George Frideric Handel: six years in a life
Richard Wigmore
Wednesday, July 19, 2023
Richard Wigmore explores Handel’s work through the lens of six pivotal years in his life, relating to both his music and his biography
1707
Never lacking savoir faire, the young Handel appears to have set out to become the supreme musical cosmopolitan. In autumn 1706, aged 21, having had a thorough grounding in the contrapuntal tradition of his native Saxony, he travelled from Hamburg to Italy ‘on his own bottom’ (that is, at his own expense) – as his first biographer, John Mainwaring, delightfully put it.
Journeying via Florence, he arrived in Rome towards the end of 1706, where he immediately dazzled cognoscenti with his keyboard prowess. Dubbed ‘Il caro Sassone’ (‘The beloved Saxon’), Handel was evidently an expert networker, attracting the patronage of the Marchese Francesco Ruspoli and the worldly, vastly wealthy cardinals Pamphili and Ottoboni. One contemporary curtly described Ottoboni as ‘without morals, without repute, debauched, decadent, a lover of arts and a fine musician’. According to Mainwaring, Ottoboni organised a trial of strength at his Palazzo della Cancelleria in which Handel slugged it out with another young keyboard lion, Domenico Scarlatti: first on the harpsichord, where opinion was divided, then on the organ, where Scarlatti himself graciously conceded defeat.
Philippe Mercier’s portrait of Handel composing at the keyboard, c1725 (oil on canvas) (NPL - DeA Picture Library/Bridgeman Images)
Remaining in Rome until he left for Florence in November 1707, Handel honed his mastery of fluid, long-arched Italianate melody in reams of solo and duet cantatas. Many of these miniature unstaged operas were unfurled at gatherings of the Arcadian Academy in the Marchese Ruspoli’s gardens on the Aventine Hill. On a far ampler scale was Handel’s debut oratorio, Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, to a text by Pamphili. In 1703 the pope had banned opera as a corrupting force. Opera-starved Romans could console themselves with the brilliant colours and teeming energy of Handel’s allegorical drama. Typically, the hedonists, Beauty (Bellezza) and Pleasure (Piacere), get most of the best tunes, including Pleasure’s ravishing sarabande ‘Lascia la spina’, later recycled as ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ in Handel’s first London opera, Rinaldo.
St Peter’s Square, Rome – the city where in 1707 Handel attracted the patronage of the Marchese Francesco Ruspoli and the wealthy cardinals Pamphili and Ottoboni (Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images)
While precise details are sketchy, we know that in the spring and summer of 1707 the Lutheran Handel composed psalm settings for the Catholic liturgy. It was perhaps for the Carmelite church of Santa Maria di Monte Santo that he wrote his Laudate pueri, Nisi Dominus and the grandest of his Roman sacred works, Dixit Dominus. From its stupendous opening chorus onwards, Dixit Dominus – a sumptuous concerto for voices and orchestra that, then and now, pushes singers to the limits – is more daring and theatrically flamboyant than any of Handel’s other works. In the late autumn of 1707, shortly after composing the elaborate pastoral cantata Clori, Tirsi e Fileno (in which the shepherdess Clori calls all the shots), Handel left for Florence to direct his first opera for Italy, Rodrigo. Zigzagging across the Italian peninsula, he was back in Rome by March 1708, where at Easter he revealed another oratorio, La resurrezione. Lavishly presented at Ruspoli’s place, this unstaged sacred opera proved the biggest triumph of his glittering Italian career to date.
Recommended recording
Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno
Deborah York, Gemma Bertagnolli sops Sara Mingardo contr Nicholas Sears ten Concerto Italiano / Rinaldo Alessandrini org Naïve (6/01)
1711
The climax of Handel’s Italian sojourn came with the performance of his opera Agrippina in Venice in December 1709. In Mainwaring’s words, ‘The theatre, at almost every pause, resounded with shouts and acclamations of viva il caro Sassone!’ Armed with letters of recommendation, Handel travelled via Innsbruck to Hanover, where in June 1710 he became Kapellmeister to the elector (the future George I) on terms so favourable as to stretch credulity: a generous salary plus ‘leave to be absent for a 12-month or more if he chose it, and to go whithersoever he please’. Four months later, in October, it pleased Handel to travel to London, lured by the city’s new craze for Italian opera.
Italian opera’s naysayers derided this vastly expensive import as degenerate and effeminate. It quickly ignited a toxic mix of xenophobia, homophobia and anti-Catholic paranoia. In a later pamphlet, Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy, the writer thundered that Italian opera would sap the nation of her ‘manhood’ and ‘empire’. London’s elite were undeterred. Handel’s arrival in London could not have been better timed. In Mainwaring’s words: ‘Many of the nobility were impatient for an Opera of his composing.’ That opera was Rinaldo, the first-ever Italian opera written expressly for London and premiered at the Queen’s Theatre, Haymarket, on February 24, 1711.
Queen’s Theatre, London: Handel’s Italian opera Rinaldo was premiered here in 1711 (London Metropolitan Archives/Bridgeman Images)
Rinaldo’s plot – a sub-Ariosto mishmash of love, sorcery and Christian triumphalism set during the Crusades – is full of absurdities and muddled imagery. No matter: audiences went wild over both the music and the impresario Aaron Hill’s no-expense-spared staging, with its mermaids, fire-snorting dragons, spectacular transformations and even a flock of live sparrows. But things could, and did, go wrong, to the delight of the editors of the satirical magazine The Spectator. When at one performance the stagehands forgot to move the wing flats, their glee was unbounded: ‘We were presented with a prospect of the ocean in the midst of a delightful grove … I was not a little astonished to see a well-dressed young fellow, in a full-bottomed wig, appear in the midst of the sea, and without any visible concern, taking snuff.’
There are profounder, more dramatically coherent Handel operas, but few have as many showstoppers as Rinaldo. The whole score teems with invention and the sheer exuberance of youth. Never one to waste a good tune, Handel recycled many of the arias from music he had composed in Italy. Most famously, ‘Lascia la spina’ from Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno became Almirena’s lament ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’. It was an immediate hit, and has never looked back.
Rinaldo had decisively put London on the European operatic map. It was also a source of patriotic pride, as voiced by Charles Burney: ‘[Rinaldo] is so superior in composition to any opera of that period which had ever been composed in England, that its great success does honour to our nation.’
Before he returned to Hanover in June 1711, Handel took his leave of Queen Anne, who, as Mainwaring reported, expressed ‘her desire of seeing him again. Not a little flattered … he promised to return, the moment he could obtain permission from the Prince, in whose service he was retained.’ True to his word, Handel returned to London in autumn 1712, this time for good.
Recommended recording
Rinaldo
David Daniels counterten Cecilia Bartoli mez Gerald Finley bar Luba Orgonasova sop Bejun Mehta counterten et al; Academy of Ancient Music / Christopher Hogwood Decca (1/01)
1723
By July 1723, newly installed in his spacious house in Brook Street, Mayfair, Handel had settled into a more-or-less regular routine. Mainwaring cites his ‘noble spirit of independency’. Yet Handel was always careful to maximise his professional options. Since moving permanently to London he had been a de facto court composer without holding a formal post. In February 1723 he had become ‘Composer of Musick’ to the Chapel Royal, a virtually honorific position that carried an annual pension of £200. That was topped up by another £200 after his appointment as music master to the royal princesses, Anne and Caroline. Anne, especially, would become an enthusiastic patron of his music.
But the day job throughout the 1720s was opera. In 1719 a group of noblemen had raised more than £20,000 by subscription to set up the Royal Academy of Music at the (renamed) King’s Theatre, Haymarket. King George I pledged £1000 a year. Armed with a virtual blank cheque (and he needed it!), Handel set off to scout for singers on the Continent. His prize catches were the Siennese castrato Francesco Bernardi (known as Senesino), and the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni. Each commanded an eye-watering salary of 1500 guineas. Senesino made his Handel debut in the 1720 revival of Radamisto. Cuzzoni, under contract in Venice, arrived in time for the premiere of Ottone in January 1723.
Caricature of a scene possibly from Flavio, 1723 (Senesino, Cuzzoni and (Gaetano) Berenstadt) (Westminister Archives/Bridgeman Images)
Prima donna and castrato were both singers with attitude. But they more than met their match in Handel, who according to Mainwaring threatened to defenestrate Cuzzoni unless she agreed to sing the gently touching aria ‘Falsa imagine’. Ironically, this aria made Cuzzoni’s London reputation as a soprano without equal in the ‘pathetic’ style.
With a run of 14 performances, Ottone was an emphatic success. In spring 1723 Handel followed it with the relatively brief Flavio, which mingles opera seria heroism with a vein of ironic comedy. To judge by its eight sparsely attended performances, Londoners were unenthused.
Image of 25 Brook Street, London, where Handel lived from 1723 (Derek Bayes/Bridgeman Images)
Immediately after his move to Brook Street in summer 1723, Handel embarked on his most sumptuously scored Royal Academy opera, Giulio Cesare in Egitto. Premiered on February 20, 1724, with Senesino and Cuzzoni in the plum roles of Caesar and Cleopatra, it scored a triumph to rival those of Rinaldo and Ottone. The Handel scholar Winton Dean memorably summed up Giulio Cesare as ‘a glorification of sexual passion uninhibited by the shadow of matrimony’. In the obligatory Baroque makeover of history, Caesar is transformed from cynical middle-aged tyrant into idealistic youthful hero, while Cleopatra is at once the ‘immortal harlot’ (Dean) and, in her piercing arias ‘Se pietà’ and ‘Piangerò la sorte mia’, a potentially tragic heroine.
With Tamerlano and Rodelinda following in 1724-25, Handel was on an operatic roll. Through his dramatic flair and powers of melodic invention he had raised the exotic, vastly expensive Italian import to a new artistic level; and for the moment, at least, he had eclipsed his rival Giovanni Bononcini in public favour.
Recommended recording
Giulio Cesare in Egitto
Kristina Hammarström mez Emanuela Galli sop Mary-Ellen Nesi mez Irini Karaianni mez Romina Basso mez et al; Orchestra of Patras / George Petrou Dabringhaus und Grimm (8/10)
1738
In the spring of 1737 the hitherto robust Handel suffered from what a contemporary called a ‘paralitick disorder’. His right arm was immobilised, and there are reports that his mind was affected. In September he travelled to Aix-la-Chapelle (aka Aachen) to take the sulphur baths. In Mainwaring’s words, ‘His cure, from the manner as well as from the quickness, with which it was wrought, passed with the nuns for a miracle.’
After his cure and return to London, Handel was back at full throttle, perhaps with a point to prove. With the unveiling of Louis-François Roubiliac’s statue of him at Vauxhall Gardens in May 1738, he had become, literally, a national monument. Yet this was also something of a watershed period. With the fickle London public tiring of Italian opera, and his finances in a parlous state, Handel now wavered between opera and English oratorio.
Arguably his most fertile year ever, 1738 began with a pair of operas. Launching the King’s Theatre season, the dramatically garbled Faramondo enjoyed fair success (dramatic coherence was never an audience priority). Handel’s next opera, Serse, netted just five performances and was never revived. What Burney dubbed Serse’s ‘mixture of tragic-comedy and buffoonery’ evidently fazed audiences weaned on full-blown opera seria. History, though, has had its revenge; and today Serse rivals Giulio Cesare and Alcina as the Handel opera most likely to fill a theatre. Beginning with the famous ‘Ombra mai fù’ (slowed and solemnised as ‘Handel’s Largo’), it moves with mercurial swiftness through a gamut of moods, from farce to narrowly averted tragedy. In Serse, too, we sense Handel mocking the formal conventions of opera seria.
Handel’s frequent librettist Charles Jennens (portrait by Mason Chamberlin the elder) (Gerald Coke Handel Collection, Foundling Museum/Bridgeman)
After Serse’s failure, the tide began to turn. For the following season Handel kept his options open, creating two mighty oratorios, Saul and Israel in Egypt, and drafting a new opera, Imeneo. Saul was Handel’s first collaboration with the lordly, irascible Leicestershire squire Charles Jennens. Planning a work on the grandest possible scale, the composer threw himself into the oratorio with reckless enthusiasm. According to the London Daily Post, Saul’s premiere at the King’s Theatre on January 16, 1739, ‘met with general Applause by a numerous and splendid Audience’ – as well it might have done. Saul’s Shakespearean breadth, psychological insight and orchestral opulence make it one of Handel’s supreme achievements. Although Saul himself has no full-blown aria, his outsize, brooding presence, culminating in his terrible final lucidity at Endor, gives the oratorio a unique tragic power.
On October 1, 1738, just a few days after finishing Saul, Handel plunged into the equally massive Israel in Egypt. The score draws liberally on music by earlier composers, though Handel usually repays his borrowings with interest. With its vividly pictorial evocations of the plagues and the parting of the Red Sea (Handel must have had fun with these), Israel in Egypt unfolds as a series of grand choral frescoes. It failed with audiences who preferred their moral edification leavened with what one writer called ‘pleasing airs of the stage’. Conversely, its glorious opportunities for a full-throated vocal workout made it a staple of Victorian choral societies, preferably with a cast of hundreds.
Recommended recording
Saul
Elizabeth Atherton, Joélle Harvey sops Sarah Connolly mez Jeremy Budd, Mark Dobell, Robert Murray, Tom Raskin tens et al; The Sixteen / Harry Christophers Coro (10/12)
1741
This was the crunch year. Opening at Lincoln’s Inn Theatre on January 10, Handel’s final opera, Deidamia (an ironic take on the Greek myth of Achilles’s boyhood), was a resounding flop. Like its predecessor Imeneo, it has an agreeable lightness of touch, but except for the French soprano Elisabeth Duparc (La Francesina) in the title-role, the cast was indifferent; and after three patchily attended performances even Handel had to accept defeat. Thirty years after the triumph of Rinaldo, his future lay elsewhere.
Never one to kowtow, Handel had made plenty of enemies during his volatile opera career. He had stubbornly resisted attempts by noblemen to secure him for their opera companies. For the moment he seems to have retreated from public view. In early July 1741 he amused himself by writing a series of Arcadian chamber duets. Later that month Jennens wrote to his friend Edward Holdsworth: ‘Handel says he will do nothing next Winter, but I hope I shall perswade him to set another Scripture Collection … I hope he will lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition may excell all his former Compositions, as the Subject excells every other Subject. The Subject is Messiah.’
After receiving Jennens’s text Handel quickly responded with: ‘What I could read of it in haste, gave me a great deal of Satisfaction.’ In a surge of activity phenomenal by even his standards, he drafted the score of Messiah between August 22 and September 14, 1741. Four of the choruses, including ‘For unto us a child is born’, fruitfully recycle music from the Arcadian duets. After a few days’ break he plunged into another biblical oratorio, Samson, destined to become one of his most reliable bankers. Jennens expected Messiah to be unveiled at a London benefit concert. Handel had other ideas. Taking up an invitation from the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, in early November he set off for Dublin, boarding the packet boat at Parkgate on the River Dee.
Drawing by FW Fairhold of the Dublin venue where Messiah had its premiere in 1742 (Lebrecht Music Arts/Bridgeman Images)
Far removed from London’s commercial maelstrom, Handel relished the flourishing concert life in what he called ‘that most Generous and Polite Nation’. In December, his Miltonic ode L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (composed the previous year) delighted audiences at Dublin’s new Musick Hall on Fishamble Street. Four months later, on April 13, 1742, a capacity house heard the premiere of Messiah at a charity matinee there. The response was ecstatic, as evidenced by the Dublin press: ‘The Sublime, the Grand, the Tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestick and moving Words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear.’
Back in England, Jennens took it as a personal slight that Handel had taken his ‘Scripture Collection’ to Ireland. After attending Messiah’s London premiere, on March 23, 1743, he conceded grudgingly to Holdsworth that ‘’Tis, after all … a fine Composition, notwithstanding some weak parts, which he was too idel [sic] and too obstinate to retouch.’ Obstinate, perhaps, but hardly ‘idel’, Handel ‘retouch’d’ Messiah to the point where there is no definitive version. Yet Jennens always remained dissatisfied with the work that within Handel’s lifetime became a national icon.
Recommended recording
Messiah
Arleen Auger sop Anne Sofie von Otter mez Michael Chance alto Howard Crook ten John Tomlinson bass The English Concert / Trevor Pinnock Archiv (11/88)
1751
Beginning with Samson and Messiah in 1743, Handel typically presented two new oratorios during Lent at the state-of-the-art Covent Garden Theatre in London. He twice paired a biblical drama with a work based on Greek mythology: Semele in 1744, Hercules the following year. His greatest public successes tended to be the most bellicose: Samson, and the so-called ‘victory oratorios’ – An Occasional Oratorio, Judas Maccabaeus and Joshua, all of which rode the wave of nationalist feeling following ‘Butcher’ Cumberland’s victory at Culloden.
Amid his triumphs, Handel had long been inured to failure. In 1750, his penultimate oratorio, Theodora, lasted just three performances, prompting Handel to quip that, ‘The Jews will not come to it … because it is a Christian story; and the Ladies will not come because it [is] a virtuous one.’ However, a prime reason for Theodora’s failure was surely its unique reflective inwardness, culminating in a rare tragic ending.
‘A View of the Foundling Hospital’ (1756) in London – engraving by Benjamin Cole (Look and Learn/Peter Jackson Collection/Bridgeman Images)
Unbowed, Handel planned a new oratorio for the 1751 season. But whereas he habitually composed during the lighter months, he only began Jephtha in January 1751, after spending the late summer and autumn in Germany. On his journey back to London, he was injured when his coach overturned between The Hague and Haarlem, but he evidently made a full recovery. On February 16, his friend the Earl of Shaftesbury reported: ‘Handel himself is actually better in health and in a higher flow of genius than he has been for several years past. His late journey has helped his constitution vastly.’
Ironically, on the score of Jephtha three days earlier Handel had scrawled (in German) after the first section of the chorus ‘How dark, O Lord, are thy decrees’: ‘Reached as far as this on February 13, 1751, unable to continue due to the weakening of the sight of my left eye.’ He resumed work on February 23, his 66th birthday, but got only as far as the end of this monumental chorus. His shaky writing betrays the effort involved.
Handel rapidly lost the use of his left eye altogether. Yet after spa cures in Bath and Cheltenham, he finally completed Jephtha on August 30. By the time he directed its premiere on February 26, 1752, he had been diagnosed with incipient glaucoma. A year later, a London newspaper reported that ‘Mr Handel has at length, unhappily, quite lost his sight’.
Thomas Hudson’s portrait of John Beard (c1717-1791), Handel’s favourite tenor (Gerald Coke Handel Collection;/Bridgeman Images)
Destined to be Handel’s last completed work, Jephtha is the most personal of his many oratorios set against the background of Israelite oppression and ultimate triumph, shorn, as usual, of the Old Testament’s murky ethics. What absorbed Handel was the plight of the oratorio’s innocent victims, and the larger theme of man’s inevitable submission to an unfathomable destiny. ‘How dark, O Lord, are thy decrees’ – perhaps Handel’s greatest tragic utterance – culminates in a stark setting of Alexander Pope’s maxim, ‘Whatever is, is right.’ As many commentators have suggested, Handel was mindful here not only of the appalling predicaments of Jephtha and his daughter Iphis, but also of his own affliction and enforced submission to destiny.
By his final decade, Handel’s oratorios had become a national institution, the blind composer on occasion treating audiences to one or more of his organ concertos between the acts. From 1750, annual performances of Messiah at the Foundling Hospital raised huge sums for charity. Handel left a copy of the score and parts to the hospital in his will, ensuring that performances could continue after his death. Fittingly, Messiah was the last music he heard, just eight days before he died at his home in Brook Street on April 14, 1759.
Recommended recording
Jephtha
Sophie Bevan, Grace Davidson sops Susan Bickley mez Robin Blaze counterten James Gilchrist ten Matthew Brook bass The Sixteen / Harry Christophers Coro (9/14)
This article originally appeared in the July 2023 issue of Gramophone magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today
