instrumental music presents its own very great difficulty for execution:

‘something that… should be the foundation of everything else. Good intonation and larger tone. Music affects the listener only when it is completely in tune and strong. When performed with correct intonation and large tone from all the instruments, this concerto’s melodic clarity and rich harmony has to make a far stronger effect on the listener than the greatest technical difficulties… Whoever knows the enormous difficulty of achieving this will not be surprised that I found both of these qualities today only with Mr Cramer, who played the principal part. Yet no single measure offered him the opportunity to show his superior skills that are so admired in Germany.’ (4)

Since Reichardt’s 1776 manual for professional ripienists (Ueber die Pflichten…) prescribes exercises that are mastered today by young children, string technique, even at that time, was extremely low by our standards.

Hearing Mara (for the first time since she left Berlin) in a scene from Giulio Cesare, Reichardt found that grandeur and fullness of tone had been added to her qualities of strength, clarity, intonation and flexibility. ‘How she sang the great, noble scene from Handel! It was evident that Handel’s heroic style had influenced the spirit and even the voice of this exemplary artist.’ And in Handel’s ‘Affani del pensier un sol momento’ from Ottone, he was profoundly moved, for she conveyed the text as from the soul. After an intermission, Mr Harrison sang ‘Parmi che giunta in porto’ from Radamisto:

‘With a tenor voice that is not strong but nevertheless very pleasing, he sang this Cantabile completely in accord with the old style in which it is composed: that is, without any additions of his own, thereby giving the audience and me great pleasure. Mr Harrison performed even the very simple figures… exactly as they appear in Handel’s work, and sought to give the piece its due only through fine tone quality and precise, clear execution. And that is very praiseworthy. Melodies and finished compositions like Handel’s arias tolerate no alterations anywhere. His melodies have such a finely chosen meaningful, expressive succession of notes that almost anything put between them is certainly unsuitable or at least weakening for the word being sung. The construction of his basses and harmonic accompaniment is such that no singer can easily change three notes without creating a harmonic error. All of Handel’s melodies… can produce the desired effect on the present listener only when we want their effect to be the one heard. All new trimmings remove from the listener the impression that the venerable old style gives him and in which alone he can enjoy such music.’ (5)

Then Reichardt describes the contrasting style of composition heard in Mara’s performance of Johann Adolf Hasse’s ‘Padre perdona oh pene!’:

‘Hasse’s style presumes an inventive singer, and whole sections, intentionally sketched out only in outline, are expected to be embellished by the singer. At that time in Italy, the new, more opulent singing style arose hand in hand with the luxuriant dramatic style in composition. Hasse availed himself of this all the more since his wife, Signora Faustina Bordoni, was one of the principal female singers in the new lavish style. Just as the old bachelor Handel worked only for his art and himself, so did Hasse work for his wife and similar singers.’

Nevertheless, Hasse did not approve of extravagant additions, as seen in his letter to Giammaria Ortes (6) (a sample of Faustina’s own embellishment is modest). While most major composers followed Handel’s practice of leaving little, if anything, to the singer’s discretion, secondary, mostly Italian composers catered to Italian singers’ desire for a skeletal melodic line to decorate.

To close the concert, Mara sang a recitative and aria from Handel’s Ode for St Cecilia’s Day, followed by a full chorus from the same. According to Reichardt’s text, this concert’s success was owed to the soloists Mara and Harrison, a much better physical space, and Cramer’s orchestral leadership. Cramer was clearly exceptional – with no metronome training available, many leaders were afflicted with the same rhythmic instability as their players.

How did Handel view singers’ additions? Consider John Hawkins: ‘In his comparison of the merits of a composer and those of a singer, he estimated the latter at a very low rate.’ (7) Handel would not have tolerated the harmonic errors that characterised most singers’ own embellishment. But where did they add the embellishment that Burney mentions in his General History of Music? The answer lies in his account of Handel’s ‘Rival ti sono’ from Faramondo, written for the castrato Caffarelli: ‘In the course of the song, he is left ad libitum several times, a compliment which Handel never paid to an ordinary singer.’ Here, and in other Burney citations, Handel did not permit routine alteration, but restricted it to places left bare for this purpose, such as very brief Adagios or the close of a section. Perhaps this kept peace with Italian singers while protecting his work. Compare any of his conventional arias with a truly skeletal Larghetto he wrote for Caffarelli in Faramondo. According to Burney, ‘Si tornerò’ is ‘a fine out-line for a great singer’(8). Here, the singer is expected to add notes, but nearly all of Handel’s other arias are fully embellished, except for occasional measures. Our belief that a da capo should have additional embellishment derives solely from Pier Francesco Tosi, a castrato who wrote when skeletal composition was fashionable in Italy. There is no reason to apply his advice to arias that the composer embellished adequately.

In sum, Reichardt’s account reveals standards and aesthetic values different from our own. If we had never known such things as recording technology, the metronome, period instruments that play up to modern standards, and high-level conservatory/general education, there would be no musicians with today’s advanced technique. From Reichardt’s text and his definition of Handel’s style as ‘heroic’, it is apparent that tempi and embellishment were restrained, and that full-bodied tone was desirable.

Notes

(1) Johann Friedrich Reichardt], ‘Briefe aus London,’ Studien für Tonkünstler und Musikfreunde, ed. F.A. Kunzen and J.F. Reichardt (Berlin, 1792/93), Musikalisches Wochenblatt (MW) portion, 130ff., 137ff., 147f., 171f. According to Walter Salmen, Johann Friedrich Reichardt (Freiburg and Zürich: Atlantis, 1963), 57ff., Reichardt attended these London concerts in 1785.
(2) Ribeiro, A. (ed.) (1991). The Letters of Dr Charles Burney, 1:96. Oxford: Clarendon.
(3) Reichardt, MW, 137: ‘Diese Entfernung der Instrumente that für mich eine sehr angenehme Wirkung: denn ihre Nähe, besonders die der Saiteninstrumente, deren jeder einzelner starker Strich immer eine gewaltsame Erschütterung ist, macht auf meine Nerven einen höchst widrigen oft schmerzhaften und lange fortdauernden Eindruck.’
(4) Reichardt, MW, 138f.
(5) Reichardt, MW, 171: ‘Solche Melodieen und ganze Zusammensetzungen, wie Händels Arien sind, vertragen durchaus keine Änderungen.’
(6) See Jerold, B. (2008). ‘How composers viewed performers’ additions’. Early Music, 36/1, February: 95-109.
(7) Hawkins, J. (1853). A General History of the Science and Practice of Music. London; rpt. New York [1963]), 870.
(8) Burney, C. (1789). A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period. Ed. Frank Mercer. New York: Harcourt, Brace [1935]), 2:819-820.

Beverly Jerold’s recent books are: The Complexities of Early Instrumentation: Winds and Brass (Brepols, 2015); and Music Performance Issues: 1600-1900 (Pendragon, 2016).

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Staging Handel – Now… and Then

Brian Robins

When we enter the theatre today to attend an opera by Handel, the curtain may rise to reveal an austere, angular, darkly-lit stage. Tubular frames will likely feature somewhere on a set that will serve for all three acts, possibly varied by a few props. At some points in the proceedings, back-projections may be brought into play. The cast is in modern dress and interacts with one another the way people do in a 21st-century soap opera, while any soldiers and guards involved will be carrying not swords or lances but AK 47s. Sound familiar? It should, because it is a fair generic description of the way Baroque opera is frequently staged today.

It goes without saying that such performance practice is aesthetically diametrically opposed to the way in which Handel’s operas were staged in London in his own day, or indeed in which Baroque opera was mounted throughout Europe. Should we care? There are those who say no. Handel’s operas, they claim, are great works perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, and anyway imaginative new productions shed new light on them for contemporary audiences. It is an argument to which I would be happier to subscribe were such productions experimental. But they are not. They are the norm, the default for Handel production in the 21st century. Rather it is staging that lays some claim to historical veracity – often sneeringly referred to as ‘traditional’ – that is now considered outré. As a consequence we are in danger of producing an entire generation of opera-goers that has no conception or understanding of what a Handel opera looked like in his day.

So what did happen at a Handel opera staged under his direction in the 1720s or 1730s? Let’s again enter our theatre, this time a venue lit by a myriad candles. It is the King’s Theatre, London’s home of Italian opera, or, perhaps during the mid-1730s, Covent Garden. When the orchestra makes it appearance, its size might surprise us. In 1720, the year of the first performance of Radamisto, the orchestra of the King’s Theatre had no fewer than 24 strings on its books: 16 violins, 2 violas, 4 cellos and 2 double basses (1), a substantially larger number than we often encounter today, even if not every musician was available for all performances.

The curtain would rise to reveal a deep stage, an illusion of grandeur and even greater depth created by the sense of perspective gained from a series of receding flats (or wings) painted to represent buildings or outdoor scenes on either side of the stage. It was one of the principal feats of theatrical engineering that the these flats were usually fixed on wheels sitting in grooves that could effect a change of scene very quickly by replacing one with another. The printed text of Radamisto, for instance, suggests that at least six different scenes were required, three internal and three external (2). It is worth adding that once the curtain had risen, it did not drop again until the performance had concluded, a convention that can doubtless be explained at least in part by the speed of scene-change that could be efficiently effected in front of the audience.

The spaces between the flats were used for all entries. Hierarchical convention determined that high-born characters entered from the right, lower mortals and villains from the left, although Metastasio, ever the practical man of the theatre in addition to being the most influential librettist of the 18th century, considered that dramatic needs should take precedence over such rigidity. We find elements of both convention and the flexibility advocated by Metastasio in the Radamisto prompt-book. At the start of Act 1, Polissena, the heroine and the wife of King Tiridate and daughter of King Farasmane, is seated at a table, stage-right, as befits her royal status. The first entrance is made stage-left by Tigrane, who is not only a mere prince but the henchman of Tiridate, the ‘baddie’ of the piece, who in Scene 2 enters stage-right, as would be expected of a king. Polissena is dismissed by her husband, exiting not right, as we might expect, but left, possibly because she leaves reluctantly and crossing the stage gives greater opportunity to display her hesitancy. Farasmane, a captive of Tiridate, enters stage-right with his guards, but his departure after hearing being subjected to the threats of Tiridate is stage-left, maybe an indication that he is not master of his own destiny. This covers only Scenes 1-3, but provides a brief indication of how stagecraft was ordered in Handel’s day.

Before leaving the Radamisto prompt-book, it is worth noting that it also gives valuable insight into the supernumeraries involved on stage, details that may surprise present-day Handelians. For instance, when the curtain rises on Polissena, we are told that she is accompanied by no fewer than ten women. Farasmane is escorted on to the stage by four guards. Later the prompt-book – but significantly not the stage directions – suggests that some eight to ten soldiers are involved charging across the stage when Tiridate takes Farasmane’s unnamed ‘capital city’. We can thus assume that at least 20 supernumeraries were involved in the first version of Radamisto. When on stage but not in action – during arias, for example – these extras would have been asymmetrically grouped in poses akin to a tableau. 18th-century theorists such as Algarotti time and again compare stage images with paintings, the latter as an exemplar of the beauty, elegance and sense of proportion that should be followed in staging.

We still know too little about who did what when it comes to the relatively small amount of production required. Certainly librettists were frequently involved with the staging of new productions, and we know from his own writings that Metastasio was very much ‘hands-on’ in Vienna (3). Composers, too, might well be involved for a first run and there is circumstantial evidence that Handel took a practical interest in staging. In an important article on the staging of Handel’s operas, Andrew Jones notes several examples of the composer’s annotations in his manuscript scores that clearly indicate concern with what happened on stage (4). Jones notes as particularly striking an example from Rodelinda, where Rodelinda – believing her husband Bertarido to be dead – addresses her son as ‘orfano’. Handel here added immeasurably to the dramatic poignancy of the moment by inserting the words ‘s’inginocchia e abbraccia il figlio’ (‘she kneels down and embraces her son’).

Despite the depth of stage, the action took place largely in a small area down stage or on an apron extending beyond the proscenium arch. Interaction between the characters on stage was restricted to recitative or during the orchestral ritornellos that punctuated arias. The most important aspects of acting were the deportment and carriage of the character, established and maintained as long as they were visible to the audience, and above all gesture, which incorporated the face, arms and especially hands. All gesture had the prime purpose of directly signalling the sense of the text to come and was performed with a rounded elegance that eschewed jerky movement, coming from the expression of inner emotion rather than being imposed. What was critical was the sense of naturalness and spontaneity that avoided any hint of the absurd synchronised movement we sometimes see in attempts at gesture from the supernumeraries. Then as now, the acting ability of singers varied enormously. We know, for example, from a number of contemporary accounts, that the castrato Nicolini, the creator of the title-roles in Handel’s Rinaldo and Amadigi, was an exceptionally fine actor, while the acting of Senesino, creator of so many of Handel’s major roles, was rated by Quantz as ‘natural and noble’.

The most extensive use of gesture was reserved for recitative: it seems likely that it was more restrained during the singing of arias. With the arrival of an aria, the singer moved to the front of the stage to address it directly to the audience, not to others who might be on stage, with whom interaction was reserved for ritornellos. The audience responded often audibly with sighs of appreciation or more vociferous reactions of approbation or disapproval. This symbiosis between singer and audience is a feature of 18th-century operatic performance that has frequently been overlooked, and while it would hardly be desirable to import its more extravert aspects into today’s opera houses, it should certainly be given more study and thought. The mutual interaction between singer and audience reached a peak in the da capo repeat, where many of the finest singers not only added ornamentation but extemporised it. This in effect meant that in such cases one might hear a different performance every time during an opera’s run, thus refuting the oft-heard argument that opera seria was a stilted, moribund form.

It will be obvious that only the essence of a complex subject have been addressed here. Nonetheless, I hope that by showing that the staging of Handel’s operas in his own day bears little relationship to what we so often see today, we can start to understand that, to paraphrase Jones, it is 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. This fundamental truth cannot be restated too frequently.

Notes
(1) Spitzer, J. & Zaslaw, N. (2004). The Birth of the Orchestra, 279. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(2) The discovery of a prompt copy of the libretto of the first version of Radamisto (April 1720) in 1985 provided an invaluable source for scholars. See Milhous, J. & Hume, R.D. (1986). A prompt copy of Handel’s ‘Radamisto’. The Musical Times, 127 (1719), June, 316-319 + 321.
(3) See Robins, B. (2016). Origin of the species: Metastasio’s directorial legacy. Opera, 67(6), 689-694.
(4) Jones, A.V. (2006). Staging a Handel opera. Early Music, 34(2), May, 277-287.

Brian Robins is a music historian, critic and broadcaster.

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Rare Copy of Handel’s Suite in G Minor Turns Up in Sydney – Twice!

Graham Pont

Handel’s last royal pupil was the Princess Louisa (1724-51). For her studies at the harpsichord Handel composed his last two substantial works for the instrument, the Suites in D minor and G minor, HWV 447 and 452. Like her older sisters, Louisa became a regular supporter of her teacher: her presence at performances of Atalanta and Poro (1736) and Saul (1739) are recorded – there were doubtless many others – and she subscribed to the editions of Alexander’s Feast (1738) and the Twelve Grand Concertos (1740). In 1743 Louise married Prince Frederick of Denmark and Norway and became Queen when in 1746 her husband was crowned King. She was popular with the Danish court and admired for her accomplishments: ‘She finds pleasure in reading and music, she plays the clavichord well and teaches her daughters to sing’ (1). In 1748 she arranged for an Italian opera company to perform at the court theatre: the company included Gluck and Sarti. Louisa died from complications of childbirth in December 1751.

When Handel composed the two Suites for Louisa is not known: the Händel Handbuch suggests 1739; Otto Erich Deutsch dates them to 1736. The composer’s autographs of both Suites have survived, as well as several authorised copies, but neither work was published during Handel’s lifetime: perhaps they were considered royal property. The first edition of the Suite in G minor appeared in a rare volume entitled A Favorite Lesson for the Harpsichord Composed for Young Practitioners by George Fred: Handel Never before Printed (London: C. and S. Thompson, n.d.) (2). This edition is usually dated c.1770 but the British Library, which holds one of the only two recorded copies, gives the date as 1772. The only other known copy, in the collection of the present writer, enjoys the rare distinction of having been transported twice around the globe to Sydney.

At the top of the title page is a note in ink ‘Found in Pitt Street, Sydney, 1936’! Eighteenth-century editions of Handel are exceptionally rare in early Australian collections: how and when this volume first reached Sydney and where it lay before being thrown out on the street in 1936 is a complete mystery. There may be some hint as to its provenance in the illegible signature on the top-left corner of the title-page.

The man who found the volume and wrote the notes on the title-page was the Sydney medico Joseph Coen (1880-1955). In his second note he records that in May 1946 he presented the volume to ‘Gilbert Inglefield, for his library and in memory of many hours of Handel’. Sir Gilbert Inglefield (1909-91) was a British architect who became Lord Mayor of London in 1967-68. After Inglefield’s death his music collection was dispersed: books of his were included in sales by Christie, Manson & Woods on 11 July 1968 and 6 August 1975. I purchased this volume from Colin Coleman in 2010 and thus it returned for the second time to Sydney.

Notes
(1) See the interesting and well-illustrated article ‘Louise of Great Britain’ in Wikipedia.
(2) The Suite in G minor has been edited by Terence Best in Händel Klavierwerke III… Erste Folge (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1970), pp.42-47. This version includes a final Gigue which Handel later added but which was omitted from the original edition.

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The Bubble Reputation: Virtue, Reason and Sexual Politics in Rodelinda

Thelma Lovell

Handel’s Rodelinda can be read on several levels: as a drama of conflicting passions; an advertisement for political stability; and a study in changing values from the warrior ideal of leadership to the heroism of devotion and self-sacrifice. Like all the best morality tales, it weaves its improving message into the texture of human interaction, in order to steer us towards the convergence of reason, power and virtue. The opera finds one form of closure in a triumphant vocal concerto (Mio caro bene) for the eponymous heroine who ends up with the winning hand in a game of high political stakes. But there is a further type of closure in the final chorus: a communal sigh of relief at the general rightness of things.

Haym’s libretto is based on Corneille’s Pertharite, which flopped spectacularly on its appearance in 1652. Pertharite is the uxorious hero who puts emotional attachment before worldly status; he is prepared to sacrifice his life so that his wife may marry the usurper Grimoald and hence keep the crown for herself. Rodélinde, on the other hand, is driven by the imperatives of birth, breeding, and the absolute necessity of distancing herself from the upstart regime. Initially unimpressed by the husband who returns as a distinctly unregal fugitive, she eventually accepts him – helped by the fact that Grimoald acknowledges the courage of Pertharite and his authentic moral claim to the throne: 

But the man who believes me a tyrant and nobly stands up to me,
However weak he may be does not have a slave’s heart; 
He displays a great soul that rises above calamity 
And makes up in courage what it lacks in fortune.

All suitably high-minded, not least on the part of Grimoald; Rodélinde apologises for misjudging him, and everything is restored to its proper place. Pertharite has the last word, proclaiming that ‘reputation (la gloire) is the sole prize of the noble virtues’ – yet the truism is evidently enlarged to include the integrity of the inner rather than solely the outer person. The mid-17th-century French public was perhaps not ready for this shift in conventional heroic values.

Let us consider the Handelian version, which again is far more interesting than the story of a long-suffering bereft female as the plaything of destiny. Two couples battle to maintain their own version of reality. Both of the men are kings yet (in different ways) not so. The usurper Grimoaldo fails to convince either himself or others of his new identity, while the deposed Bertarido is first imagined dead and then when he reappears simply fails to look or act with the expected dominance. His shabby demeanour attracts the scorn and disbelief of Grimoaldo, in whose scheme of things position must be signalled by outward show. The women are in a similar bind: Rodelinda was – and still feels herself to be – queen, though this is technically untrue; and Eduige is ambitious to step into Rodelinda’s shoes by marrying the actual, though inauthentic, ruler Grimoaldo. And though the female characters could not be overt political agents, they are able to operate the levers of power at one remove. Sexuality is part of the game for all four characters. 

Rodelinda’s opening cavatina strikes a pose of tragedy and rhetorical hauteur. It is a courtly lament for a queen conscious of her status, yet as she sings of her loneliness (e qui sola) the texture becomes closer and warmer; this is a suffering human being. Even so, reputation trumps all: the furious energy of her rejection of the crass Grimoaldo is fuelled by a mix of grief and an objection to becoming déclassée: gloria is not limited to chastity. Despite her iron will, Rodelinda exists in a context of other people and circumstances that she cannot entirely control but must try to read. Chief amongst these is of course Grimoaldo, whose weak point is his need to persuade himself and others of his newly-acquired authority. He begins badly, for what sort of hero is turned down by the woman he loves (or in this case, the trophy wife he thinks he deserves)? He does at least have the satisfaction of discarding his old love Eduige, who longs to share the throne with him. Staccato pomposity (Io già t’amai) proclaims that self-image is his driver. Similarly, he preens himself before Garibaldo in the jaunty Se per te: ‘I am king and with my protection you have nothing to fear, not even from my future wife’. 

It is a different story when he has been wrong-footed by Rodelinda’s terrifying condition of marriage, i.e. that he should murder her son. (In fact, Haym gives us a softer version than Corneille: in the original, Rodélinde offers to join in the murder of the boy.) Grimoaldo’s Prigionera ho l’alma in pena tells us through its repeated melodic phrases – as if rooted to the spot – that he is trapped. He cannot be the Darwinian lion who kills the cubs of his defeated rival, for (as Rodelinda points out) this would cause him to lose his gloria: a king’s standing rests on his moral reputation – his soft power – as much as compulsion. The contrary argument is made by Garibaldo, ostensibly henchman but actually Grimoaldo’s dark alter ego. Unlike the other characters, Grimoaldo never diverges from one version of reality: a crude realpolitik represented musically by great strides and uncompromising bare textures.

The game-changer in the drama is the resurrected presence of Bertarido: he pauses at his supposed funeral monument to rail at its untruthfulness. He is very much alive, and through stately dotted rhythms Handel lets us know that he is genuine royalty. The musical shock is the transition to E major in Dove sei as if, like Bertarido, we are entering a strange new world with its centre of gravity altered from the C major of the overture. From this point onwards, Bertarido and Rodelinda seem to share a private tonal domain, full of pain and confusion – as for instance  in the B minor of Ombre, piante, the E major of Morrai, sì, and perhaps especially the F sharp minor of Io t’abbraccio. Furthermore, the lyrical simplicity of Dove sei tells us that this king is full of sensibility, without the pretension of Grimoaldo. His strength is that of the inner rather than the outer man. 

As the drama progresses, the musical and psychological trajectories of the rival kings intersect. Beginning as the would-be confident reigning monarch, Grimoaldo finds himself more and more out of his depth, ending in the weary defeat of Pastorello d’un povero armento – its E minor a wistful echo of Bertarido’s E major Dove sei. Bertarido himself, on the other hand, follows a tonal path that fluctuates with his personal fortunes but at last, with the restoration of his sword, brings him back to where he truly belongs. The triumphant C major of Se fiera belva is the bright light of power and the world that so far has existed only (as he ruefully declares to his sister Eduige) in his rimembranza.  

The irony is that Bertarido’s privileging of the private over the public was not in itself enough to restore his family or his kingdom. It was rather Eduige’s thwarted passion for Grimoaldo and the desire for vengeance that led her to help Bertarido gain his freedom; it was not virtue pure and simple that caused the virtuous outcome. Eduige’s emotions and actions are crucial to the plot; in her shifts of loyalties she is a foil to the intractable Rodelinda and all too believable. She too has her pride, which caused her to spurn Grimoaldo in his previous merely ducal rank. The weak point for this pair is the craving for a royal status they have never had. In this respect, Rodelinda is always in a stronger position. Her sense of self is rooted in knowing herself to be queen. Yet without Eduige’s help, she would never have emerged triumphant.

A further irony is that Bertarido must in the end use the very force that he has rejected in favour of love. It is the warrior’s joy that he expresses when he is given the means to fight; and it is the warrior’s virtue – the virtue of the sword – that enables the more inward virtues to flourish. His principles oblige him to kill Garibaldo, even though this act potentially places Bertarido’s own life in jeopardy. By this gesture he is taking a comparable risk to Rodelinda’s, when she put her son’s life in the balance. There could be no certainty that Grimoaldo would decide that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ rather than take the opportunity to remove his competitor. 

This is where drama becomes moral fable, and where we turn to the sixth character: Unulfo. He occupies a half-way house between the stereotypical portrayal of Garibaldo and the psychological complexity of the two couples. He is both participant and commentator – the bridge between stage and audience – and the sort of person upon whom all power structures rest: stability, continuity and prudence are his guiding principles. Here he confronts a dilemma, for he serves the current regime (namely Grimoaldo) yet his sympathies are with Bertarido, both personally and because Bertarido represents the legitimate order. For this reason, when Bertarido makes a physical gesture of affection, Unulfo draws back: kingship is a token of something beyond the human and particular. At the same time, the philosopher/counsellor acts as guide and mentor to his emotionally impulsive chief.

All three of Unulfo’s arias are situated musically close to the ambit of C major, i.e. the ‘real’ world from which the opera is launched and to which it eventually returns. In the first of these (Sono i colpi della sorte) Unulfo urges Bertarido to cultivate inner strength even as he is reeling from the thought that Rodelinda is giving way. A king must temper feeling with self-control. (He gives similar advice to Grimoaldo after the shock of Rodelinda’s bargain: deh richiama, Signor, la tua virtude. In this case, significantly, it falls on deaf ears: Non più. Le voci di virtù non cara amante cor, o pur non sente.) It is Unulfo who leads Garibaldo to expound his ruthless code, as if turning to the audience to ask: ‘Surely you can’t approve of this?’ Yet the circumspect Unulfo needs a nudge to translate his true loyalty from thought to deed. Trusted by Grimoaldo to keep Bertarido under lock and key, he requires impetus from the strong female character of Eduige to understand that principles too are subject to practicalities and hierarchies. His subsequent relief and joy (Un zeffiro spirò) is a musical parallel to Grimoaldo’s earlier confidence in Se per te giungo a godere. There is, too, symbolic meaning in Bertarido’s inadvertent wounding of Unulfo: prudent virtue sometimes has to be sacrificed for a higher good. There is a time for caution, and a time for action.

In the end, Rodelinda seems to fulfil the Enlightenment dream that virtue is also rational self-interest: good in itself, it also leads to the best outcome for all concerned. Neither Rodelinda nor Bertarido had any doubts about this (though they suffered along the way), while Grimoaldo and Eduige eventually came to the same conclusion. The only dissenter – Garibaldo – lay dead and unlamented. But there is realism as well as idealism in Handel: human agency can to some extent escape destiny’s shackles, but not without a little help from chance. 

Thelma Lovell is author of A Mirror to the Human Condition: Music, Language and Meaning in the Sacred Cantatas of J.S. Bach. She lives in Cambridge.