Tag: Winton Dean

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Handel in Cambridge

By Tony Watts

In 1733 Handel visited Oxford at the invitation of its University’s ViceChancellor. Although Handel was reported as not accepting a doctorate offered to him, it was a great occasion, attended by many Heads of Houses from Cambridge, and included the first performance of his new oratorio, Athalia in the Sheldonian Theatre. So far as we know, Handel never visited Cambridge. But it was reported that he refused a doctorate here too (though no documented evidence of either offer exists), and he had other contacts with Cambridge: for example, Thomas Morell, one of his main librettists, was a Fellow of King’s. But subsequently, Cambridge has made a huge contribution to both Handel scholarship and Handel performance, at least comparable to that of Oxford. The Cambridge Handel Opera Company (CHOC) is part of that tradition.

The collection of Handel autographs in the Fitzwilliam Museum is second in importance only to the Royal Collection in the British Library. Handel was the great hero of the Museum’s founder, Viscount Fitzwilliam, who acquired all the material that had not been bound and presented to King George III. This comprised over 500 leaves of complete, incomplete and uncompleted works, fragments and sketches, written between about 1708 and Handel’s death – now bound in 15 volumes. This collection has subsequently been extended, notably by Francis Barrett Lennard’s gift in 1902 of 67 volumes of early copies of Handel’s scores. In addition, the Fitzwilliam holds the terracotta model of Roubiliac’s famous statue of Handel erected during Handel’s lifetime in the Vauxhall Gardens: public statues of living individuals other than monarchs were rare in England at that time, and the informality of Handel’s attire and pose are strikingly realistic.

There are also important Handel collections in several College libraries. In particular the Rowe Music Library in King’s contains a substantial collection of both contemporary manuscript sources and of 19th century copies assembled by A.H. Mann (1850- 1929), and its Rowe Collection is even richer in first editions of Handel’s music. In addition, the Wren Library in Trinity houses several scores of Handel’s English oratorios which were edited and/or published in Cambridge in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The first biography of Handel – published in 1760, a year after the composer’s death – was written by John Mainwaring (c.1724-1807), a graduate and Fellow of St John’s. A later biography was written by Edward Dent (1876- 1957), a Fellow of King’s and Professor of Music. Dent was also responsible for bringing to Cambridge a number of eminent musicians to escape Nazi persecution, including the great scholar Otto Erich Deutsch (1883-1967), cataloguer of Schubert’s compositions: while in Cambridge (1939-51) Deutsch collected material for his Handel: A Documentary Biography (1955), which served for decades as the ‘bible’ of Handel biography and was the precursor to Handel: Collected Documents. The most substantial work on Handel’s music, the monumental three volumes on his operas and oratorios, was by Winton Dean (1916-2013), a graduate of King’s: his work is widely recognised as seminal in musicology as a whole, a benchmark for analytical and perceptive scholarship, based on comprehensive and strongly contextualised documentary research.

Christopher Hogwood (1941-2014), a graduate and Honorary Fellow of Pembroke and also an Honorary Fellow of Jesus, was a leading figure in the early-music revival of the late 20th century, wrote yet another biography of Handel, and was involved in several concert performances and recordings of Handel operas and oratorios by the Cambridge-based Academy of Ancient Music, of which he was the founder. More recently, Andrew Jones, a Fellow of Selwyn, was founder and conductor of the Cambridge Handel Opera Group (see below), and is currently preparing an edition of Handel’s continuo cantatas; and Ruth Smith, an independent Cambridge-based Handel scholar, is author of Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought and of many essays in programmes for Handel productions both in the UK and internationally.

Many of the most important books on Handel have been published by Cambridge University Press. These include the five volumes of Handel: Collected Documents, The Cambridge Companion to Handel, The Cambridge Handel Encyclopaedia, and several monographs.

Only one performance of Handel’s works is recorded as taking place in Cambridge during his lifetime: Acis and Galatea at Trinity in February 1756, conducted by John Randall, Professor of Music in the University. Randall subsequently performed Messiah in the Senate House a month after Handel’s death, in May 1759, following this over the next few years with a series of other Handel oratorios in the same location: a number of these were designed to raise funds for the new Addenbrooke’s Hospital (echoing the role famously played by Handel’s own performances of Messiah in fund-raising for the Foundling Hospital in London). Between 1789 and 1809 The Musical Society at the Black Bear Inn in Market Street was almost a Handel Society, an average of three out of eight items at their monthly concerts being devoted to Handel. The first performance in England of Mozart’s arrangement of Alexander’s Feast was given in the Senate House in 1819; and the first revival in England of Semele in the Guildhall in 1878, under Sir Charles Stanford.

A particularly significant series of Cambridge productions was the staged performances of Handel’s oratorios between 1925 and 1948, following the powerful movement in Germany to stage these works – which, though highly dramatic, were not designed by Handel for staged performance. The stage première of Semele was mounted in 1925 by Dennis Arundell, a Fellow of St John’s: a reviewer noted that the artists included two Borzoi dogs, a fantail pigeon, and two goats, which “appeared to require a little more stage experience”. This was followed by staged performances of Samson, Jephtha, The Choice of Hercules, Susanna, Saul and Solomon, some at the Guildhall and others on the back lawn of King’s. They were conducted by Cyril Rootham of St John’s and later by Boris Ord of King’s, with staging by Camille Prior, and costumes and sets by Gwen Raverat – all famous Cambridge figures. The 1935 performances were part of a substantial Cambridge Handel Festival.

In the 1980s Andrew Jones founded the Cambridge Handel Opera Group (CHOG). Its first production, Rodelinda (1985), was followed by 14 further productions of Handel operas, every two years, usually with four performances, at West Road Concert Hall. A distinctive aim of these productions was to observe principles of 18th century performance practice in visual as well as musical respects. They were always in English, with new translations by Andrew Jones that were often used elsewhere, notably at the Coliseum in London. They were accompanied by a Study Afternoon on the opera being performed, with presentations by Handel scholars and, usually, the Stage Director.

Alongside CHOG, there have been other recent staged Handel productions in Cambridge, including by Colleges, like Xerxes at Fitzwilliam (2007), and by Cambridge University Opera Society, like Jephtha (2015). Particularly notable have been productions by English Touring Opera, of which there were at least ten in Cambridge between 2007 and 2014 at the Arts Theatre and West Road, many produced by James Conway.

CHOG ended in 2013, but King’s graduate Julian Perkins has subsequently revived it as CHOC. Its first production was Rodelinda (2018) at The Leys; Tamerlano is its second. CHOC reaffirms the staging principles which underpinned CHOG’s work, and has also sustained the tradition of the Study Afternoon, now extended by the “Green Room” online seminars, again linked to the production – both curated by Ruth Smith. CHOC’s production values, and its commitment to promoting relevant scholarship alongside its productions, give it a unique position in the world of Handel performance. It has also mounted a concert performance of John Eccles’s Semele in Trinity, recorded in a much-praised CD, in collaboration with the Academy of Ancient Music and Cambridge Early Music – bringing together the vibrant earlymusic scene in Cambridge. In all these respects, CHOC is building upon and extending a long, rich and widely influential tradition.

The CHOC production of Tamerlano will be staged in Cambridge on 5, 6, 8 and 9 April. Tickets are available from Cambridge Live: https://www.cambridgelive.org.uk/tickets/events/cambridge-handel-operacompany-presents-handels-tamerlano

Meanwhile, CHOC is holding three online ‘Handel’s Green Room’ discussions in February/March, curated by Ruth Smith, on preparations for the Tamerlano production. For details, and to subscribe to CHOC’s News Bulletin, see: https://cambridgehandel.org.uk/

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‘The first great English oratorio’: Handel’s Athalia

Kate Shaw

‘Athalia is the first great English oratorio’: thus begins Winton Dean’s chapter on Athalia in his seminal work on Handel’s oratorios (1). Dean makes little attempt to define the generic label ‘oratorio’ in the context of Handel’s Athalia (1733), instead making the work conform to the theme that runs through his book: that Handel’s oratorios have roots in Classical drama. He, for example, claims that the character of Athalia is ‘a Jewish Clytemnestra’, thereby bypassing the work’s Biblical source and instead anchoring it in the tradition of Greek tragedy.

Philip Brett & George Haggerty (2), the only other scholars hitherto to discuss the work at length, conversely identify Athalia as part of the contemporary British phenomenon of Sentimental drama, which they see as evidenced by ‘the musical enlargement of Josabeth’s role’. The roles of the two leading female characters, Josabeth and Athalia, are defined as Sentimental and Tragic respectively. But Handel’s Josabeth and Athalia are complex characters, for whom such labels swiftly become limiting.

By analysing both Josabeth and Athalia in scenes critical for their character, I seek to demonstrate that they display neither tragedy nor sentimental drama, but instead that the combination of the two genres in Athalia illuminates the complexity and distinctiveness of Handel’s dramatic concept expressed in this work.

Athalia
To understand Athalia as a tragic heroine is to limit her: the vulnerability, inaction and stasis through which Handel and his librettist Samuel Humphreys characterise her might be read as granting her more complexity. Whilst it is true that Humphreys has taken much of Athalia’s text verbatim (via translation) from the true tragic heroine that Jean Racine portrays in his play Athalie (well-known in Handel’s London), Humphreys and Handel together create a character with far more agency.

Humphreys imitates yet diminishes Racine’s technique of delaying Athalia’s entry, a key point that Dean overlooks. The audience has to wait around half an hour to meet the eponymous queen. This marks a departure from both Esther and Deborah, where the titular women are the first characters on stage.

The audience meets Athalia having awoken from a nightmare where she has been stabbed by a boy dressed as a Jewish priest, allowing Humphreys and Handel to create a more exposed character. Her first number, ‘What scenes of horrors round me rise’, is an accompanied recitative and not an aria, indicating her weakened mental state. Her unease is reflected in Handel’s choice of key, F minor, a common key of despair which he had previously used in the crises of both Esther and Acis and Galatea. She is accompanied by a plangent oboe melody and sinister strings, which highlight her anxiety, and undermine any sense of authority the audience might have expected.

Throughout the scene, her interaction with those around her shows a lack of leadership. Not only is she having an extreme nervous episode in front of Mathan, her adviser, but also present is a ‘Chorus of Sidonian Priests’: Athalia totally ignores their interjections (the chorus ‘The Gods who chosen blessings shed’) and Mathan ‘achieves’ an aria before she does (‘Gentle airs, melodious strains’). Indeed, at the end of the scene, the Sidonian Priests disappear to the Temple on Mathan’s, not Athalia’s, orders.

Athalia’s first and only aria in this scene, ‘Softest sounds’, betrays her pervading melancholia and distances her from the image of a tragic heroine. The sarabande metre is sombre and the sighing paired quaver figuration in the strings completes the image of wretchedness. She is shown to be still unsteady, as this aria is not in da capo form, but sounds more like the A section of a da capo aria that she is insufficiently gathered to complete.

Athalia’s first scene is a personal and intimate depiction of a disturbed woman, with agency that removes her from the Tragic archetype. She is distant from Dean’s analysis of her as a ‘Jewish Clytemnestra’, as she fails to retain the sureness of that truly tragic heroine.

Josabeth
Josabeth’s sentimentality is only one aspect of her characterisation, as she is shown by Humphreys and Handel to be an active force in the oratorio while fiercely protecting her family and the Temple community. Her part is much expanded, both in volume and dramatic depth, from Racine’s depiction. Humphreys is, for this reason, unable to involve Josabeth actively in the plot of the oratorio, as it has been designed without her significant input. However, this gives the librettist licence in fleshing out her character.

Josabeth spends much of the oratorio responding to surrounding events, but this does not make her ‘passive’, to use Brett & Haggerty’s term. Instead, it allows her to establish her role as the most human character in the work, through whom the audience become emotionally involved in the action. By enlarging Josabeth’s part, Humphreys and Handel ensure that the human drama in the oratorio is always more prevalent than questions of politics. Brett & Haggerty write: ‘It was not experience itself that was important to this audience but the way one responded to it. Response, of course, was an eighteenth-century obsession.’ This could explain the expansion of Josabeth’s role: with four arias and four ensemble numbers, she is the most musically active role in the work.

Josbeth’s characterisation is concluded in the duet ‘Joys in gentle trains appearing’, sung after the demise of Athalia. In this duet Josabeth and Joad affirm their love for each other and the sureness of their faith in God. As in their previous duet, ‘Cease thy anguish’, Joad presents the theme, befitting his role as High Priest and husband. Josabeth then mirrors his melody, but not in a way that suggests she is subordinate. The duet is in A major, which the listener fails to realise as Joad exposes the theme on the dominant, E. When Josabeth copies him in A major at bar 17, it then becomes clear that she is resolving the duet to its tonic. Dean’s assertion that this is merely practical, and that it fits the ‘natural compass of the voices’, seems to accord Handel insufficient dramatic awareness. It is as if, throughout the oratorio, Josabeth has been increasing in self-confidence and assuredness, relinquishing the passivity that Brett & Haggerty have assigned to her.

Conclusion
This musico-dramatic analysis of Handel’s characterisation of Josabeth and Athalia is enlightening when considering the complexities of genre in this early oratorio.

Josabeth is a deeply human character, frequently used by Handel and Humphreys to provide insight into emotional situations as they arise and evolve. But Handel and Humphreys have granted her more agency than would be possible were she entirely stooped in sentimental drama. Therefore any reference to this genre must remain only a reference, not a straight-jacket.

Athalia is likewise more complex than previous scholarship has recognised. Her portrayal by Humphreys and Handel is considerably weakened from the truly tragic heroine as depicted by Racine, and in the oratorio she fails to establish the dominance and awe required by tragedy. Indeed, Brett & Haggerty’s statement about Josabeth, that ‘she is an entirely passive creature, dominated either by events or by her husband’s will’, could be said of Athalia if ‘her husband’s will’ was replaced with ‘Mathan’s will’.

The subtleties of characterisation used by Handel and Humphreys create in Athalia two women that refuse to be limited as belonging to one particular musical or literary school or another. This indicates that the generic influences that, in combination, create the early English oratorio are drawn upon more subtly than previously recognised. Handel and Humphreys adopt characteristics of several theatrical and musical genres to form the first truly three-dimensional characters in Handel’s English theatre works. Dean’s designation of the work as ‘the first great English oratorio’ is even more deserved than critical commentary has hitherto suggested.

Notes
(1) Dean, W. (1959). Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques, p.247. London: Oxford University Press.
(2) Brett, P. & Haggerty, G. (1987). Handel and the Sentimental: the case of ‘Athalia’. Music and Letters, 68(2), 112-127.

This article is based on an undergraduate dissertation prepared for examination at the University of Cambridge. Kate Shaw wishes to express her gratitude to her supervisor Dr Ruth Smith.

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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.