Herbert F. Peyser

“ Whether or not he could discern them from afar it is probably unlikely that the prospect of conflict would have troubled over much a nature as powerful and combative as Handel’s. Indeed, difficulties were what this prodigious vitality and ever renewing creative inspiration best throve upon. As so often happens in lands where opera is fundamentally an exotic people again wanted opera. It was a logical time to end the Cannons interlude. The psychology of the moment, to which Handel was sensitive, came just when company-promoting took on almost the aspect of a hobby. ”

“ Handel secured some extraordinary singers in Dresden, where the Italian opera was blooming. In addition to Boschi, the bass, who had sung in “Rinaldo”, he bagged the great Signora Durastanti and the castrato Senesino, who until the subsequent coming of the mighty Farinelli, was perhaps the artificial soprano whom London most worshipped at a time when castrati were completely the rage. Senesino played incredible havoc with the hearts of deluded women. ”

“ To the average person reared on the lyric drama as known to two or three generations preceding ours the long-established description of a Handelian opera as a “concert in costume” may suffice at a pinch. But in a larger sense it begs the question, for Handel’s forty odd operas are both more than this and less. We should find their librettos so cut to a pattern that the most old-fashioned “books” of the 19th Century would possibly strike us, by comparison, dramatically bold, even involved. Handelian operas have no trace of psychological subtlety or elementary “conflict”. ”

“ It is altogether too easy to lay a disproportionate stress on the practice involved, the more so as it was a fairly legitimate custom in the Eighteenth Century. Besides Handel, masters like Bach, Haydn, Gluck, Mozart and even Beethoven, had a way, more or less frequently, of taking their own where they found it. Often, indeed, they found it in their own earlier creations. In any case no moral or ethical question was involved, for the good reason that the treatment of a theme or a melody according to the esthetic of that period, mattered far more than the phrase in question. ”

“ His enemies increased in number and power and resorted to the basest tactics imaginable to discredit and injure him. The so-called Opera of the Nobility opened at a playhouse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, lured his singers away from him by fair means or foul, and by securing the great Farinelli obtained a trump card. Handel (who in time parted company with Heidegger) would burn his fingers the moment his fortunes seemed on the upgrade. Even the weather was against him, what with the Thames freezing over 41 in one of the years that he obstinately returned to opera and cutting down his audiences. ”

“ So Lord Burlington and other peers raised capital for a new season of Italian opera, appointed Handel director-in-chief, made the ugly but efficient Heidegger stage manager, rounded up librettists and sent Handel to the Continent to engage singers for what was to be known as “The Royal Academy of Music”—an English duplication of the official name of the Paris Opéra. And the Weekly Journal soon announced that “Mr. Handel, a famous Master of Musick, is gone beyond the sea, by order of His Majesty, to collect a company of the choicest singers for the Opera in the Haymarket.” ”

“ In any case, Father Handel was to know the ups and downs of fortune; and the vicissitudes he endured did not sweeten an always morose and surly character. He has been described as “a strong man, a man of vast principles, bigoted, intensely disagreeable, a man with a rather withered heart.” A portrait of him gave Romain Rolland “the impression of one who has never smiled.” He was twice married, the first time to the widow of a barber, a woman ten years his senior, the second to Dorothea Taust, a pastor’s daughter, thirty years his junior. ”

“ But when the King returned to London from his trip to Germany opera fell upon bad days. Musical and theatrical life flourished, indeed, yet suddenly farces and other diversions, imported from France, captured the mood of the town and delighted the monarch and his ladies. Now nobody felt like putting up money on opera, since inexpensive vulgarity was a safer bet. At just about this period Handel and James Brydges, Duke of Chandos, former Paymaster-General of the Army during the Marlborough wars, were brought into contact. ”

“ Then he turned his thoughts towards the inventive side of the art; he showed him how to give his musical ideas the most perfect form, and he refined his taste. He possessed a remarkable library of Italian and German music, and he explained to Handel the various methods of writing and composing adopted by different nationalities, whilst pointing out the good qualities and the faults of each composer and in order that his education might be at the same time theoretical and practical, he frequently gave him exercises to work in such and such a style.... ”

“ The elder Handel’s motive was, according to his own lights, perhaps quite as defensible. He had no wish to see a son of his degraded to the rank of a lackey or some form of vagabond, than which a musician at that time hardly seemed any better. The barber-surgeon fully shared the prejudice of the average “strong man” against the artist. Rolland describes the bourgeois middle class German attitude of the 17th Century on the subject of music: “It was for them a mere art of amusement, and not a serious profession. ”

“ Music claimed him solely. Handel was only 17 but seems already to have exercised a strong musical authority in Halle. He assembled a capital choir and orchestra from among his most gifted pupils and let them be heard on Sundays in various churches of the town. Like Bach and other masters of that astonishing period, he composed an incredible number of cantatas, motets, psalms, chorales and devotional miscellany, which had to be new every week. It must not be imagined that he allowed them to wilt or evaporate. ”

“ Rolland ridicules the claim of some unthinking people that Handel “killed English music since there was nothing left to kill.” A renewal of the Puritanical opposition which poisoned the English stage contributed to the confusion and discouragement of British artists, and the worst of such attacks as the notorious Jeremy Collier had made on the “profaneness and immorality” of the theatre lay in the fact that, as such things often do, they expressed the deep feelings of the nation. In consequence of a universal hypocrisy foreign elements came to fill the vacuum created. ”

“ There was no other place in Germany where music was held in such high esteem. The artists there hobnobbed with the rich merchants.”
The Hamburg opera catered to various factions which did not invariably see eye to eye. One of these factions consisted of persons who sought in operatic entertainment out and out amusement; the other, of individuals with a religious bent, who regarded the average fantastic and extravagant opera as an invention of hell—opera diabolica. When Handel arrived the lyric theatre was making history guided by the composer, Reinhard Keiser. ”

“ Keiser, though a person of unstable character and extreme presumptuousness, had indisputable genius. He was not yet 30 when Handel came to Hamburg and under him that city experienced its golden age of opera. To be sure, the weakest feature of the Hamburg Opera was the singing. For a long time the institution had no professional singers. The roles were taken by students, shoemakers, tailors, fruiterers “and girls of little talent and less virtue,” while ordinarily artisans “found it more convenient to take female parts.” ”

“ The Duke of Chandos seems to have been in a position to buy anything which struck his fancy and there is a story that on one occasion, he or his son (the accounts differ) coming across a man unmercifully thrashing his well-favored wife, rescued the lady by buying her on the spot. He, therefore, had no particular trouble securing Handel as master of his music in place of his former employee, the German Dr. Pepusch. Some ten years later Dr. Pepusch had his revenge by compiling the score of the “Beggar’s Opera” which was to become such a grievous obstacle in Handel’s path. ”

“ In the summer of 1733 Handel went to Oxford. The University authorities had offered him a degree of Doctor of Music. Oxford is said to have known little of his music at that time. Yet his arrival there might, according to Newman Flower, “have been the triumphant entry of a king. The town was overcrowded; even accommodations at the hostels ran out and people slept in the streets.” The composer brought with him a new oratorio, “Athalia”, composed to a text which Samuel Humphreys had adapted from 40 Racine. ”

“ It was late in August, 1742, before Handel returned to London. The hostility of the English aristocracy was still strong and continued for some years, although the forceful voice of Alexander Pope had been raised in his favor, little as that poet is said to have known about music. But Pope’s acknowledged belief in Handel’s “talent” did something toward disarming the composer’s enemies. However, he was in no hurry to let London hear “Messiah” in spite of all the great things spoken and written about it. ”

“ Under Keiser the adventurous newcomer soon found employment as a second violin in the opera orchestra. His particular intimate was Mattheson, a musician of many gifts and uncommon versatility, who united in himself literary talents, a critical flair and a highly volatile temperament. It was he who helped Handel find pupils and who guided him into the town’s important musical circles. So that before long Handel had access to the organ lofts of Hamburg’s churches and opportunities to compose works for ecclesiastical purposes. ”

“ From an ordinary person the hard-boiled parent would have taken such advice in very bad part; coming from the mouth of a prince it acquired the force of a command. So he decided to allow his son to study music with the unspoken reservation, however, that he must belong first and foremost to the law. Actually, these musical studies might be said to have begun in Weissenfels, for here young Handel had a chance to hear some of the works of the Nürnberg master, Johann Krieger ”

“ Handel insisted that “angels would be necessary to sing them if such stuff were to sound even agreeable.” At this time his ambition was to create a German style, independent of foreign influences. And for Keiser’s successor, Saurbrey, Handel turned out a new opera, “Florindo und Daphne”, which, like Wagner’s “Rienzi”, proved to be so long that the composer caused it to be given in two parts, “for fear”, he admitted, “that the music might tire the hearers.” Then, without taking leave of Mattheson or any of his friends, he accepted the prince’s invitation and went to Italy. ”

“ To make matters worse, a certain MacSwiney, who succeeded Aaron Hill at the Queen’s Theatre, absconded, leaving nothing but unpaid bills and enraged singers. At this stage there enters the picture a Swiss adventurer, by name Heidegger, a man of unbelievable conceit and homeliness, who was, however, to play an important role in Handel’s future. To recoup the failure of “Il Pastor Fido” the composer turned out in less than three weeks a “tragic opera” in five acts, “Teseo”, with a libretto by Nicolo Francesco Haym, and dedicated tactfully to the Earl of Burlington. ”

“ Like Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and other supreme musicians Handel could create with a rapidity which ignominiously shames composers of our supposedly “speedy” age. Even bearing that fact in mind, the composition of “Messiah” between Saturday, August 22, 1741, and Monday, September 14, following remains one of the miracles of music. ”

“ Had it been practical he might have brought a whole opera production to Oxford. In place of such a luxury he compromised on oratorios, the more so because the dividing line between such entertainment and the opera of the period was not so sharply drawn as it was eventually to become. The chief differences between the two forms lay in the preponderance of choruses, such as, in opera, were regarded as hardly more than side issues.
Meanwhile, he seemed unable to resist the lure of the theatre. Again and again he returned to Italian opera. He continued his earlier partnership with Heidegger ”

“ Soon Anastasia Robinson, revolted by the turmoil over Cuzzoni, retired from stage life and married the Earl of Peterborough.
Cuzzoni, however, was only one obstacle of her kind. Soon afterwards the management, on the lookout for another sensation, secured the soprano’s most hated Continental rival, Faustina Bordoni, who was to become the wife of the composer Hasse. Handel brought the pair on the stage together in his opera “Alessandro”. Lady Pembroke was “protectress” of Cuzzoni, Lady Burlington of Faustina. ”

“ Once again he entered into partnership with Heidegger, planned another opera season, secured Senesino again and went abroad to engage other singers. On that occasion he traveled again to Italy, went to Hamburg and made a last visit to his aged mother in Halle. She was now paralyzed, and shortly afterwards she died. The new 38 London opera season got off to a bad start, one failure succeeding another. Politics aggravated the situation, the more so as George II and the Prince of Wales were at odds and the supporters of the latter, determined to set up a rival opera company to ruin Handel. ”

“ Newman Flower tells of “one for trading in hair, another for the universal supply of funerals in Great Britain, one for a wheel of perpetual motion, one ‘for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is’.” Still another project contemplated “breeding silkworms in Chelsea 34 Park.” By the time things were ready for the opening of the Academy’s second season Lord Burlington imported from Rome the composer Giovanni Battista Bononcini, possibly not dreaming that he was introducing a dangerous rival to Handel. ”

“ Grimani, whose family owned the theatre of San Giovanni Crisostomo in Venice, supplied him with the libretto of an opera, “Agrippina”, which Handel probably began to compose on the spot. Its performance in Venice was as good as assured and from Naples he returned to Rome, making another useful friend in the Bishop Agostino Steffani, who was charged with secret missions by different German princes and held at the same time the post of Kapellmeister at the Court of Hanover. ”