“It is either the devil or the Saxon!” Then there is a story of Corelli’s coming to grief over a passage in Handel’s overture to Il Trionfo del tempo, in which the violins went up to A in altissimo. Handel impatiently snatched the violin to show Corelli how the passage ought to be played, and Corelli, who had never written or played beyond the third position in his life (this passage being in the seventh), said gently, “My dear Saxon, this music is in the French style, which I do not understand.” In Italy Handel produced two operas, Rodrigo and Agrippina, the latter a very important work, of which the splendid overture was remodelled forty-four years afterwards as that of his last original oratorio, Jephtha. He also produced two oratorios, La Resurrezione, and Il Trionfo del tempo. This, forty-six years afterwards, formed the basis of his last work. The Triumph of Time and Truth, which contains no original matter. All Handel’s early works contain material that he used often with very little alteration later on, and, though the famous “Lascia ch’io pianga” does not occur in Almira, it occurs note for note in Agrippina and the two Italian oratorios. On the other hand the cantata Aci, Galattea e Polifemo has nothing in common with Acis and Galatea. Besides these larger works there are several choral and solo cantatas of which the earliest, such as the great Dixit Dominus, show in their extravagant vocal difficulty how radical was the change which Handel’s Italian experience so rapidly effected in his methods.
Handel’s success in Italy established his fame and led to his receiving at Venice in 1709 the offer of the post of Kapellmeister to the elector of Hanover, transmitted to him by Baron Kielmansegge, his patron and staunch friend of later years. Handel at the time contemplated a visit to England, and he accepted this offer on condition of leave of absence being granted to him for that purpose. To England accordingly Handel journeyed after a short stay at Hanover, arriving in London towards the close of 1710. He came as a composer of Italian opera, and earned his first success at the Haymarket with Rinaldo, composed, to the consternation of the hurried librettist, in a fortnight, and first performed on the 24th of February 1711. In this opera the aria “Lascia ch’io pianga” found its final home. The work was produced with the utmost magnificence, and Addison’s delightful reviews of it in the Spectator poked fun at it from an unmusical point of view in a way that sometimes curiously foreshadows the criticisms that Gluck might have made on such things at a later period. The success was so great, especially for Walsh the publisher, that Handel proposed that Walsh should compose the next opera, and that he should publish it. He returned to Hanover at the close of the opera season, and composed a good deal of vocal chamber music for the princess Caroline, the step-daughter of the elector, besides the instrumental works known to us as the oboe concertos. In 1712 Handel returned to London and spent a year with Andrews, a rich musical amateur, in Barn Elms, Surrey. Three more years were spent in Burlington, in the neighbourhood of London. He evidently was but little inclined to return to Hanover, in spite of his duties to the court there. Two Italian operas and the Utrecht Te Deum written by the command of Queen Anne are the principal works of this period. It was somewhat awkward for the composer when his deserted master came to London in 1714 as George I. of England. For some time Handel did not venture to appear at court, and it was only at the intercession of Baron Kielmansegge that his pardon was obtained. By his advice Handel wrote the Water Music which was performed at a royal water party on the Thames, and it so pleased the king that he at once received the composer into his good graces and granted him a salary of £400 a year. Later Handel became music master to the little princesses and was given an additional £200 by the princess Caroline. In 1716 he followed the king to Germany, where he wrote a second German Passion to the popular poem of Brockes, a text which, divested of its worst features, forms the basis of several of the arias in Bach’s Passion according to St John. This was Handel’s last work to a German text.
On his return to England he entered the service of the duke of Chandos as conductor of his concerts, receiving a thousand pounds for his first oratorio Esther. The music which Handel wrote for performance at “Cannons,” the duke of Chandos’s residence at Edgware, is comprised in the first version of Esther, Acis and Galatea, and the twelve Chandos Anthems, which are compositions approximately in the same form as Bach’s church cantatas but without any systematic use of chorale tunes. The fashionable Londoner would travel 9 miles in those days to the little chapel of Whitchurch to hear Handel’s music, and all that now remains of the magnificent scene of these visits is the church, which is the parish church of Edgware. In 1720 Handel appeared again in a public capacity as impresario of the Italian opera at the Haymarket theatre, which he managed for the institution called the Royal Academy of Music. Senesino, a famous singer, to engage whom Handel especially journeyed to Dresden, was the mainstay of the enterprise, which opened with a highly successful performance of Handel’s opera Radamisto. To this time belongs the famous rivalry between Handel and Buononcini, a melodious Italian composer whom many thought to be the greater of the two. The controversy has been perpetuated in John Byrom’s lines:
“Some say, compared to Buononcini |
It must be remembered that at this time Handel had not yet asserted his greatness as a choral writer; the fashionable ideas of music and musicianship were based entirely upon success in Italian opera, and the contest between the rival composers was waged on the basis of works which have fallen into almost as complete an oblivion in Handel’s case as in Buononcini’s. None of Handel’s forty-odd Italian operas can be said to survive, except in some two or three detached arias out of each opera; arias which reveal their essential qualities far better in isolation than when performed in groups of between twenty and thirty on the stage, as interruptions to the action of a classical drama to which nobody paid the slightest attention. But even within these limits Handel’s artistic resources were too great to leave the issue in doubt; and when Handel wrote the third act of an opera Muzio Scevola, of which Buononcini and Ariosti[1] wrote the other two, his triumph was decisive, especially as Buononcini soon got into discredit by failing to defend himself against the charge of producing as a prize-madrigal of his own a composition which proved to be by Lotti. At all events Buononcini left London, and Handel for the next ten years was without a rival in his ventures as an operatic composer. He was not, however, without a rival as an impresario; and the hostile competition of a rival company which obtained the services of the great Farinelli and also induced Senesino to desert him, led to his bankruptcy in 1737, and to an attack of paralysis caused by anxiety and overwork. The rival company also had to be dissolved from want of support, so that Handel’s misfortunes must not be attributed to any failure to maintain his position in the musical world. Handel’s artistic conscience was that of the most easy-going opportunist, or he would never have continued till 1741 to work in a field that gave so little scope for his genius. But the public seemed to want operas, and, if opera had no scope for his genius, at all events he could supply better operas with greater rapidity and ease than any three other living composers working together. And this he naturally continued to do so long as it seemed to be the best way to keep up his reputation. But with all this artistic opportunism he was not a man of tact, and there are numerous stories of the type of his holding the great primadonna donna Cuzzoni at arm’s-length out of a window and threatening to drop her unless she consented to sing a song which she had declared unsuitable to her style.
Already before his last opera, Deidamia, produced in 1741, Handel had been making a growing impression with his oratorios.
- ↑ Chrysander says Mattei instead of Ariosti.
