The following is a
draft for a radio programme, presented as ‘Handel, Radamisto, and the Royal Academy’, produced by Paul Hindmarsh, for
BBC Radio Manchester, BBC Radio 3, 30/5/2000.
Handel, Radamisto, and the Royal Academy
There are few works as important to the history of opera in
England as Handel's Radamisto, the first of his operas for the Royal
Academy of Music. Its production, in 1720, confirmed Handel's place as the
greatest composer of Italian opera in London, and helped open a phase which
would see London become the opera capital of the world. Over the next few
years, during the first period of the Royal Academy which ended in 1728, Handel
would follow the brilliance of Radamisto with other masterpieces for the
English stage - including Giulio
Cesare, Tamerlano, and Rodelinda - to be sung by the best
singers money could buy.
There had been
Italian opera successes in London before, though they'd always been
controversial. Early in the century, before Handel's arrival, commentators such
as John Dennis had set the stage for attacking what was essentially seen as an
effeminate and un-British Italian diversion "of more pernicious
consequence, than the most licentious Play that ever has appeared upon the
Stage", depending on the practice of "Arts which Nature has bestow'd
upon effeminate Nations, but denied to [us] as below the Dignity of [our]
Country, and the Majesty of the British Genius."
The literary establishment, if more balanced in its
judgement, joined in the critique, and
Addison and Steele's Spectator pilloried the rising form in a series of
satirical articles:
If the Italians have a Genius
for Musick above the English, the English have a Genius for other
Performances of a much higher Nature, and capable of giving the Mind a much
nobler Entertainment.
Even Handel's first London success with Italian opera - his Rinaldo
of 1711 - was satirized for its spectacular excesses. Addison, the author
of the attack, gave as an anecdote an interview with a fellow carrying a cage
full of sparrows on his shoulder; when asked what they were for he replies 'for
the opera': "Sparrows for the opera, says his Friend, licking his Lips, what
are they to be roasted?". "No, no, says the other, they are to enter
towards the end of the first Act, to fly about the Stage".
But, whatever the critics might say about such
entertainments, the opera public loved them. Handel's Rinaldo was one of
the greatest successes of the period. The publication of its songs alone was
reputed to have made their publisher some fifteen hundred pounds. The course of
Handel's commitment to Italian opera was firmly established. He returned to
Hanover in 1712, but was back the next season with Teseo. Soon, after
several other Italian productions, Handel was an established figure in London.
He had already received a state pension, and had found welcoming lodgings with
the Duke of Chandos and the Earl of Burlington, the greatest patron of the
period,. With the Hanoverian succession complete, Handel found not only the
support of Earls and Dukes, but of his own German patron, the Elector of
Hanover, now George the First. Radamisto would be dedicated to the King,
who, in return, would allow Handel a royal privilege of copyright, first to be
used for the same opera:
Whereas George Fredrick Handel,
of our City of London, Gent. hath humbly represented to Us, That he hath
with great Labour and Expence composed several Works, consisting of Vocal
and Instrumental MUSICK, in order to be Printed and Published; and hath
therefore besought Us to grant him Our Royal Privilege and Licence for the sole
Printing and Publishing thereof for the Term of Fourteen Years: We being
willing to give all due Encouragement to Works of this Nature, are graciously
pleased to condescend to his Request.
The right patronage was now available for the most
remarkable venture in English opera history. As Handel's first biographer,
Mainwaring, observed:
A project was formed by the Nobility for erecting an
academy at the Haymarket. The intention of this musical Society, was to secure
to themselves a constant supply of Operas to be composed by HANDEL, and
performed under his direction.
In an unprecedented expression of artistic venture
capital (with little promise of return, considering the enormous cost of opera
productions) £10,000 of stock in the new company was bought by an elite group
of investors, the King allowing an annual £1,000 to support the scheme. So
began, giving a peculiarly capitalist slant to its title, the period of the
Royal ‘Academy’ of Music in the early months of 1719.
On February 21st the Original Weekly Journal
announced that Handel had gone abroad to gather together "the choicest Singers in Europe"
for the new company.
So exciting was news of the venture that this journal had
actually anticipated Handel's departure by three months. On May 14th the Lord Chamberlain, as Governor
of the new Academy, issued a warrant to 'Mr Hendel to procure
Singers for the English Stage':
Whereas His Majesty has been
graciously Pleas'd to Grant Letters Patents to the Severall Lords and Gent
[lemen] mention'd in the Annext List for the Encouragement of Operas for and
during the Space of Twenty one Years, and Likewise as a further encouragement
has been graciously Pleas'd to Grant a Thousand Pounds p[er].A [nnum]. for the
Promotion of this design. ... You forthwith to repair to Italy, Germany or such
other Place or Places as you shall think proper, there to make Contracts with
such Singer or Singers as you shall judge fit to perform on the English Stage.
...
The warrant appended specific
instruction to Handel:
That Mr Hendel either by himself of such Correspondenc[e] as
he shall think fit procure proper Voices to Sing in the Opera for one Year and
no more....
That Mr Hendel engage Senezino as soon as possible to Serve
the said Company and for as many Years as may be.
That in case Mr Hendel meet with an excellent Voice of the
first rate he is to Acquaint the Govr and Company forthwith of it
and upon what Terms he or She may be had.
Italian opera was now a cosmopolitan enterprise and Handel
went not to Italy but to Dresden where the Elector of Saxony had gathered one
of the finest opera companies in Europe. Though the Academy had to wait until
the end of 1720 to secure its star attraction, the castrato Senesino, Handel
returned having secured the services of the famous soprano Margherita
Durastanti and other signings soon followed. Durastanti was to take the title
role in the first production of Radamisto (which Senesino would take
over when he arrived for the second production), and although the librettist
and first secretary of the Royal Academy, Paolo Rolli, had described her as
"a bad choice for England" with the odd justification that she was
"an elephant", Handel was certainly impressed with her voice, and had
written for her previously both in Rome and Venice. She was to receive five
hundred pounds for three months from March and a further eleven hundred pounds
if she stayed for the next fifteen months. Italian Opera with these
international stars, was scandalously expensive. London was paying more than
any other city for the most celebrated voices available. The celebrated prima
donna Faustina, who would follow Durastanti to England in the same decade to
sing for Handel could earn seven hundred and fifty pounds a year more in London
than in Venice. This was speculative investment on a grand scale, and one
parallel in particular appealed to the satirists. Several notices in 'The
Theatre' magazine, edited ironically enough by Richard Steele, whose Spectator
had ridiculed Handel's first London opera nine years previously, made the
association clear. March the first's edition commented tersely: 'Yesterday
South Sea was 174. Opera Company 83, and a half. No transfer.' The second, a
week later, developed the humour:
At the Rehearsal on Friday last,
Signior NIHILINI BENEDITTI rose half a note above his Pitch formerly
known. Opera Stock from 83 and a half, when he began; at 90 when he ended.
The campaign came to an elaborate conclusion on the 12th of
March, with a letter purporting to be from 'Musidorus':
'Sir,
Your
last Paper very rightly and with great Justice, notify'd to the Town the Rise
of the Opera-Stock, occasion'd by the elevation of half a Note above the usual
Pitch of Signior Beneditti. I hope, Sir, you will allow no one hereafter
to call him no Man, when you shall have heard from me, how much he is a Man of
Honour. It happen'd, Sir, in the casting the Parts for the new Opera, that he
had been, as he conceiv'd greatly injur'd; and, the other Day apply'd to the
Board of Directors [...] for Redress. He set forth, in the recitative Tone, the
nearest approaching ordinary Speech, that he had never acted any thing, in any
other Opera, below the Character of a Sovereign; or, at least, a Prince of the
Blood; and now he was appointed to be a Captain of the Guard, and a Pimp ... he
found Friends, and was made a Prince.'
Vertiginous salaries, very high voices - hitting notes
musical and raising notes sterling: the parallel is a gift to the authors,
here. They cannot resist, of course, typically robust English humour about the
castrati - the name 'Nihilini Beneditti' compounds the earlier castrato star of
London's opera stage - the Nicolini of Handel's Rinaldo - with a tenor
in the present company, Benedetto Baldassari. Actually, the anecdote about
refusing to play such a minor role almost certainly relates to Baldassari's
role of Fraarte in the first production of Radamisto. The improbable 'rise' of a male castrato
voice finds its metaphorical equivalent in the rise of South Sea stock. The
idea that the 'he' who has been "greatly injured", should not be
called 'no man' is a joke about castration - hence he is only a 'man of
honour'. 'NIHILINI', plays on 'nihil' - nothing, thing of no value, or, in
legal terms 'being found without the goods'.
In the summer of 1720, between first and second productions
of Radamisto the South Sea Bubble actually did burst. Rolli, in the same
letter which announced the arrival to London of the most famous castrato
of his day - Senesino - also commented on the current financial disaster:
"My dear Riva, what ruination has the Southsea crash caused! The whole
nobility is at its last gasp; only gloomy faces are to be seen. " Handel himself must have lost money, for he
had certainly invested at least five hundred pounds in the scheme. But the
nobility was certainly not at its last gasp, as it could still afford to
pay Senesino an unprecedented fee of
£2,000, an astonishing amount at the time.
And if London, in 1720, was in a fever about the stock
market, it certainly seemed almost equally excited about Italian opera. The Royal Academy's first season opened with
Giovanni Porta's opera Numitore on April 2nd, 1720, little more than an
appetizer for Handel's first Academy production
of Radamisto. Senesino hadn't arrived yet, but the fervour of
anticipation was none the less for that. The first night, on April 27th,
according to Mainwaring, was a night to remember:
If persons who are now living, and
who were present at that performance may be credited, the applause it received
was almost as extravagant as his AGRIPPINA had excited: the crowds and tumults
of the house at Venice were hardly equal to those at LONDON. In so splendid and
fashionable an assembly of ladies (to the excellence of their taste we must
impute it) there was no shadow of form, or ceremony, scarce indeed any
appearance of order or regularity, politeness or decency. Many, who had forc'd
their way into the house with an impetuosity but ill suited to their rank and
sex, actually fainted through the excessive heat and closeness of it. Several
gentlemen were turned back, who had offered forty shillings for a seat in the
gallery, after having despaired of getting any in the pit or boxes.
Those who made it were not
disappointed. Handel, always ready and able to rise to an occasion like this,
had composed a masterpiece. For the second production, eight months later, he was able to call on the spectacular
Senesino for the title role, and the consequent re-arranging of parts, and
additional writing to suit and emphasise his voice led to a significantly new
version: Applebee's 'Original Weekly Journal' for the 31st December, 1720,
recorded another successful first night:
On Wednesday Night [the 28th] the
Royal Family with a great Number of the Nobility, etc. were to see the New
Opera, call's Rhadamistus ... Signior Nicoleni, the famous Italian Eunuch, is
newly arriv'd here from Venice, and Sang last Wednesday Night at the New Opera
with great Applause.
This wasn't the only report to mix up
Nicolini with the actual performer Senesino. The identity of the performer was
obviously less noteworthy to the uninitiated than the fact that he was a
castrato. In fact the association between the two was natural enough, and not
only because they were reported to look alike. The directors of the Royal Academy
certainly knew that the sensational castrati had special pulling power.
Nicolini had been the first great castrato to perform in England and Senesino
was following in his glorious footsteps to establish an even greater age of
Italian opera.
Both versions of Radamisto were worthy of its
important place in the history of opera in London.
Not only did Handel reveal a complete mastery of the high
heroic mode of opera seria, but also revealed his profoundest capacity to move.
The most famous of the opera's arias was (and of course, remains) Radamisto's
'Ombra cara', where the hero laments the 'dear shade' of his wife who he
mistakenly believes dead. It's an aria which almost beggars description.
'Of 'Ombra Cara', confess two modern
scholars, 'it is difficult to write in measured terms'. In this they agreed
with eighteenth-century commentators. Burney noted:
Too much praise cannot be given to
that song ... I remember Reginelli sing the air at the opera in 1747, among
some light Italian songs of that period, and it seemed the language of
philosophy and science, and the rest the frivolous jargon of fops and triflers.
But Handel treats all the parts with an equally musical
mastery of emotion. Take one of Polissena's early arias. Here is Polissena, a
loving and duteous wife of a tyrannical and unfaithful husband. Having pleaded
for mercy for her brother and father, she has been abruptly dismissed prompting
this poignant aria of lament: 'Tu vuoi ch'io parta'' (You wish me to go, I
go'). Handel devises a simple, unaffected, setting for her emotion, expressing
perfectly her artless integrity. Usually in the arias of the period there is an
intrumental introduction to the voice (called the 'ritornello' because it returns as a refrain
between sections). But not here, as Polissena sings directly,
spontaneously, from the heart. Yearning and sadness are perfectly bound
together in the aria, with numerous dramatic rests expressive of the apparent
hopelessness of her situation; she has so many contradictory feelings they keep
stopping her short. Her unrequited love, though, is eloquent, as she refers to
her husband as 'idolo del mio cor' though a 'but' causes further pause. She
will leave the 'idol of her heart', duteously, 'but' 'senza core' - 'without
heart'. Such arias are wonderful in themselves, and it's understandable that we
often only know of Handel's operas through the fame of their best songs. But to
hear single arias out of context is to lose much of their beauty and power. In
a great opera like Radamisto each aria has its place within the whole
scheme, contributing to a complex portrait of character, and helping to
create, in its relationship with the rest of the opera, thematic and narrative
coherence. Indeed, because the opera was so significantly revised for its
second production we can even see the development of Handel's practice in this
sense. Much later in the opera Polissena will be dismissed once more, again
after pleading for her father and brother. Handel obviously saw the opportunity
of developing the pattern, here, and substituted a new aria for the second
production. Again Polissena opens without introduction, again her feelings are
expressed as soon as felt, without disguise or artifice. But her remarkable
patience is almost at an end, and she sings to her husband, 'Barbaro! partirò',
in an explosive burst of truly righteous indignation. Again she will go, but if
he is so barbarous that all her pleading will come to nothing, then he had
better beware. The second aria echoes the first, structurally and
verbally, but there is a new spirit to
the singer's complaint, capturing perfectly the building sense of catastrophe
in the opera. The reasonable and the dutiful have been reasonable and dutiful
enough, and if Kings cannot behave honourably then they will have honourable
behaviour forced upon them!
This is the key to the success of Handel's greatest heroic
operas. The action is always significantly public and every turn of events has
implication for the fate of nations. The trumpets and horns of Handel's score
regularly and magnificently emphasise the outcome of battles, the glory of
triumphs, and the vainglory of the mighty. But the heroic code explores the
relationship between character and action: the deed expresses the self. These
dramas, then, become dramas of character, as the private world of
relationships, personalities, and wills dominates the public stage of
consequences.
Handel's Radamisto has everything opera seria usually
has. The opera excels in all the conventional subjects of the period: it has
the battle arias, where the great warriors call their troups to arms; it has
the simile arias, where emotion is dramatised by comparison (so Radamisto, in
crisis, compares his situation to that of a ship in storm without harbour or
light to guide it); it has its arias of vengeance and complaint, all threaded
together with noble recitative. But the sum of its parts raises it beyond any
of its often compelling details. Handel, for his first great Academy
production, brought his own miracles to bear on the conventions. In doing so he
created not only a unified and coherent piece of musical drama, but one which
explores the human heart in all its aspects. The dynamic range of the opera's
emotions is remarkable: it moves from lament, fear, foreboding, tragic
suffering. and melancholy despair through to optimism, triumph and eventually
joy. The music carries us through these emotions, from spare, sombre settings
which evoke the deepest sense of grief and loss, through virtuoso displays of defiance and anger, to
the ornaments of love and celebration. The opera was the perfect vehicle for
its new star singers - by turns they could affect the audience with moving,
plaintive, lyricism and astonish them with vocal acrobatics. They may have come
for the money, but participating in Handel's greatest period of opera would
have left them with a whole new musical education.
Possible edits:
Possible edits:
1. The following quotation can be omitted, with
no changes necessary to the text around it:
Whereas George Fredrick Handel,
of our City of London, Gent. hath humbly represented to Us, That he hath
with great Labour and Expence composed several Works, consisting of Vocal
and Instrumental MUSICK, in order to be Printed and Published; and hath
therefore besought Us to grant him Our Royal Privilege and Licence for the sole
Printing and Publishing thereof for the Term of Fourteen Years: We being
willing to give all due Encouragement to Works of this Nature, are graciously
pleased to condescend to his Request.
2. The following passage
(A) can be replaced with the abbreviation (B):
(A)
On May 14th the Lord Chamberlain, as Governor of the new
Academy, issued a warrant to 'Mr Hendel to procure Singers for the
English Stage':
Whereas His Majesty has been
graciously Pleas'd to Grant Letters Patents to the Severall Lords and Gent
[lemen] mention'd in the Annext List for the Encouragement of Operas for and
during the Space of Twenty one Years, and Likewise as a further encouragement
has been graciously Pleas'd to Grant a Thousand Pounds p[er].A [nnum]. for the
Promotion of this design. ... You forthwith to repair to Italy, Germany or such
other Place or Places as you shall think proper, there to make Contracts with
such Singer or Singers as you shall judge fit to perform on the English Stage.
...
The warrant appended specific
instruction to Handel:
(B)
On May 14th the Lord Chamberlain, as Governor of the new
Academy, issued a warrant to 'Mr Hendel' " forthwith to repair
to Italy, Germany or such other Place or Places as you shall think proper,
there to make Contracts with such Singer or Singers as you shall judge fit to
perform on the English Stage. ...". The warrant appended specific
instruction
