Radamisto and the Royal Academy

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 'M^r 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 M^r 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 M^r Hendel engage Senezino as soon as possible to Serve the said Company and for as many Years as may be.

    That in case M^r Hendel meet with an excellent Voice of the first rate he is to Acquaint the Gov^r 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:

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 'M^r 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 'M^r 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

Semele: An English Opera?

This is a draft script for a scripted interlude for a BBC Radio 3 Proms production of Semele, produced by Fiona Shelmerdine, BBC Radio 3, broadcast 5/8/96.

From 1742, when Handel returned to London from his famous production of Messiah in Dublin, through to the first performance of Semele in February 1744 something remarkable happened to the reputation of Handel. The composer whose single greatest musical commitment had been to the composing of Italian opera, and to the establishment of successful opera seria in London, the composer of over forty operas who had completely transformed English musical culture, suddenly found himself described as the scourge of opera. Less than a week after the first night of Samson, in February 1743 Horace Walpole was writing: “Handel has set up an Oratorio against the Operas, and succeeds”. Exactly one year later, with the production of Semele, the theme of the rivalry with opera was still current. One of Handel’s most devoted musical followers, Mrs Delany wrote to her sister:

“Semele is charming; the more I hear it the better I like it, and as I am a subscriber I shall not fail one night ... They say Samson is to be next Friday, for Semele has a strong party against it, viz. the fine ladies, petit maîtres, and ignoramus’s. All the opera people are enraged at Handel ...”

Both Walpole and Mrs Delany were referring to the same musico-political struggle.

By 1741 Handel had composed his last Italian opera - Deidama - and had, whether he was conscious of the finality of it or not, therefore sacrificed at last his practising dedication to the musical pre-eminence of opera seria. This sacrifice was almost certainly against his private conviction, but a complicated pattern of pressures dictated, gradually in the 1730s, and then more emphatically at the beginning of the next decade that his musical future lay in the composition of English oratorios not Italian operas.

From the beginning of Handel’s career in London there had always been an English lobby, championed, for instance, by Joseph Addison in the pages of The Spectator, which saw the singing of operas in England, in Italian, as absurd. By 1728, with the end of the first period of The Royal Academy of Music, what were seen as the excesses of Italian opera were being parodied in the most successful stage play of the eighteenth century - John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera.  But in the 1730s the champions of English words found the perfect musical expression for their cause - not in the production of operas in English, but in the development of a new form - the English oratorio. Ironically it was Handel’s own music - an unauthorised but sympathetic production of Esther in 1732 - that was to signal the future of his career. The production was the talk of the town and soon other unauthorised versions were being announced in the press. Handel had to respond, and his own production of Esther was advertised for May 2nd, 1732. A satirical letter published in the same year captured the success of oratorio, and Handel’s prophetic involvement in the new fashion:

“I left the Italian Opera, the house was so thin, and cross’d over the way to the English one, which was so full I was forc’d to crowd in upon the Stage ... This alarm’d Handel, and out he brings an Oratorio, or Religious Farce, for the duce take me if I can make any other Construction on the Word, but he has made a very good Farce of it, and put near 4,000l. in his Pocket. This being a new Thing set the whole World a Madding; Han’t you be at the Oratorio, says one? Oh! If you don’t see the Oratorio you see nothing, says t’other; so away goes I to the Oratorio, where I saw indeed the finest Assembly of People I ever beheld in my Life, but, to my great Surprize found this Sacred Drama a mere Consort, no Scenary, Dress or Action, so necessary to a Drama ...”

Handel’s commitment to Italian opera was hardly, though, to end suddenly. He was to compose a further fourteen Italian operas, including the masterpieces Orlando and Ariodante. And the opera cause in England was not to end with Handel’s final opera some nine years later. In 1741, six months after Handel’s last opera and four months before his visit to Dublin there was news that a new opera venture, headed by Lord Middlesex, had been established: “Six extravagant young Gentlemen have subscrib’d

1000 £  apiece for the Support of an opera next winter”. It was against this new opera company that Walpole reported the rival success of Samson in 1743 and it was the “opera people” supporting this venture that Mrs Delany claimed were so outraged by Semele.

The coincidence of Handel’s visit to Ireland and the establishment of this new company worked in favour of Handel’s current reputation. The response of Alexander Pope, the most important representative of the literary establishment, is particularly interesting. In the first version of his great mock-epic poem The Dunciad, published in 1728, Pope had presented opera as the cultural harbinger of the reign of the Goddess Dulness:

“Already, Opera prepares the way,

The sure fore-runner of her gentle sway.”

These lines were written during the height of Handel’s supremacy as a composer of Italian operas, at a time indeed when opera was synonymous with Handel. Now, though, in 1741, as Handel had departed for Ireland, Pope was completing his vision of the reign of anti-art, composing the fourth book of The Dunciad.  And he had certainly not changed his views of Italian opera, which, with its “affected airs” and “effeminate sounds” confirms the foreboding promise of the earlier poem.  It appears personified as a “Harlot form” ready to silence the nine muses:

“When lo! a Harlot form soft sliding by,

With mincing step, small voice, and languid eye;

Foreign her air, her robe’s discordant pride

In patch-work flutt’ring, and her head aside.

By singing Peers up-held on either hand,

She tripp’d and laugh’d, too pretty much to stand;

Cast on the prostrate Nine a scornful look,

The thus in quaint Recitativo spoke.

‘O Cara! Cara! silence all that train:

Joy to great Chaos! let Division reign:

Chromatic tortures soon shall drive them hence,

Break all their nerves, and fritter all their sense:

One Trill shall harmonize joy, grief, and rage,

Wake the dull Church, and lull the ranting Stage;

To the same notes thy sons shall hum, or snore,

And all thy yawning daughters cry, encore.

Another Phoebus, thy own Phoebus, reigns,

Joys in my jiggs, and dances in my chains.”

But now, in 1741, far from it being the case that Handel is implicated in this attack, astonishingly he is seen as our musical saviour, a hero to threaten the rule of Dulness:

“ ‘But soon, ah soon Rebellion will commence.

If Music meanly borrows aid from Sense:

Strong in new Arms, lo! Giant Handel stands,

Like bold Briareus, with a hundred hands;

To stir, to rouze, to shake the Soul he comes,

And Jove’s own Thunders follow Mars’s Drums.

Arrest him, Empress; or you sleep no more’ -

She heard, and drove him to th’Hibernian shore.”

It is hardly surprising, if this is expressive of a new reputation, that Handel had no intention of contributing to the feeble resurgence of opera in the hands of Middlesex’s company. Indeed he quashed any suggestion of involvement explicitly:

“The report that the Direction of the Opera next winter is committed to my Care, is groundless. The gentlemen who have undertaken to middle with Harmony can not agree, and are quite in a Confusion. Whether I shall do some thing in the Oratorio way (as several of my friends desire) I can not determine as yet.”

But this was soon determined. Despite the fact that the Messiah was not to travel well from the Hibernian shore to London, Handel was ready with Samson, and, despite the report of a paralytic disorder in April 1743, three months later Semele was finished. Lord Middlesex, though, had powerful supporters, and Handel had to resist considerable pressure to offer the company new operas to rescue their flagging fortunes. It is probable that he did help in November, 1743, by allowing them to perform his opera Alessandro, in a revised form. But, despite offers of 1,000 guineas for two new operas or 500 guineas for one, Handel defied Middlesex, and threw down the gauntlet with Semele - not simply because this was an English ‘oratorio’ to rival the operas, but, rubbing salt in the wound, because it was the closest thing to an English opera Handel had ever composed.

So Semele was born: written by the greatest composer of opera in the period, at a time when his popularity increasingly depended on the composing of English oratorios, and in a context which required a response to a rival opera venture. It is hardly surprising that the work has posed problems of classification ever since. Is it an English opera, an oratorio, or a hybrid of the two? The ‘opera party’ mentioned by Mary Delany were probably so angered because they considered it to be direct operatic competition. Mainwaring, Handel’s first biographer, tried to have the best of both worlds. He included it in his list of ‘Oratorios’, but then added a footnote: “An English Opera, but called an Oratorio, and performed as such at Covent-Garden”. The advertisement for the first production claimed it would be performed “After the Manner of an Oratorio”, which is hardly definitive. A further problem is the subject-matter, which seemed to link the work more obviously with opera than with oratorio with its conventionally Biblical subjects. It was this, perhaps, which led Jennens to call it “a bawdy opera”. But even this apparently unequivocal labelling was quickly adapted to “a Bawdatorio”.

Semele resists simple classification. Mrs Delany (who had a right to judge, having followed so closely every development in Handel’s London career) saw at rehearsal something completely original in the work:

“I was yesterday morning at Mr. Handel’s to hear the rehearsal of Semele. It is a delightful piece of music, quite new and different from anything he has done ...”

Neither ‘opera’ nor ‘oratorio’ will adequately contextualize this sense of originality.

The manner of its first production and the use of the chorus are obvious signs of its affinity with oratorio. But there are also subtler indications of the differences between Semele and Handel’s operas (ignoring the matter of language, though ‘opera’ and ‘Italian’ had become almost inseparably united in the eyes of the opponents of both). Typically, in opera seria, affairs, doomed relationships and mismatches, have dynastic implications. Nothing really hangs on Semele’s relationship with Jupiter - the fate of nations, the alliances of rulers, the place of governing families do not stand in the balance, so the consequences are purely personal (though, of course, Semele’s overreaching has a broadly symbolic appeal). There can be no uncertainty attending the fate of Jupiter, God of Gods - he will lose one of the many mortal objects of his desire but his government of the heavens cannot be threatened. In Semele private affections, however they are received by an interested public chorus, have no public repercussions. On a structural level Semele, like the operas, is episodic. But composed not to be staged, there is no structure of dramatic surprise within the episodes. The interruptions at crucial moments; the secret witnessing of supposedly private interviews; the messages that change the course of scenes  - the whole range of interventions that comprise the ebb and flow of Handel’s opera scenes are absent here. So, too, to a certain extent, is the dramatic delay of personal revelation typical in the operas. Take, for instance, the relationship between Athamas and Ino as expressed in the second scene. Ino is in love with Athamas and sings her air “Turn, hopeless lover, turn thy eyes” - and weeps for him. He sees her response as a sign of her empathy not her love. This is the kind of misunderstanding in love typical of the operas. But not typical is the fact that Ino immediately reveals his mistake and expresses her love unequivocally. Finally they sing a duet in which she claims he has undone her and he wishes to atone. There is no room here, for the ambiguity and uncertainty that delays the revelation of love so often in the operas. The scene both introduces and solves the mystery.

Also on a structural level, of course, there is no need of musical justification for exits at the end of scenes, so the summarising function often falls to the chorus. In the operas exits often give rise to simile arias which dramatise, by analogy, the present state of the character’s mind and situation.

Also some of the arias have a rather gratuitous relationship to plot. This is certainly true of Semele’s first major air “The morning lark to mine accords his note”. The pathetic fallacy offered here is a standard feature of arias of pause, repose or melancholy in the operas. But Semele’s state of emotion, here, has not been prepared and rather belies the keynote of her character - a vainglorious confidence. The air is not a vehicle for plot, or the development of character, but a vehicle for the voice.

None of these points, though, definitively place Semele out of the category of opera, any more than they make it a lesser composition. Though there are changes to the original libretto, it is nonetheless important that this libretto is explicitly operatic. The signs of the spectacular remain in the text and many productions have shown that they can be reactivated. It is rather the case that such points make the work rather different from Handel’s general operatic practice.

 It could never be argued that Semele lacks drama. It is not, for instance, easy to extend the point about the lack of dramatic coherence in Semele’s ‘morning lark’ air. Even if we take an air like “Where’er you walk” - which might seem a likely candidate for critique, as it is an interpolation (from Pope’s ‘Summer’ pastoral) and therefore perhaps not essential to the integrity of the action - we find nevertheless that it contributes a considerable dramatic irony to the events:

“Where’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade;

Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade:

Where’er you tread, the blushing flow’rs shall rise;

And all things flourish where’er you turn your eyes.”

This is no merely descriptive lull before the storm. Jupiter promises “cool gales” to “fan the glade” of Semele’s paradise - a perverse irony in that it relates to the actual fate that awaits Semele,  where she will be anything other than “cooled” by this deity: “I burn, I burn, I faint, for pity I implore”.  Further, “all things” will “flourish” where she turns her eyes, again ironically untrue. Unfortunately she will turn her eyes too intensely on herself: “Myself I shall adore, / If I persist in gazing”. The consequence of her vanity will be her demand to see for herself the Godhead in all its glory: the result will hardly be ‘flourishing’! As with the best of Handel’s opera arias, so with “Where’ere you walk”. It can be enjoyed out of context, but it then loses a wealth of contextual meaning.

And there are whole sequences in the work which bear exact comparison with Handel’s operatic technique. The scene in the Cave of Sleep, for instance, is an operatic tour de force. The opening symphony - larghetto e piano per tutto - with its ponderous bassoon line is perfectly suggestive of the steady breathing of slumber. It is rudely followed by the allegro e forte introduction of Juno and Iris: “Somnus, awake”. The God of Sleep’s response is the inspired “Leave me loathsome light” with its dramatic failure of da capo form - Somnus can just about make it through the first section of the air, and he even manages the B Section but the A Section reprise is beyond him. True to his name, he nods off showing a shocking disrespect for the proprieties of conventional composition! Juno manages to wake him with the enticing prospect of Pasithea, at which point he comes (literally) to his senses with “More sweet is that name/ Than a soft purling stream”. And this perfect mini-drama directly relates to the urgency of plot. Somnus must be woken if Juno’s plans for Semele’s undoing are to succeed.

It’s not only the sense of drama here that is ‘operatic’ - the compositional features are typical of Handel’s best operas. The interruption, for instance, to strict da capo form often has a particular dramatic aptness in the operas (in Rodelinda, for instance, a sister thinks after the B section of an aria that she recognises the singer’s voice as her brother’s: her interruption is followed by the da capo reprise which allows the confirmation of recognition - as in this scene from Semele variation from the norm is motivated by dramatic expressiveness).

So where, exactly, does this leave us? Far from being closer to a definition of Semele we find it the more elusive. We are not even sure what the work is about! It has been suggested, for instance, that there are possible allegorical readings. One argument goes that Semele contains a subtle political warning to one of King George II’s mistresses, who Semele-like, seemed ready to over-reach her position. Another suggestion, returning to the political situation surrounding the first production, is that Semele represents Lord Middlesex’s opera venture and her overthrow the triumph of Handel’s response. But both allegories fail to make sense of the fact that Semele herself is undoubtedly the heroine of this work, however dubious her morality. This holds true for any production, but it was perhaps accentuated in 1744, because the star of Handel’s company then, La Francesina (the stage name for Elisabeth Duparc, a French soprano trained in Italy), took the title role, and was famed for a “lark-like voice” (very apt for “The morning lark to mine accords his note”): we return to Mrs Delany, who had originally been unimpressed by her singing:

“I was yesterday to hear Semele; it is a delightful piece of music ... Francesina is extremely improved, her notes are more distinct, and there is something in her running-divisions that is quite surprizing.”

Handel certainly wrote the part for a voice capable of florid passagework, and as a vehicle for vocal display it is as impressive as any he created.

Perhaps we can end, if allegory is to be allowed, by hazarding a fanciful alternative:  “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,/ Or what’s a heaven for?”  Handel’s operatic ambition had been perhaps too much for the English to bear. Those who commune with the Gods are reminded of their indiscretions and punished for their overreaching by the advocates of moral propriety. The fate of Semele herself can be offered, not too seriously, as an allegory of Handel’s musical career. Just as Semele is to rise as a phoenix from the ashes, so, out of Handel’s ultimately doomed commitment to opera were reborn the dramatic skills that produced the finest ever series of oratorios in English.

 

Handel’s Ezio – Two interludes

These two interludes were prepared for a BBC Radio 3 production of the opera, and broadcast as ‘Handel's Ezio and the Second Period of the Royal Academy’, produced by Kate Boulton, for BBC Radio 3,  6/12/95.

Interlude 1

"In January Ezio, a New Opera: Clothes and all the Scenes New. But did not draw much company."

Francis Colman's opera register for February 1732 in its brevity and sense of anti-climax confirms the contemporary obscurity of Handel's twenty-ninth opera. Despite the fact that the King attended four performances, the opera closed after only five. It was not always thus with Handel's operas in London. The devotees who attended Ezio in January 1732 might well have recalled, ruefully, the hysterical response which greeted the beginning of Handel's Royal Academy opera venture twelve years earlier, as Handel's first biographer, Mainwaring, recorded later in the century:

"In the year 1720, he obtained leave to perform his Opera of RADAMISTO. 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."

Radamisto certainly pleased its sensation seeking audience. But, though not in the class of Radamisto, there is nothing obvious either musically or dramatically which should have consigned Ezio to a footnote in the history of Handel's opera career. As a piece of drama the libretto, derived from the celebrated poet Pietro Metastasio, actually has more coherence than many of the operas of Handel's first Academy period. The motivations of the main characters in Ezio usually have a clear logic. So, for example,  though the figure of the tyrant in Handel's operas can often be criticised for sudden and unconvincing repentance, there is no such inconsistency about Valentiniano. His rivalry with Ezio is established in the first scene where Ezio's glorious triumph as the conquering hero offers the full motive for mistrust and jealousy in an Emperor who values his own unassailable power. His first aria 'Se tu la reggi a volo' serves not only as public praise for Ezio, but also as a double-edged reminder that whatever Ezio achieves will be to the increase of his own Godlike dominion. That this should become sexual rivalry, as in the next scene news arrives that Valentiniano will have Fulvia, Ezio's bride-to-be, reinforces the sense that psychologically Valentiniano fears his manhood at risk. That he should try and arrange for Ezio to marry his sister Onoria confirms that he needs to retain political control of the situation. When Ezio refuses to comply he is asserting his independence of the Emperor's wishes, and so confirming Valentiniano's fears of his uncontrollable nature. His aria therefore warns Ezio to be more prudent. Logically, since now we have a test of wills, Act I Scene x announces Valentiniano's determination that Fulvia will marry him. When an attempt on his life fails it might be argued that he should know Ezio better than to assume the author of the treason to be him, but, of course, it serves his aims perfectly to have Ezio so discredited. When Fulvia dissembles affection for Valentiniano in order to preserve Ezio from execution it is perfectly in character that the Emperor should gloat over Ezio with Fulvia beside him. Most of all, by now, Valentiniano needs Ezio to make a confession about his part in the attempted murder (whether he believes it or not) because Ezio has popular appeal and there must be a public justification for mistreating him. So he agrees to his sister's plan to unite Fulvia with Ezio as the most persuasive means of getting the confession. Without this clear political motivation this change of policy would indeed seem implausible, but actually the scene confirms the sense that Fulvia is not the object of a genuine desire, but rather the pawn in a political game. Further, in the very next scene, Valentiniano orders Varo to kill Ezio should the full confession not be granted. So we know that his comment when he sees Ezio's unrelenting honesty - he says he is "convinced at last" that Ezio was guiltless - is hypocrisy, not reconciliation. Ezio is reported dead, and his resurrection at the end of the opera is greeted by Valentiniano with genuine relief. But this too is plausible, because a public revelation of Ezio's innocence in the murder attempt has been made, and Valentiniano's action in having Ezio supposedly killed now places him in an extremely dangerous political situation. Hence his previous aria 'Per tutto il timore' with its sense that 'danger is all around'. Of course, it can easily be argued that eighteenth-century audiences did not require this degree of plausible correlation between character and action in opera. But the point is that Ezio does not fail on dramatic grounds. Actually its plot is extremely similar in structure to the preceding Handel opera, also based on a Metastasian libretto  - Poro. Ellen Harris points out some of the correspondences: in Poro, as in Ezio the hero's love of a woman is challenged by professions of love from the hero's military superior; In both operas there is an unknown traitor to the ruler; both Poro and Ezio are falsely reported to be dead; the denouement reveals the true source of the treachery; and both operas magnanimously forgive the traitor, and unite the real lovers. Handel obviously felt he was following a successful formula in Ezio. Poro had been extremely well received a year earlier in 1731. So, too, in the score are the kind of set pieces that Handel had every right to believe the public wanted. The opera opens in due pomp and ceremony with Ezio "preceded by martial Instruments, Slaves, and Ensigns of the Vanquished". The subject invites the typical simile arias of the period ("sailors may know their hazardous routes, but still have to trust to fate"; "if the water level of a river is kept low then there is no risk of flooding") and call on Handel's great powers of musical imitation (from musically "smoothing breezes" to the "Ocean's rage", for instance). There are vengeful arias, rueful arias, arias of passion and love, heroic arias and even a prison aria. There is a trial scene and a battle scene. The opera has all the elements that usually allow the full range of Handel's expressive power. So there's nothing here to explain why the opera should fail.

Neither would failures in the casting account for the lack of interest. Admittedly, in 1732 it seemed difficult to find the right combination of beauty of voice and appearance in the leading ladies. Anna Strada, who played Fulvia, was said by Handel's most devoted opera follower, Mrs Pendarves, to have a "voice ... without exception fine" and a "perfect manner", but, unfortunately, her "person" was "very bad and she makes frightful mouths" If this seems harsh, it is rather generous compared with the comments of those who nicknamed her "the pig". But if the audience of Ezio, though they may have been charmed by her voice, could not tolerate her features they could always have concentrated their gaze on Francesca Bertolli, who played Onoria, as she was, we are told, "a perfect beauty, quite a Cleopatra", who Mrs Pendarves suspected of practising in front of a mirror "for she has never any distortion in her face". Sadly she is also said to have had "neither voice, ear, nor manner to recommend her". But also present on stage was the great castrato of Handel's Academy years - Senesino, whose first role for Handel had been Radamisto and who was now cast, of course, as Ezio. And even if his star was dwindling, there was a sensational new bass to capture the imagination. The role of Varo was written for Antonio Montagnana, a bass with a remarkable range of at least two octaves, who had arrived in London in 1731.  Burney's claim that Handel's scoring for Montagnana in Ezio "was manifestly intended to exhibit the peculiar power of the singer" is perfectly supported by the Act II aria 'Nasce al bosco' . The aria's subject is the suddenness with which the lowliest shepherd can rise to become the greatest of rulers whilst the loftiest of the nobility can as rapidly be plunged into peasant obscurity. In Montagnana Handel had a  base who would allow the fullest expression of his imitative skills. The aria rises and falls as suddenly as its human subjects. Its andante allegro scales and leaps require astonishing security and versatility, and the aria calls on the full range of Montagnana's two octaves from high to low F's, both notes in the space of only two bars in the A section's closing cadence. Handel also gives him the last aria in the opera -  'Già risonar'  - which has the full bravura treatment with trumpet accompaniment, and demands great vocal agility in its rapid coloratura passagework and noble trills and melismas.

Despite such brilliance, as we have seen, the opera was a failure. Indeed Sir John Hawkins, in his General History of the Science and Practice of Music, published in 1776, places Ezio in a whole period of mediocrity:

"Whereas of his earlier operas [writes Hawkins], that is to say, those composed by him between the years 1710 and 1728, the merits are so great, that few are able to say which is to be preferred; those composed after that period have so little to recommend them, that few would take them for the work of the same author. In the former class are Radamistus, Otho, Tamerlane, Rodelinda, Alexander, and Admetus, in either of which scarcely an indifferent air occurs; whereas in Parthenope, Porus, Sosarmes, Orlando, Aetius, Ariadne, and the rest down to 1736, it is a matter of some difficulty to find a good one."

Late twentieth-century music criticism would not agree with Hawkins assessment. Donald Burrows, who quotes this passage in his recent book on Handel, rightly notes that "it might reasonably be claimed ... that Hawkins ended his list in an unfortunate place, for, with Orlando and Arianna Handel's creative powers were rising towards a new peak". Those two works are indeed masterpieces of musical drama, but Partenope is a brilliant and original exercise in the mock-heroic, and Sosarme, Poro, and Ezio itself are full of music which shows that Handel's creativity was not flagging as Hawkins had implied.

Handel's opera career is regularly punctuated in the press and private correspondence of the period with premature funeral rites. If Ezio seemed to mark a low point in reception, then Viscount Percival thought the following opera, Sosarme "one of the best" he had ever heard and noted that it justly "takes the town". A comparison of the publication history of the two operas shows the difference in reception. Though a version of the score of Ezio was pirated in an unauthorised version on 7th February, 1732, and though Handel's usual publisher Walsh entered the lists immediately with an advertisement claiming: "There is publish'd a spurious Copy of those call'd the Favourite Songs in Ætius, with many Faults; This is to give Notice that all who would have the Favourite Songs in Ætius, may have the Originals, finely printed and correct, where the whole Opera is sold" - neither venture was successful. The readiness of the opera industry could not support an interest that wasn't there. Contrastingly Walsh's first publication of the "favourite Songs from Sosarme" on March the 11th was followed by "A Second Collection of the most Favourite Songs" from the same opera one month later. By May Walsh was advertising Sosarme "for German Flute and Bass and also for Single Flute".

Ezio failed not because of any weakness of music,structure, plot, or cast. It failed because the opera going public in the 1730's was more fickle than it had been throughout the 1720's. The fashion for Italian opera was less predictable, and others were about to take advantage of this by using Handel's own music to challenge his opera writing career.

What, though, we might well ask, explains Hawkins's retrospective critical judgement of the operas of the 1730's? The answer must partly lie in the hindsight that can see these Second Academy revival operas as belonging to an ultimately doomed attempt by Handel to assert the continuing priority of opera in his musical output. Ezio stands at a point in the history of Handel's career where the pressures to move from opera to oratorio were about to gather an increasingly irresistible momentum.

Interlude 2

Ezio was followed in the 1731-2 season by an unsuccessful revival of Giulio Cesare, and by the new opera Sosarme, which the Opera Register tells us was "for many nights much crowded", and which we have seen Viscount Percival praising. But Percival, like many other followers of Handel's music, was soon to be admiring a rather different musical entertainment.Within a month of the first production of Ezio, he noted in his diary:

"From dinner I went to the Music Club, where the King's Chapel boys acted the History of Hester, writ by Pope, and composed by Hendel. This oratoria or religious opera is exceeding fine, and the company were highly pleased, some of the parts being well performed."

This performance of Handel's Esther (originally composed as a 'masque') was not authorised by the composer, though it is believed he attended. Handel's celebrations that day (the first performance was on February 23rd, 1732, his forty-seventh birthday) must have left him with mixed feelings. Here, in an unauthorised version of one of his own pieces was an English language success to rival his Italian operas. There were three performances in all directed by Bernard Gates "Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal, together with a number of voices from the Choirs of the Chapel Royal and Westminster, join'd in Chorus's after the manner of the Ancients, being placed between the stage and the Orchestra". The production was the talk of the town and soon more unauthorised performances were being announced in the press. Handel, urged by the ever faithful Princess Anne, had to respond. For all his unquestionable commitment to Italian opera he could hardly allow his own productions to be compromised by the pull of his own music in the control of rival performers. The Daily Journal, for April 19th, advertised his response:

"By His Majesty's Command.

At the King's Theatre in the Hay-market, on Tuesday the 2nd Day of May, will be performed, The Sacred Story of Esther: an Oratorio in English. Formerly composed by Mr. Handel, and now revised by him, with several Additions, and to be performed by a great Number of the best Voices and Instruments."

A note to the announcement added "There will be no Action on the Stage, but the House will be fitted up in a decent Manner, for the Audience. The Musick to be disposed after the Manner of the Coronation Service". This qualification suggests a subtle response to the Bishop of London's assumed injunction against the operatic representation of religious material. For the performance Handel used his opera cast - the Senesino, Strada, and Bertolli of Ezio singing English on a stage without action. Montagnana now appeared in the role of Haman with lines that require perfect articulation and enunciation in the most native of English speakers: "Pluck root and branch from out the land". A satirical letter of the period testifies to what must have been a rather incongruous phenomenon:

"I left the Italian Opera, the house was so thin, and cross'd over the way to the English one, which was so full I was forc'd to crowd in upon the Stage ...

This alarm'd H[ande]l, and out he brings an Oratorio, or Religious Farce, for the duce take me if I can make any other Construction of the Word, but he has made a very good Farce of it, and put near 4,000l. in his Pocket ...

This being a new Thing set the whole World a Madding; Han't you be at the Oratorio, says one? Oh! If you don't see the Oratorio you see nothing, says t'other; so away goes I to the Oratorio, where I saw indeed the finest Assembly of People I ever beheld in my Life, but, to my great Surprize, found this Sacred Drama a mere Consort, no Scenary, Dress or Action, so necessary to a Drama; but H[ande]l was plac'd in Pulpit, (I suppose they call that their Oratory). by him sate Senesino, Strada, Bertolli, and Turner Robinson, in their own Habits; before him stood sundry sweet Singers of this poor Israel, and Strada gave us a Halleluiah of Half an Hour long; Senesino and Bertolli made rare work with the English Tongue you would have sworn it had been Welch; I would have wish'd it Italian, that they might have sung it with more ease to themselves, since, but for the Name of English, it might as well have been Hebrew ...

We have likewise had two operas, Etius and Sosarmes, the first most Masterly, the last most pleasing ... I like one good Opera better than Twenty Oratorio's."

But our satirist's preference for Ezio over Esther shows him self-confessedly out of joint with his time.

For all the problems of staging and pronunciation Handel's version of Esther, the Opera Register notes was "performed six times and very full"; "with vast applause" boasts The London Magazine. Recalling the days of Radamisto too many tickets were sold for the first performance, necessitating an advertisement inviting returns before the opening. Handel's Esther, variously described as an "oratory" and an "oratoria" had become the first English oratorio to grace the stage. Within weeks the pirates were at it again. The Daily Post for May 2nd announced:

"We hear that the Proprietors of the English Opera will very shortly perform a celebrated Pastoral Opera call'd Acis and Galatea, compos'd by Mr. Handel, with all the Grand Chorus's and other Decorations."

The directors of this 'English Opera' were Thomas Arne, his son the composer, J. F. Lampe and Henry Carey - a veritable collection of spokesmen for the cause of dramatic music in English, who were to promote the cause as vigorously as possible. The rehearsals for Lampe's 1732 opera Britannia prompted a poem in The Daily Post, which, though showing insincere deference to Handel, clearly boasted its patriotic agenda:

No more shall Italy its Warblers send

To charm our Ears with Handel's heav'nly Strains.

To the production of Acis Handel again responded. There was a real sense, now, that he was no longer leading the public's musical taste, but rather following it. He mounted his own revised version of Acis and Galatea at the King's Theatre: "There will be no Action on the Stage, but the Scene will represent, in a Picturesque Manner, a rural Prospect, with Rocks, Groves, Fountains and Grotto's; amongst which will be disposed a Chorus of Nymphs and Shepherds". Bizarrely, the performance, again with the opera cast, was given in a mixture of English and Italian, reviving the often mocked tradition of macaronic performances earlier in the century.

Handel returned to Italian opera with a revival of Alessandro, but by only the second performance the house was noted as being "thin" The aesthetic contest between the lovers of Italian opera and the advocates of music set to English words was reaching another of its climaxes. One development in particular brought the ideological conflict into a neat full circle. In December Aaron Hill wrote to Handel urging him to commit himself to the English language:

 "Having this occasion of troubling you with a letter, I cannot forbear to tell you the earnestness of my wishes, that, as you have made such considerable steps towards it, already, you would let us owe to your inimitable genius, the establishment of musick, upon a foundation of good poetry; where the excellence of the sound should be no longer dishonour'd by the poorness of the sense it is chain'd to. My meaning is, that you would be resolute enough to deliver us from our Italian bondage; and demonstrate, that English is soft enough for Opera, when compos'd by poets, who know how to distinguish the sweetness of our tongue from the strength of it, where the last is less necessary."

Ironically it had been Hill who twenty-one years earlier, as producer of Handel's first London opera Rinaldo, had helped to establish an unprecedented period of Italian opera in the capitol. Prophetically, though, Hill had published a word-book for Rinaldo, whose Preface to Queen Anne had envisaged no doubt in seeing "The English Opera more splendid than her Mother, the Italian". Hill's comments, in the letter of 1732, about the "Italian Bondage" were an attempt now to make English opera truly English. They resurrected a debate which had surrounded the first period of Handel's Italian operas as thoroughly as it now threatened those operas' future.

The 'stage' for attacks against Italian opera had been set as early as 1706 with John Dennis's ludicrous and xenophobic attack against Italian opera: 'a Diversion of more pernicious consequence, than the most licentious Play that ever has appear'd upon the Stage'.  His arguments are absurd, but certainly express a rich vein of anti-culture typical of the worst kind of provincial Englishness. 'Pleasure of Sense,' argues Dennis 'being too much indulged, makes Reason cease to be a Pleasure, and by consequence is contrary both to publick and private Duty'.  The pleasures of Italian opera are too great for Dennis, offering, particularly, a threat to all young ladies, in its celebration of love and all its arts. French music is less a danger as it is 'by no means so meltingly moving as the Italian'.  It's ironically amusing that such a silly and vituperative polemic should so manifestly reveal the intensity of the sensuous pleasures of Italian opera. But Dennis's real grouse seems to be that Italian opera is effeminate and foreign: 'the Reigning Luxury of Modern Italy, is that soft and effeminate Musick which abounds in the Italian Opera'. 

Actually, at least one of Dennis's objections should have been met by Handel's arrival ('But yet this must be allow'd, that tho' the Opera in Italy is a Monster, 'tis a beautiful harmonious Monster, but here in England 'tis an ugly howling one'). But Handel's enterprise, in 1711, had more formidable literary arguments to overcome than from this raving nonsense. Rinaldo, like the operas which immediately preceded it, was attacked in the influential Spectator by Richard Steele and Joseph Addison. Alexander Pope, who named both Dennis and Addison as his satiric targets, could dispense with Dennis as a mere dunce, but, in the very midst of attack had to acknowledge Addison's literary skills. However, there may have been an element of hubris in the Spectator's attacks, especially in Addison's emphasis on the absurdities of the Italian elements of the opera. Addison himself was the English librettist of the failed opera Rosamund, composed by the dire musician, Thomas Clayton, and staged in 1707.  The production was dropped after a dismal three performances. It is another indication of the revival of the English lobby that in 1733 Arne was prepared to re-set Addison's Rosamund  (rather more musically than Clayton).

The Spectator's pillory in 1711 was certainly a concerted attempt to discredit the Italian operas. Five issues (numbers 5; 13; 14; 18; and 29) gave over their space to the ridicule of the increasingly popular new form, over a period of less than one month from March 6th to April 3rd. And though the sophistication of the critique offered here is incomparable with Dennis's clumsy, ill-conceived onslaught, there is still the condescending assumption that the English should have higher pleasures than the mere continentals:

"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."

The criticism of the use of Italian sources is interesting, as it reveals, aptly, the absurdities of the period preceding Handel's Rinaldo. As Dean and Knapp note: 'All the operas between Rosamund and Rinaldo were pasticcios processed locally from Italian materials'.  Some of these were sung in Italian but others were  productions in both languages. The Spectator ridicules the absurdities of translation from the Italian which does not match the music:

"I have known the Word And pursu'd through the whole Gamut, have been entertain'd with many a melodious The, and have heard the most beautiful Graces, Quavers and Divisions bestow'd upon Then, For, and From; to the eternal Honour of our English Particles."

The macaronic use of both languages in the same opera was a manifestly unsatisfactory compromise, allowing Addison many further strokes of wit: 'The King or Hero of the Play generally spoke in Italian, and his Slaves answer'd him in English'.  There are two possible answers to Addison's critique of linguistic impropriety:  either operas should be sung wholly in Italian, or librettos conceived in English should be sung in English. Despite the failure of the wholly English Rosamund (which also should have proved to Addison that the music is more important than the words), the former possibility was (illogically) seen to be an even greater impropriety:

"At length the Audience grew tir'd of understanding Half the Opera, and therefore to ease themselves intirely of the Fatigue of Thinking, have so order'd it at Present that the whole Opera is perform'd in an unknown Tongue."

The second focus for the Spectator's attack was the spectacle of the new operas; again an attack which ironically helps us to focus on the pleasures of such productions.

 The Spectator was essentially  ridiculing the taste of opera audiences; its pleasures are seen to be trivial and laughable. With Handel's Rinaldo, though, as with  Teseo (1713) and Amadigi (1715), his other 'magic operas' (so called because they both have a sorceress who conjures up all kinds of visions and monsters) the opera audiences could enjoy state of the art special effects, both in the production and in the music. Rinaldo calls for two chariots, one drawn by white horses and blackamoors, the other drawn by two dragons issuing fire and smoke; furies and dreadful monsters (more fire and smoke); a delightful grove with singing birds in the trees; singing and dancing mermaids; a dreadful mountain prospect; an enchanted palace; a magician's cave; ugly enchanted spirits; and plentiful supplies of thunder, lightning and 'amazing noises'. Not all this was possible -  Steele notes that the horses drawing the chariot never appeared - but as much as was possible was done. Addison ridiculed the whole enterprize in the issue of March 6th. Especially ludicrous to him seemed the provision of real birds for the delightful grove:

"As I was walking in the Streets about a Fortnight ago, I saw an ordinary Fellow carrying a Cage full of little Birds upon his Shoulder; and, as I was wondering with my self what Use he would put them to, he was met very luckily by an Acquaintance, who had the same Curiosity. Upon his asking him what he had upon his Shoulder, he told him, that he had been buying Sparrows 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, and to fly about the Stage."

For all Addison's humour here and elsewhere, his descriptions do suggest the excitement of these productions: 'Rinaldo is filled with Thunder and Lightning, Illuminations, and Fireworks'. Some self-appointed proprietors of eighteenth-century taste may have scorned such entertainments but the opera public loved them. Rinaldo was one of the greatest successes of the period. The publication of its songs alone was reputed to have made their publisher fifteen hundred pounds.  In a sense the number of issues devoted by the Spectator to the mockery of Italian opera is a testament  to the futility of its arguments. The thirst for Italian opera was already established before the Spectator's first issue, and its arguments were doomed. The glamour, and royal patronage of the Italian opera and the imported Italian singers were to withstand triumphantly the onslaught of such criticism, and the establishment of the Royal Academy, as we have seen in the frenzied reception of Radamisto was to herald the height of Handel's opera career. But the old arguments had never been laid to rest and it is an indication of the shift in public taste that they should resurface in the Second Academy period. Of course operas on the Academy scale were always a risky business proposal, and the financial difficulties which have familiarly always been associated with opera were as relevant in 1732 as they are now. Ezio stands at a point in the history of Handel's career when commercial necessities were combining with ideological issues to make the future of Italian opera in London even more insecure than it had been nefore. Within a year of the first production of Ezio Handel not only had to contend with the rival oratorios, but also a fully fledged rival opera company, which came to be known as the Opera of the Nobility. To add injury to insult the new company was able to boast Farinelli, the new castrato sensation, and a host of Handel's previous singers, including Cuzzoni and the new defectors Senesino and Montagnana. It was difficult enough to sustain one opera company in London, let alone two. The stage had been set for a period of musical and musico-political rivalry which was within the rest of the decade increasingly to see Handel forced to accept the sacrifice of his single greatest musical commitment - his practising belief in the pre-eminence of Italian opera.

 

Works Cited

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, 5 vols (Clarendon Press, Oxford,

            1965)

Donald Burrows, Handel (Oxford: OUP, 1994)

John Dennis, An Essay on the Opera's After the Italian Manner, Which are about to be

            Establish'd on the English Stage, With some Reflections on the Damage which

            they may bring to the Publick (John Nutt, London, 1706), Preface, p.4.

Otto Erich Deutsche,  Handel: A Documentary Bibliography (Adam and Charles

            Black, London, 1955)

John Mainwaring,  Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel (R. and J. Dodsley, London, 1760)