At the time when Handel arrived in London the opera company had migrated from Drury Lane to Vanbrugh's new theatre in the Haymarket, where it was under the management of Aaron Hill, an enterprising young man of Handel's own age who was ready to pursue any sort of career that chance might offer him, whether in literature, music, or business adventure. We may safely hazard a guess that it was Boschi who persuaded Hill to invite Handel to compose an opera for the Queen's Theatre, as Boschi had already sung, in November 1710, in Hydaspes, an opera by Francesco Mancini, in which Nicolini delighted his audience in a fight with a lion. Hill sketched a plot based on Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, and an Italian libretto was hastily provided by Giacomo Rossi, Handel composing the music at the same time, and often overtaking the poet. The music, in fact, was completed in a fortnight, and the opera of Rinaldo was first produced on the stage on February 24, 1711. To judge from Burney's account of the preceding weeks of the season, coupled with this astonishingly rapid collaboration, it is probable that Hill was in a difficult situation, from which only a new and strikingly successful opera could save him. Rinaldo achieved the desired success; it did more, it established Handel's reputation in England as a dramatic composer, and set London a new standard in Italian opera. The previous Italian operas had been works of little distinction, and some of them had even been pasticcio operas, as they were called, put together from songs by various composers. Even Scarlatti's Pyrrhus and Demetrius paled beside the new opera of Handel, for it had been written as far back as 1694, and was in a style which Scarlatti himself had long abandoned.
Rinaldo had fifteen performances in the course of the season. It provoked bitter attacks from Addison in the Spectator and from Steele in the Tatler, but everybody knew that Addison's vanity was wounded by the grotesque failure of Rosamond, and that Steele had interests in the playhouse. It was useless at that particular moment to champion the cause of English opera, for England happened to possess not a single composer who was equal to the task of writing one.
The opera season came to an end in June, and Handel left London for Germany. He did not go straight back to Hanover, but stayed at Düsseldorf again, where the Elector was evidently desirous of keeping him as long as possible, for the Elector himself wrote more than once to Hanover to make excuses for Handel's prolonged absence from his official duties. Handel may well have felt that Hanover was a dull place as compared with London. There was no opera, and his chief function was to compose Italian chamber duets for the Princess Caroline of Ansbach; afterwards Queen of England. But he may well have taken pleasure in her service, for she was an excellent musician and no mean singer. In November 1711 Handel paid a visit to Halle, in order to stand godfather to his niece, Johanna Friderica Michaelsen, the daughter of his surviving sister, who eventually inherited the bulk of his fortune. Some biographers have stated that Handel had already revisited his birthplace in 1710 before going to London. Mainwaring is their authority for this, but Mainwaring habitually confused dates and more probably referred to the visit of 1711, for which we have the certain evidence of Friderica Michaelsen's baptismal register. It is clear that the alleged visit of 1710 was suggested merely by a desire to make the most of Handel's affection for his mother, which Mainwaring had already emphasised. Mainwaring, however, went beyond the truth in saying that she had become blind; she did eventually lose her sight, but not until some twenty years later.
Handel appears to have remained at Hanover until the autumn of 1712, when he obtained permission to go to London again "on condition that he engaged to return within a reasonable time" (Mainwaring). What period was to be considered reasonable we do not know. Handel had certainly been planning this London visit for some time, as he was corresponding with friends in England, and was also taking some trouble to improve his knowledge of the English language. It is not surprising that he hankered after London, for London offered him a society which bore more resemblance to the world which he had known at Rome. The tradition of Italian culture had for generations been more firmly implanted in England than anywhere in Germany, except perhaps in Vienna, and, since those three years in Italy, Handel's musical outlook had become completely Italian, as his music shows. The few attempts which he made at German Church music present a curious contrast of style; one could hardly believe them to be the work of that Handel whom we have adopted as our own. German music at that date was provincial; Italian music was the music of the great world, because it was the music of the theatre. It was to the theatre that Handel looked forward, and London had what even Rome had not—an opera, and an Italian opera. The success of Rinaldo had shown him that London was the place where he might launch out into a triumphal career as a composer for the stage.
CHAPTER III
Second visit to London—Italian opera—George I and the Water Music—visit to Germany—Canons and the Duke of Chandos—establishment of the Royal Academy of Music.
For the greater part of the nineteenth century the Handelian type of opera was the laughingstock of musical critics; they wondered how any audiences could have endured to sit through it, and why the fashionable society of London should have neglected native music for what Dr. Johnson defined as "an exotic and irrational entertainment." The modern reader's impression of an Italian opera of Handel's days is a story about some ancient or mediaeval hero whose very name is often to most people unknown; if he happens to be someone as famous as Julius Caesar, the familiar episodes of his life are sacrificed to some imaginary and complicated intrigue presented in the form of long and elaborate songs, thinly accompanied, and separated by stretches of dreary recitative. But in those days persons of culture, in England as well as in Italy, were perhaps more interested in ancient history and in the history of the later Roman Empire than they are now; it is significant that Gibbon's Decline and Fall made its appearance just when the fashion for operas on subjects which might have been taken from its pages was coming to an end.
The conventional treatment of those subjects, which makes all the operas seem exactly alike, was the result of a certain literary reform which had tended to standardise opera libretti under the influence of Racine, and it was really a movement towards dignity and dramatic unity after the monstrous confusion of the earlier Venetian operas. As to the conventionality of the music, and its forms of air and recitative, it can only be said that all serious Italian music was written in these forms; it was simply the normal musical style of the period, and must have been as natural to its own audiences as the style of Puccini or Richard Strauss at the present day. Handelian opera has often been described as a concert in costume, and Dr. Burney, writing as late as 1789, both admits this description and defends it.