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.