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Handel as a Man of the Theatre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1961

Brian Trowell
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Extract

‘'TIS Vexatious to have such music neglected.’ Mrs. Pendarves was writing to her sister, Ann Granville. That same evening she was to attend a revival of Handel's Sosarme at the Hay-market Theatre, and she feared another empty house. She was right.

Since that day in 1734, many musicians and musical historians have echoed Mrs. Pen's vexation over the neglect of Handel's operas. Most of them have agreed with her about the excellence of the music; but few have said that its neglect was undeserved. For all his great gifts, we read, the master was working under impossible conditions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 88 , 1961 , pp. 17 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1961

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References

1 Deutsch, O. E., Handel, a Documentary Biography, London, 1955, p. 364.Google Scholar

2 Burney, C., A General History of Music, ed. F. Mercer, 2 vols., London, 1935. ii. 827.Google Scholar

3 Dean, W., Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques, London, 1959, pp. 31–2.Google Scholar

4 There is very little serious criticism amongst the welter of highly entertaining abuse that greeted the Italian opera in London. When Steele, for example, states that the ‘only Design’ of opera is ‘to gratify the Senses, and keep up an indolent Attention in the Audience’, he condemns the spectators, not Handel (Deutsch, op. cit., p. 35).Google Scholar

5 He found Rodelinda's ‘L'empio rigor del fato’—a furious outburst of inflexible defiance—‘gay and airy’ (Burney, op. cit., ii. 731); time and again he shows himself deaf to Handel's dramatic power and gifts of musical characterisation.Google Scholar

6 Deutsch, op. cit., p. 192, citing the Critica Musica of 1725.Google Scholar

7 [J. Mainwaring], Memoirs of the Life of the late George Frederic Handel, London, 1760, pp. 76–8.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., pp. 110–1.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., pp. 106–7; see also Deutsch, op. cit., pp. 314, 379, 511.Google Scholar

10 Dean, op. cit., p. 25.Google Scholar

11 Tosi, P. F., Observations on the Florid Song, tr. J. E. Galliard, London, 1742; Burney, op. cit., ii. 752.Google Scholar

12 It must have been because he found the Italian singers indispensable that Handel ignored for so long the frequent pleas for opera in English; when they attempted English, ‘you would have sworn it had been Welch’ (Deutsch, op. cit., p. 301).Google Scholar

13 The captive Berenice in Scipione (which still awaits a complete edition) sings ‘Dolci aurette’ to her supposedly distant lover, Lucejo; he surprises her by interrupting her da capo in another key. Dean quotes other examples (op. cit., p. 29).Google Scholar

14 Handel regularly got his operas on to the stage within eight to fourteen days of completing the score: he must have had an unparalleled genius for rehearsal and administration.Google Scholar

15 No one seems to have noticed that Rodelinda is descended at one remove from Corneille's Pertharite; to compare play and opera would make an interesting paper in itself.Google Scholar

16 There are still monoglot critics who condemn Handel's methods out of ignorance: they should be forced to sit through the entire words and music of the Roman de Fauvel, or Brahms's Magelone-lieder embedded in Tieck's romance.Google Scholar

17 Handel: a Symposium, ed. G. Abraham, London, 1954, chapter ii.Google Scholar

18 Not all of Handel's contemporaries would have preferred his recitative ruder and briefer: see Deutsch, op. cit., pp. 385, 433, and Burney, op. cit., p. 729.Google Scholar

19 … raising his eyes and his voice to heaven, ‘Go’, he told me, ‘say to Tamerlane that at last I yield to my fate’ …Google Scholar

20 Deutsch, op. cit., p. 31.Google Scholar

21 The wordbooks are a useful guide to diction, but their translations do not fit the music: the translation of the arias in Tamerlano which Cluer published in 1724 was not taken from the wordbook, as suggested by Deutsch (op. cit., p. 175). This version, which is singable though stilted, was apparently prepared by Henry Carey; some of the texts were later reprinted by Walsh under his name (see Smith, W. C., assisted by C. Humphries, Handel, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Early Editions, London, 1960, p. 75). The notion that Handel performed Imeneo in English in Dublin seems to rest on no evidence at all beyond the use of the English title ‘Hymen’; but his operas were regularly given English titles by the press.Google Scholar

22 Deutsch, op. cit., p. 69.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., p. 579.Google Scholar

24 Handel's stage-directions sometimes call for movement during an aria. See the flirtatious Atalanta's first song in Serse, or Nero's hypocritical distribution of alms in Agrippιna, where hιs ‘Qual piacer’ breaks into a tiny recitative as he singles out some particularly deserving member of the Roman mob: ‘Prendi tu ancora, prendi!’—‘Take some more, you, come on!’Google Scholar

25 ‘Va tacito e nascosto’ (Giulio Cesare), with its unusual legato horn solo, paints both the hunter's stealthy approach and the devious thoughts of the singer; ‘Fra l'ombre’ (Sosarme) is, in its context, a remarkable picture of an insidious but ingratiating villain—wherever the words and music came from in the first place.Google Scholar

26 In Belshazzar: see Dean, op. cit., p. 459 and plate VII.Google Scholar

27 MS R.M. 20.a.7, ff. 8’, 9’, 20’-22; also MS R.M. 20.d.2 (Tamerlano), f. 41; Handel also shortened ‘Se giunge un dispetto’ in Agrippina—one of his later Poppeas must have been uncertain of her coloratura.Google Scholar

28 In at least one case Handel stipulated that a contralto must be suitable for male travesty parts before engaging her (Deutsch, op. cit., p. 256). Nevertheless, it is interesting to find Burney saying of a contralto air in Sera that it ‘would well suit a base voice, if sung an octave lower’ (op. cit., ii. 822).Google Scholar

29 Deutsch, op. cit., p. 520.Google Scholar